Deirdre Shanahan
In Conversation
Daniel Davis Wood speaks to Deirdre Shanahan about her story collection Carrying Fire and Water.
Paperback: £9.99
ePub: £3.99
Many readers who might be familiar with your work will have probably found you via your novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. Can you talk a bit about your turn towards the form of the short story? How did the writing of these stories overlap with the writing of the novel?
Actually, the stories and the novel were completely distinct enterprises. There is no crossover. I think a novel necessitates some level of long-term logic or planning, whether at the beginning or in the later stages, overtly or not, whereas stories for me inhabit a different psychological space and arrive out of a different impulse. In everything — subject, tone, and language — they feel very different.
Maybe on a general level there is something common between Carrying Fire and Water and Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind: themes like the relationships between parents and children, and women escaping their situations. But in the stories I’m able to plunge in at different times in the characters’ lives, and focus on one thing, then charge on and come out again… I feel you can’t do that so much with a novel, where one works more with continuous time and gives much more attention to characters and their relationships. Stories work on a level beyond language, with symbol and shape.
I may have written one or two stories at the same time as the novel, but not most of them. Of course I take “writing” the novel in this context to be the original drafting and not the later periods of editing. I tend to write stories in gaps of time but not really when I am deeply engaged in a long piece of writing. With this collection, some stories arrived out of time away at residencies, in dedicated periods of creative work. And in terms of comprising a single entity — Carrying Fire and Water as a whole — they probably arrived more quickly than the same number of words in a novel.
So what did the stories offer you, creatively, that the novel didn’t?
The convenience of the short story, so to speak, is one of experimentation, whether that be to do with style or subject tone or voice. It is clear they offer convenience in terms of portability for a time-pressed reader, but they offer more than that to the writer. There is the chance to try out skills and techniques that may be rough or unproven. They can be more playful than novels; you don’t have to be so faithful to what you’ve written before, and you can take risks without too great a cost.
Your risks seem to have paid off pretty well, speaking as an observer. You strike me as quite a prolific writer and one who has had a number of honours in rather a short space of time, a few years. How did you start out and how did you get to this point? Was there a particular moment in recent years where you decided to commit to this pathway, honing your craft and clawing your way forward?
With the stories, I had worked on some pieces for a while before anything happened. I’ve always written stories but I think I did develop a clearer sense of what a story meant to me and what I could do, what I wanted to do, in the last three or four years. And I was fortunate to have some published, shortlisted, et cetera. But it certainly was a more gradual thing than may appear, and as dopey as it may sound, I think it had as much to do with “learning my craft” as with being braver and becoming more confident. The publications coming together — that’s coincidental. The stories come to me. I work on them and after a while they are hopefully good enough to go out into the world. But nothing is predictable or planned in any way.
One thing that maybe helped is that is easier to be in touch with a community of writers these days. I’ve always tried to take the opportunity to learn — for instance, I attended the masterclass with Claire Keegan at the Short Story Festival in London a couple of years ago; that was something I could not pass up. Of course, the real task is to carry with one what one has learned, to absorb and let it become part of oneself — not merely to attend passively.
It’s serendipitous that you mention the masterclass with Claire Keegan; this summer I re-read her début collection, Antarctica, and was struck by its affinities with Carrying Fire and Water. I can say what I think those affinities look like, but I’d like to hear from you first. What were the most valuable things you learned in those classes, including Keegan’s? Are we talking about things related to process and technique, like the nuts and bolts of writing, or was it more to do with permission, freedom, inspiration — the intangibles?
Sometimes I think the most one takes away in any learning process is what’s unsaid. From Claire Keegan, I think I learned to have a complete dedication to the story itself and how it speaks. For the writer to write the story, they must not just execute an idea but excavate something from it, to find out what it truly is, and then write on — to follow its essence wherever it leads. And I learned to pay attention to the visceral, to the physicality of the world, in order to convey emotions. It’s probably no secret that Claire is an inspiring teacher but one with great warmth. Who could forget her description of a paragraph as sentences which lie against each other, one developing from the one before, nestled in together like piglets around their mother?
Let’s linger on that bit for a moment: paying attention to the visceral physicality of the world to convey the emotions of a character. It feels like a contradiction in terms, because a physical description of an environment just doesn’t represent a character’s inner life. But, if I can put it this way, I think you tend to do something along these lines, a la Claire Keegan…
You have a character in a situation, but you don’t dwell explicitly on the emotions of the situation. Instead, you have the character notice something in the physical environment and describe it. Now, what a lot of realist writers do is the “objective correlative” thing — the character notices something external, which is meant to suggest their emotional state, or symbolise their psychology, or something along those lines. But the things your characters notice don’t really have that quality. You just let the character notice them and then describe them, and describe and describe, in increasingly precise detail, often to the point where the sentences splinter into fragments — and the intensity of the description suggests the intensity of the character’s concentration, which to me suggests the intensity of the emotions they’re gripped by, which are usually emotions that they want to get away from. So the reader feels the emotions through the length and detail of description focused on environments that don’t have any emotions.
This is to do with my feeling that fascination with the world is what distinguishes people from one another. I work primarily from a sense of character; I “see” characters, often but not always in a particular place — they appear to me, imaginatively, from some other part of my life or experience, maybe bringing a location with them or maybe not. Sometimes, I may not know exactly why these characters are in one place or another, or what the connection is, but that is what I will explore and discover as I work on the story. Having said this, I think that a writer or any creative person must be, by the nature of their work and preoccupations, alert to the world around them in all its many and various facets. Basically, that is our material. I perhaps might make myself clearer by saying I studied art. This way of understanding the world has remained with me as one way of “seeing” — absorbing and interpreting — what is around me and how I go on to use it in creating fiction. How one experiences and interacts with the outer world helps distinguish someone who is trying to make art. If one is not fascinated by the phenomena of the world and the way we humans are in the world and how we behave towards or react to stimuli, then I don’t know what else there is to do. My characters may share that belief — not consciously, but in the way they hold themselves in the world.
You’ve said that your characters tend to be fascinated by the world they find themselves in, although it also seems to me that they’re lost in the world, or overwhelmed by it, and their fascination with external phenomena reads like a coping strategy or some way of anchoring themselves, or re-orienting themselves. Let me give an example, from ‘Araiyakushimae’. Your protagonist, Yolande, notices an irrigation ditch on a farm belonging to her family; she has returned to the farm after an absence of many years. The description is very matter-of-fact:
At the lower field, the brambles were pimply and underdeveloped because of the early summer rain. The bridge over the ditch was an old door with a few split planks supporting it, though its appearance belied its strength for it had been there through all the years from the time when her grandparents were still alive. Old rainwater sumped the soil around it. Grass and reeds clotted the flow, shimmering gold under the full light of the sky. She had jumped over the ditch as a kid, lost to danger, rather relishing it and not realising ditches developed from runnels and brooks, following the contours of the land.
There are some poetic qualities — the “pimply” brambles; the acoustic resonance between “sumped” and “jumped” — but otherwise this passage describes a sentimentally important place in a dispassionate way. What’s interesting about it, though, is that the paragraph before it is seething with rage. Yolande, we’ll learn, was abused by her uncle, who still lives on the farm, and the words preceding her observations of the ditch are brimming with fury: “He would have to listen as she spat out words caged in for years. She would challenge. Scald him with the truth.” So we jump, shockingly, from this intense urge to “scald” straight into a cold description of a ditch — but Yolande’s anger continues to come through the description of the ditch, because we know that she’s focusing on it so closely in order to keep the reins on her emotions.
There are lots of other instances of this, where characters interact with the world by really only reacting to stimuli, because they’re so badly at the mercy of greater powers and not able to be proactive in shaping their own selves. The closest we get to someone who acts decisively is in ‘The Stars Are Light Enough’, when your protagonist reaches an awareness of her limitations, her ineffectiveness, and calls it quits. Otherwise there are no real epiphanies or resolutions, more a sense of drift — and especially in stories like ‘Lost Children’ and ‘Weights’.
What is this a function of? I mean, would you say that you see the world in this way — as so vast that it mostly swallows up human agency and self-determination? Or is it more that you’re drawn to characters in disempowered situations, for dramatic purposes?
I think your point is relevant to ‘Lost Children’ and ‘Weights’, but I don’t want to convey the belief that we have no agency in the world. When it does happen, I think these characters have evolved this way for dramatic purposes: some might appear to be reactive in some stories and become more proactive towards the end, as in ‘Breakfast With Rilke’ and ‘Dark Rain Falling’. Sometimes I see characters as being at the mercy of their passions or the effects of the past, so in those cases they may come across as more passive, but it is often because they might be enveloped in larger societal forces or emotional currents than they can deal with. And in other stories, like ‘Foraged Things’, the character’s age determines the degree of change she can effect on her own life. There might be an element of “drift” there in the collection, but I hope not excessively.
Okay, so then how does all of this make its way into sentences for you? I’m assuming you go slowly, sentence by sentence, rather than scene by scene, because your sentences are so stark and rhythmic. So you’ve got the characters in your mind, the situation they’re facing, but when you sit down to write, where do you devote most of your attention? Is it, say, to the voice, the sound, the imagery? Or is it in fact the dramatic material, wanting to make the action happen?
It’s still the characters. I actually don’t think about “voice” — that seems to be too self-conscious. I’m writing about people, place, situation; I’m thinking about relationships and the emotions between one person and another, what they see in each other, how they might act and react. I’m not thinking consciously about style or how to write — just hoping to get something down. And I’m kind of writing to work something out, so there’s excitement to it as you create and enter your own little world.
You mentioned that you studied art, so would you say, then, that this visual background not only influences the beginnings of your process — imaginative visualisations of people in a scenario — but also fuels the process throughout? As if, if writing is not primarily an exercise in the sounds of words, it’s an exercise in finding words that animate imagery?
A little. I think all I’ve studied — along with experience, observations, conjecture, imagination, dreams, memory, et cetera — come to bear on my writing. The process is one I might describe as involving similar skills to those of people who work with the materials of the plastic arts. By that I mean I see the writing process often in terms of shaping, paring as a sculptor works, carving and cutting off pieces while having to be sensitive to the form one is handling. The way a story emerges for me is something akin to the way Michaelangelo’s prisoner sculptures appear, if that doesn’t sound too hifalutin. When I write, I am working on the notion that there is something in this original image that wants to get out and I have to find a way to release it to its rightful form, in the way it will be served the best.
And in doing that I try to use all my senses, on and off the page. So, for example, I like to walk rather than drive, because it’s a more sensual experience, there’s more stimulation of the senses. A journey might or might not be pleasurable, but in each case I am more likely to register more about my surroundings if I go through them slowly, on foot. And the process you are specifically asking about, whereby I might start with an image and then use words to make it move and become immersive, is the result of long stages of just doing the same thing, imaginatively — putting myself in a place, working out what it feels like, maybe researching or checking on facts, but essentially drafting and redrafting until the words I want, which express most acutely how it feels to be somewhere, are finally there on the page.
Which of the stories in Carrying Fire and Water did you have to subject to this process most intensely, in order to get them into the right shape? And which ones would you say came easiest, through a relatively speedy process?
Nearly all the stories fell into place, eventually, in the way I envisaged, but the one that springs to mind in terms of needing reviewing was ‘Weights’. Something about the tone wasn’t right to begin with, and there was also something else that I knew was amiss and but I couldn’t detect what it was.
Can you say more about it, and how you resolved it?
In its original form, I had a much more explicit version of what happened between the girl and the music teacher. It felt quite wrong, I think, but I could not see a way out until a friend read it. They actually did not point out anything but offered advice on childhood trauma — things I knew but had forgotten, as one does when drawn into the world of a story. With their input, though, they helped me see that I could take a step back and make use of the metronome as an object in the story. The metronome carried the emotional weight in real and metaphorical terms, and there is now a greater degree of suggestion, which I hope is more effective than the explicit approach I took at first. The experience reminded me that you have to have a consideration for the reader, and what they’ll take from a story, but also what they’ll bring to it — what depth of understanding. Anyway, after that intervention, I was able to return to the story and complete it in the way I had been striving for.
So, what next? I know you have more stories in reserve, but where are your ambitions taking you now?
I am working on another novel. But I also have ideas for two stories which I want to get the chance to focus on in the near future. Stories will always be part of my writing life. They’ll interweave and arrive at unexpected times — though they are a welcome interruption and I have to give them due space and attention.
About the Author
Deirdre Shanahan is a novelist and writer of short fiction. Her short stories have appeared in The Best of British Stories 2017 and won the Wasafiri International Fiction Award in 2018. Her début novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. She lives in London.