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1.
AOTW: How has your Irish or Irish-American background influenced your writing?
Niall Williams: I was born in Dublin and grew up in Ireland, and I feel the shape and mood of everything I have written is influenced by that. It is not conscious or in any way deliberate. Writing for me is about the rhythm of the words in the back of your head, and that rhythm is formed out of those you hear from childhood onward. It is hard for me to pin down anything particular and say that is an Irish influence, I think that's probably for others. My concern is to listen to the story coming through my head and write it as best I can. It is of course mostly when in other countries that you are told your books are "Irish" as such. But recently I was on a book tour in South Africa with The Fall of Light and was delighted to be told that it seemed such an African kind of story!
Morgan Llywelyn: My work has always been influenced by the fact that I am Irish. My earliest memories are of my Irish-born parents and grandparents telling me about Ireland. As soon as I could, I moved home to stay. I find Ireland a constant source of inspiration in so many ways --- not only the history about which I write, but also the land itself. The physical land: hills, lakes, sea, sky.
Andrew M. Greeley: It is a very powerful influence. I see the world through the lens of someone who is both Irish and American.
Mary E. Lyons: Lately, very much so. After I obtained dual citizenship, I decided to write a book for young readers about Ireland. That book turned into two. Feed the Children First: Irish Memories of the Great Hunger was published by Atheneum this month; Houghton Mifflin published Knockabeg: A Famine Tale in September 2001. Prior to this, I wrote biographies and historical fiction for young readers about women, southerners, African-Americans, or a combination of these subjects.
Eoin Colfer: All my stories have their roots in Ireland. Even though Artemis Fow is a modern fairy tale, the characters have all evolved from traditional Gaelic fairy figures.
Malachy McCourt: Being Irish is all I know or experience inside my head so words and syntax are all rounded and grounded with that specific ethnicity.
Randy Lee Eickhoff: Enormously. I have found that the myths and stories from the past define the current society and culture with an uncanny conciseness. The stories from Ireland's past do, as Yeats insisted, define the modern man. We are the stories of our ancestors.
Regina McBride: I grew up in New Mexico. My parents were New York Irish, strongly identified with their Irishness. They seemed always homesick, in exile for things Irish and they romanticized Ireland as a kind of lost piece of themselves. I absorbed that from them and developed a nostalgia for a place
I had never been, which I imagined might offer some revelation about who I was. This was so powerful for me that I eventually moved to Ireland on my own and with very little money.
Maureen Dezell: I don't see my Irish American background as a singular, or overwhelming influence. It's one among a number of characteristics and experiences, along with being female, a baby boomer, someone who moved a lot as a child, a mother, and a former teacher --- that influence my writing.
I do think many Irish Americans grow up hearing and appreciating good storytelling; that there's a respect for information, language and verbal acuity in the culture. There is a strong Irish anti-intellectual streak in Irish America that flies in the face of native Irish traditions. But some of the inherited respect for literature and the written word certainly survives on this side of the Atlantic...Hence this roundtable.
Martin Roper: I'm from Dublin and I think I see myself as a Dubliner more than an Irishman. We grew up poor although we children weren't aware of the poverty. My parents protected us from it. We were loved. As I got older and became conscious of our circumstances I was angry at a society that allows its citizens to work as hard as my parents did for so little money. But I got over that a long time ago. It's simply life and the injustice of it is an influence in my writing. Having heroic parents is my greatest influence.
Jamie O'Neill: To the extent that life informs writing, and I have only ever lived as an Irishman, my Irish background must be an overwhelming influence. But has my being Irish brought anything particular, nationally identifiable, to my writing? Perhaps in my use of English, but more of that below. It's interesting to me how my writing has influenced my sense of being Irish. Forgive me now for mentioning my current novel, but it's the only one I have, and I spent ten years of my life writing it. At Swim, Two Boys is set mostly in Glasthule and Sandycove, on the southern lip of Dublin Bay. This is where I grew up, on the sea-wall there, sun-basking in summer, wave-dodging in winter. It was only when I came to write of it that I realized how much I loved that place: the swooning hills, bracken-gold and bracken-green, the beckoning sparkling reckless sea, that sense of freedom, an Irish freedom that really you didn't know what to do with it. My writing brought me to this love of place, and I'll be forever grateful for that. Then again, my novel is set in 1916 at the time of the Easter Rising. We were taught this rising in school as almost a sacred affair. The revisionism in Irish historiography has rendered it more human, fallible --- even mockable. In the course of my ten years' writing and researching, my opinions changed often, till in the end I came to my own understanding. Easter 1916 is the soul of my nation. And I hoped that I too should have shared that "excess of love" as Yeats put it, shared in the courage and nobility of those young men and women who in the foggy dew went out that Monday morning. I feel more Irish, having written that novel, than ever I did before.
Emma Donoghue: I spent my first twenty years in Dublin, and those are the ones that mark you, so that despite the fact that I then spent eight years in England, and I now live in Canada, I will always be an Irish writer. Meaning that I use words like "banjaxed" and "bockedy" and that I have an irrepressible confidence that the world eagerly awaits every story I have to tell!
Máire B. de Paor: I normally write in my first language which is Gaelic, one of the oldest spoken vernaculars in western Europe. It is an inflected language like its sisters, Greek and Latin, and is a very precise medium of expression rich in concrete symbolism and colourful, concrete turns of phrase. The only reason I sometimes write in my second language is to be understood by readers at home and abroad who are not proficient in Gaelic or who, through no fault of their own, have been deprived of their Gaelic inheritance.
Marita Conlon-McKenna: Because I live and work here in Ireland, everything I write has some connection to my place and who I am. I don't consciously think of it as I put words on the page but my words and language and thoughts are bound to reflect this. To me being Irish is just like having blue eyes and fair hair, something that is a part of me. It is only when I travel outside of Ireland that I realise my Irishness, and appreciate this special quality that sets us apart from others and informs and shapes much of what we as a people do. It is a mighty influence!
Liam Clancy: Totally, as my memoir describes. I went from a small town in Ireland in the 1930s, which had one foot in the Middle Ages, another in the 20th Century to leaving a relatively poor background for an introduction to America by a Guggenheim heiress. Living for much of my life in Greenwich Village drew me into the world of artists, of freedom of thought and expression, of the conflicts of Vietnam and racism.
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