The Redemption Interviews
IT’S A TOUGH WORLD OUT THERE FOR WRITERS, AND WE TOTALLY GET IT.
That’s why, this autumn, we put out a call to writers far and wide, asking them to submit their short stories to our competition with just one caveat: It had to have been rejected from somewhere else. This was a competition for the ones that other places said were not for them, not for this moment, not for this issue…because we believe in second chances (and third and fourth and fifth ones), and you should too.
Our top three winning writers—Eoin Madigan, Aingeala Flannery, and Margaret Cahill—graciously took the time out of their busy schedules to answer a few of our questions, and you can read their thoughts below. Their first-rate short stories (and the ten others who found a home, too) can be found in Silver Apples’ Issue 12: “Redemption.”
Where are you from, where are you now, and how did you get from A to B? How did you arrive at writing short stories?
EM: Born and bred in Limerick, I’m still in Limerick now, but by way of stints in Spain, France, the UK, and the States. I’ve been scribbling away since my early teens and every now and again a decent short story will take shape.
AF: My background is in journalism, which is full of people who aspire to write more than news and features. I made the leap about three years ago. Now, I only write four or five columns a year as a journalist. I had a few scraps of short stories written over the years, and once I moved on from media these stories became my writing outlet. I felt liberated… until the self-doubt and imposter syndrome set in.
MC: I’m originally from Tullamore in Co. Offaly. I came to Limerick for a year to do a Masters but got a job teaching in the University afterwards and twenty two years later I’m still living here. way. I had an idea that I wanted to write but didn’t know how to get started so I did a couple of evening courses in creative writing in the University ten years ago. After that, I joined a Writers’ Group that grew out of one of those courses and we’ve been meeting every month since for the past eight years to critique each other’s short stories and novels. Having a regular deadline every month, seeing my work improve through their input and subsequently getting some publications and some competition listings has kept me going.
All three winning stories have very prominent mother characters. What does “mother” mean to you and how did this play a role in writing “Mother’s Nature”?
EM: “Mother” to me means strength, though a strength that’s not always turned towards the best uses.
AF: I don’t think of The Machine as a story about motherhood, it’s a story about class and injustice. The narrator is doing her best, as a mother, as a person, as an employee, as a tenant, but the odds are stacked against her at every turn.
MC: My own personal meaning of “mother” has no relationship to my story at all. To me, my mother is a security blanket, the person who I always come back to, to feel centred and grounded and a source of unconditional love. But I know that isn’t everyone’s experience of a mother. The family provides the most important relationships in our lives. It moulds us emotionally and psychologically as people but that can be in a positive or negative way. Although the mother is a prominent character in my story, it’s told by the child in first-person and so it’s really their story and about how their life is affected by the actions of their mother and the mental health crisis she is going through.
Do you let your mom read your stuff?
EM: Jesus no!
AF: If she wants to.
MC: Sometimes. She doesn’t generally read fiction, so if I do, it would be a fairly straightforward story and nothing too experimental or risqué.
If you could elicit one thing from your reader, what would it be?
EM: If I pour some emotion into a work, ideally, I’d like to elicit that from the reader, or some interpretation of it.
AF: The urge to read more.
MC: I want the reader to identify with the characters I create, to be drawn into their world, to have an affinity with them and to be invested in what happens to them. That may teach them something about themselves in the process but I want to find homes for all of the characters I have created so that other people can meet and feel for them, as I do.
Describe the road from rejection to publication in Silver Apples Magazine.
EM: It was rejected once before Silver Apples. I didn’t make any major changes, just polished it up and got feedback from a few close friends for small tweaks here and there.
AF: It was rejected once. I don’t think I changed it much. I wrote the story in early 2019 during an MFA in Creative Writing at UCD, so it got quite a going over by my supervisor and my classmates.
MC: I started this story back in 2013. Over the years it has been rejected by competitions three times and literary journals six times. I would have reviewed and edited it quite a few times in the 2-3 years after starting it. I bring all of my work to my Writers’ Group and it would have been reviewed by them a couple of times also. I had just about given up on it and dug it out for one last edit to submit it to Silver Apples Magazine. This is the fifteenth edit of the story, though a lot of those last ones were small changes as I tried to tweak the ending to pull the story together.
Any advice for those who were not selected for the shortlist in this competition?
EM: Keep plugging away. I’ve been writing over 15 years and this is the first win/publication I’ve managed. Take subjects or themes that are close to you and pull them apart, twist them, mix them up with something else. That’s what worked for me here in any case!
AF: Go again.
MC: It’s hard to be objective about a story you’ve been working on for a long time. There are two main things that can help at that stage. The first is to put it away for six months and don’t look about it or think about it. You can then come back to it with fresh eyes and read it objectively as you would someone else’s work and it’s easier to see what works and what doesn’t and what needs to be cut.
The other alternative is to give it to readers/writers you trust to be completely honest with you. You do need to be careful about who you entrust your work to through. They need to be people who can really analyse the writing to tell you why a character’s actions aren’t believable, why your use of language supports or interrupts the atmosphere, if the point of view or tense it’s written in isn’t working etc. You need to make the story the best possible story you can before sending it out.
Ultimately, not all stories that you write are going to be good enough to be published in an already saturated market and knowing when to give up on one, put in in the bottom drawer and move on is one of the hardest things to figure out as a writer. Kevin Barry writes something like twelve stories a year. He knows himself that there will only be two or three good stories out of that but he finishes every story because that’s how he learns and hones his craft. Sometimes a story will have served its purpose in teaching you how to write and can act as a catalyst for better stories to come.
What does it look like where you write? What can you tolerate/not tolerate about that space?
EM: I write anywhere it’s relatively quiet and I know I won’t be disturbed for a while. This could be at home or in a café in town.
AF: I write in the box-room of my house, looking out the upstairs window at trees and cranes. The room has a high ceiling and a pencil drawing by PJ Lynch on the wall. My writing table is lovely and old, but I have yet to find the perfect chair.
MC: I do all of my editing sitting on my sofa with my laptop on my knee. That’s what I consider the real work of writing. The worst thing about it is the distraction of the internet. It’s all too easy to open up a browser ‘just for a minute’ and to end up down an internet rabbit hole for an hour.
I find that I come up with new stories from scratch most often when I’m away from home. If I’m somewhere new, with different people around me, new things, in a different environment and out of the regular routine of everyday life, that’s when I tend to get my best ideas. I always bring a notebook with me on trips and scribble down phrases or scraps of dialogue or a page of an idea that comes to me and some of those turn into stories later. I also have a text app on my phone that I use when I’m out and about and an idea comes to me.
Are you working on anything now? What?
EM: A fantastical tale involving Constantine, the last Emperor of Byzantium, and a pack of dogs that save clueless tourists from honey traps.
AF: There’s a novel bouncing around in my head. I have the characters and know where I’m beginning the story. I’m off to the University of Limerick Winter School in Doolin in a few weeks to make a start on it.
MC: I’m never working on just one thing. I consider all of my unpublished stories works in progress so there is always plenty of work to do in editing them. I have a bunch of stories that are nearly there, others that are in progress, a bunch of first drafts and a whole load of sketches, scenes and false starts that never went anywhere.
I turned one of my stories into a radio play earlier this year, wrote some creative non-fiction, have written some short flash fiction pieces and have had some music and art pieces published. I’m trying to be open to whatever new writing possibilities present themselves and to give new things a go.
What book do you wish you could erase from your mind so you could enjoy it for the first time all over again? Why?
EM: Shogun by James Clavell. It’s the first great sweeping epic I read and it absolutely bowled me over. In fact, I’ve almost forgotten it all – five more years and it’ll be like a new book to me!
MC: Julian Gough’s Jude books. I came home from a trip to Galway a number of years ago with a bag full of discounted books I’d bought in Charlie Byrne’s bookshop. Jude in London was one of them. I couldn’t get my head around it at all at the start. I’d come from an academic background and was used to reading straightforward realist fiction. The story began with two people floating across the Irish sea on a grand piano and I thought it was nonsense at first. Eventually, I relaxed my expectations that the story had to make sense, got into the flow of it and ended the book thinking it was the funniest thing I’d ever read. I went back to the first Jude book then (Jude: Level 1) and from there it lead me to all sorts of other surrealist books, from Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, to Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Ulysses and Alisdair Gray’s Lanark. Each in turn stretched my reading brain and opened my mind up to the possibilities available to the fiction writer. They changed my style of writing and I’m only just starting to see that now as I move away from the more traditional stories I used to write, of which “Trains” is a good example, to madder, more adventurous, fun stories where anything can happen and where the bounds of reality can be played with. Now that I’m more tuned in to reading this sort of fiction, I’d love to be able to go back and read Julian’s two books fresh for the first time. I know I’d find them even funnier now.
If you could choose any activity as an Olympic sport, what would you have the best chance at winning a medal for?
EM: Napping.
What would your first question after waking up be if you had been cryogenically frozen for the last 100 years?
AF: Where’s the coffee?