Bell, book and candle – interview with Moïra Fowley Doyle

Magic, mysticism and mystery are at the core of Moïra Fowley-Doyle’s novels, The Accident Season and this year’s The Spellbook of the Lost and Found. Set in rural Ireland they take normal girls and unravel the secrets of their past and defeat the demons of their present with spells, enchantment and dreams. We chatted to Moira about the inspiration behind her books and weaving magic into modern Ireland.

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Did you always want to write novels?

Always. When I was a child I wanted to be a ballet dancer so I took four two-hour ballet classes a week for ten years – and I wrote constantly: stories and poems and every day in my diary. When I was a teenager I wanted to be an artist so I drew and painted and sketched – and I wrote constantly: poetry and short novels and every day in my diary. When I was in university I realised that my only constant was my real passion, so I started calling myself a writer.

Where did you develop an interest in magical realism?

When I was a teenager I discovered the Weetzie Bat books by Francesca Lia Block.They’re a series of five cult YA books written in the 80s and I’d never read anything like them. They’re glitzy and grim and sparkly and serious, they’re lyrical and strange and poetic.

There’s this sense that threads through them that even the darkest moments can be beautiful, that reality and fantasy are blurred, that everybody has a story to tell.

I took this like an arrow to the heart because I’d always had the same sense myself, but couldn’t quite put it into words.

Once I realised that this interlacing of truth and fiction had a genre and a name I started reading all the magic realism I could find.

It’s the closest type of fiction that I feel reflects real life.

“The real and the maybe-not-so-real have always been a bit blurry for me, and that means that when things are good they’re dreamy and magical, and when they aren’t they’re eerie and haunting.”

What books and authors have influenced your writing style?

Francesca Lia Block, for starters, but also non-YA like Kate Atkinson and Jeanette Winterson on the adult fiction side, and David Almond and Philip Pullman on the children’s fiction side. These are the authors I read the most as a teenager, which was when my writing style developed, and are also some of the authors I read the most today.

Both The Accident Season and The Spellbook of the Lost and Found are dreamy, haunting stories, do you have to get in a particular mindset for that style of writing?

To be honest, that mindset is kind of my default. I’ve never been someone who is particularly anchored in the real world. The real and the maybe-not-so-real have always been a bit blurry for me, and that means that when things are good they’re dreamy and magical, and when they aren’t they’re eerie and haunting. I lived my entire adolescence like this, so I suppose it made sense to me to write about teenagers who lived the same way.

In The Spellbook of the Lost and Found you mix religious traditions, superstitions and wiccan ritual, did you do a lot of research to bring your story to life?

I read a lot about folk magic and patron saints, but these are things I’m very interested in anyway, so I had a good bit of that research done already. I learnt a lot of the superstitions and religious traditions just by having been brought up atheist in Ireland. There’s this fascinating and beautiful almost-paganism to Irish Catholicism when you look at it from the outside: the patron saints, the holy wells, how people bury Child of Prague statues before weddings and keep St Christopher medals in their babies’ prams. I also read a lot about trees. Native Irish trees and the superstitions and legends and folk magic associated with each. Each of the characters’ names were carefully chosen so that their personalities – and relationships with each other – aligned with the meanings of the trees they’re named after. I think I read more about trees than I did any other research.

Your books have such a sense of place – did the area that you grew up in have a big influence on that? 

Not the place I grew up in, so much: I grew up in Clontarf, which is a seaside suburb on the north side of Dublin, and it’s very lovely, but not at all like where I set my first two books.

But a couple of years before I wrote The Accident Season my parents bought a house in County Mayo, beside a forest, on the shores of a lake.

It’s in the middle of nowhere, a fifteen minute drive from the nearest small town which has a beautiful river running through the middle of it and not a few ghost estates sitting empty and overgrown. B

oth The Accident Season and Spellbook are set in fictional small towns that are heavily based on that real town.

“I don’t tend to write people I know in real life into my books, but I put a lot of the feel of my family – the closeness, the teasing, the minor chaos, the dad jokes – into Olive’s family in Spellbook”

The characters in both of your novels are loyal and have strong connections of family and friendship – is that drawn from your own life?

I’m very lucky because I have a very close-knit, loving family and a group of friends I’ve had since I was a teenager. Some I met when I started secondary school, the others when I started university, and we’ve been through a lot together and grown up together and stayed strong and a lot of us were each other’s bridesmaids and now our children play together.

I don’t tend to write people I know in real life into my books, but I put a lot of the feel of my family – the closeness, the teasing, the minor chaos, the dad jokes – into Olive’s family in Spellbook.

That’s probably why the chapters we spend in Olive’s house are some of my favourites in the whole book.

Do you have a favourite of any of your characters?

I feel a great kinship with Bea in The Accident Season – she is probably the closest to teenage-me that any of my characters have turned out so far.

But I also love Rose in Spellbook – I think it would be very difficult not to fall in love with somebody like Rose in real life.

The romances and emotions in both of your books are incredibly intense and vibrant – do you enjoy writing that side of your characters or do you find it challenging?

I love the emotions!

Emotions and relationships and family dynamics are the things I prefer to write – in fact, they’re always the things I write first.

My first drafts are a mess of dreaminess and creepiness and characters having emotions and relationships and the rest of what makes a story – the plot, the pacing, having at least half of the book make some semblance of sense – happens in the edits.

“Write the kind of book you want to read but can’t quite find, the one that ticks all your boxes, the one that you’d buy instantly if you saw it on the shelves.”

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

I know this is kind of a cliché, but write what you love. Fall in love with what you write.

Write the kind of book you want to read but can’t quite find, the one that ticks all your boxes, the one that you’d buy instantly if you saw it on the shelves. If you don’t love your book fiercely, you’re less likely to finish it.

And if you love it that much, chances are very high that other people will too.

Do you have plans for your next novel? 

I’m currently about halfway through the first draft of my next novel, so because it’s at such an early stage I can’t talk much about it. I like that it’s kind of a secret as I build it, though – this tangle of family history and stormy seas – that will one day soon become a book.

The Accident Season and The Spellbook of the Lost and Found are published by Penguin and available from all good bookshops.

To the waters and the wild – Interview with Deirdre Sullivan

Winner of the YA Book of the Year, Deirdre Sullivan, spoke with Cinders magazine about Tangleweed and Brine in October.

Deirdre Sullivan is no stranger to the Irish YA literary scene what with her fabulous novel Needlework, and her Prim Improper series. Her new collection Tangleweed and Brine is something different, a set of feminist fairy-tale retellings that is already well on its way to becoming a feminist classic. Tangleweed and Brine takes the stories that we thought we knew and looks at them through a new lens. It gives readers a fresh perspective on characters that they will have known all their lives – turning these stories on their heads and empowering the women whose tales they tell. Méabh McDonnell spoke to Deirdre about her inspiration behind the collection and why fairy-tales are still the stories that speak the loudest to us.

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What drew you to re-writing these classic fairy-tales?

I have always been drawn to storytelling, and fairy-tales in my fiction, which is true for so many writers. I have been rewriting fairy-tales for years and I think it’s an attempt to touch and name the things inside them. The truths and the lies. With Tangleweed and Brine, I got to explore the world of my childhood fiction more deeply, which was a demanding experience in the best possible way. I loved writing it, and I felt it very deeply.

Do you have a favourite fairy-tale now, or did you have one growing up? 

It’s hard, but I think the Little Mermaid holds a special place in my heart. I grew up near the ocean, and I was a lonely child. The sadness of the Little Mermaid worried me and spoke to me at the same time. It still does.

Did you find it challenging to re-interpret these stories, when they’re so embedded into our culture? 

Yes, and no.

The stories came to me little by little and one (The Tender Weight) that I was stuck on actually got sorted out in a dream.

I lived and breathed them for the year it took to write, I was constantly thinking about them and twisting the worlds around my brain.

The writing itself, when I sat down to do it, generally flowed. I work full time, and I think that focusing myself on other things sometimes helps what I’m working on to percolate.

I worked very hard on this book, and I have been getting ready to write it for over a decade, but the voice and the shape of it came very naturally. It felt like it was ready to be written, and I loved the process.

What do you think is so consistently appealing about fairy-tales, particularly to YA writing?

Story is such a powerful and human tool, and fairytales are the oldest and most potent stories of all.

They are tales from our childhood that follow us into adulthood.

As a writer for young adults, that’s a transition I negotiate in most of my fiction. You look at the original versions of fairy-tales, for example Little Red Riding Hood, you could argue that they are YA. Dark themes, warnings, young protagonists, striking out on their own.

When we are teenagers, we realise little by little how complex the world around us can be, and we have to decode the stories we have been told about the world and work out new stories to tell ourselves as we shape our identity.

And that’s what fairy-tales began as.

Stories told to help people make sense of the world around them. Rules and warnings, the things we think we want and how to get them….

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In some of the stories you write from an unusual perspective, such as the wife in Come Live Here and Be Loved, the witch in You Shall not Suffer and the servant girl in The Little Gift, was it difficult to decide who’s story you were going to tell in your version? 

This book came so naturally to me. Like, I worked very hard on it, but the voices flowed. I felt like I knew those girls or was those girls. The second person ones are, I think, related the the choose your own adventure books I loved as a young adult, like Secret Sorceress. They were full of magic and romance and peril, and I encountered “you” stories for the first time inside their pages. Weirdly I felt closer to the you women than the I women, more embedded…. I don’t know what that says about me.

“When we are teenagers, we realise little by little how complex the world around us can be, and we have to decode the stories we have been told about the world and work out new stories to tell ourselves as we shape our identity.

And that’s what fairy-tales began as.”

I loved the heroine of Slippershod, how her story is about taking power and independence back for herself. I also really enjoyed how the heroines of You Shall not Suffer… and Riverbed in particular use their agency to re-write their stories. How did you go about giving these women voices and independence in stories where most of the time they are just evil or good – tainted or pure? 

I didn’t think about it, it came really naturally. I don’t think I could have told them any other way. I mean, I could rewrite those stories again (and have- there’s another Snow White living on my laptop at the moment, and a few mermaids, I come back to fairytales a lot). We aren’t one thing. We have hearts. We have desires and we live in a world where we are denied agency in a myriad of ways. I’m aware of my privilege. I have a roof over my head, I’m white, cisgendered, but there are things the world takes from women piece by piece as they grow up. And I thought about what it would be like to live inside a fairy-tale. How would you claw back what you needed to feel like a person? And what that would do to you. The purity and taint of it is right. And everyone is both and all at once.

I really liked the connections from one story to the next, like the girls having heard of each other and witches being treated the same throughout the stories, did you set out to write them with that in mind  or did that develop as you completed each tale? 

I don’t think they’re in the same world, they’re like all these little snow globes that touch each other like a venn diagram. I think the links were as a result of them growing from the same brain rather than a thing I set out to do. It came organically.

Did you have to do a lot of research into the original fairy-tales to find out how you would re-write your own?

I had done a lot already. I ate up Jack Zipes, Marina Warner, Maria Tatar, Marie Louise Vin Franz and the like at college, when I was supposed to be studying Law. And I have always been drawn to fairy-tale retellings. The book is dedicated to two dear friends, one who first introduced me to the work of Jack Zipes, in the NUIGalway library, and another who edited the Writers Society journal when I was in college. The first thing I read of hers was a fairy-tale she had written and I thought to myself “friend!”

When I first got the contract for Tangleweed and Brine (Little Island commissioned it, based on their knowledge of the fairy-tale retellings I had already done) I felt like I should reread everything again, but I ended up dipping in and dipping out over the year and letting it flow out of me. I think that having that swathe of space helped the book. I wanted it to feel natural.

“I have a roof over my head, I’m white, cisgendered, but there are things the world takes from women piece by piece as they grow up. And I thought about what it would be like to live inside a fairy-tale.”

You mentioned Angela Carter as an author who influenced you, did you enjoy writing a version of Bluebeard that was so different to The Bloody Chamber

This is the one that came to me in a dream, which has never happened before and was really useful. Thanks, subconscious.

I am drawn to the story of Bluebeard, the darkness and the blood and the keys and the fear. It’s powerful.

But I was very intimidated when I came to it, because I love Angela Carter’s version a lot. Tangleweed and Brine is a little nod to her book The Bloody Chamber, as it influenced me as a writer. Her voice is fearless and poetic and her use of colour and imagery is something else.

Her stories are so different but so cohesive.

That’s another reason I was glad there was space left between reading around fairytales and writing Tangleweed and Brine. Such big boots to even try on, never mind fill!

“The things in these stories take place in fairy-tale worlds, but there’s a core of truth to all of them, at least to me”

The concept of ‘witches’ is woven throughout most of the stories, in some they are revered, in others feared, in some forces for good and in others forces that have done evil – was there a reason you referred to them so often in your fairy-tale universe? 

Yes, it was about power. How to get power in a patriarchal society, how to learn to value things that aren’t worth money. Plants, animals, the elements, yourself.

The witch is the transgressive woman, the other. And there’s a value to that and a price to pay. People punish unruly women- who do not look or behave properly. Women are still disfigured, burned, murdered and cast out for perceived transgressions in the world today. The things in these stories take place in fairy-tale worlds, but there’s a core of truth to all of them, at least to me.

Why choose earth and water as the key elements of the book? 

Initially I was going to do all four elements, but the stories kept coming out with Earth and Water strongly, so I went with it. Writing this was a very different process to writing my other books, it was more instinctual, and less planned. I think all the witches might have put me more in tune with my subconscious or something. The wagons.

Do you believe in magic?

Yes. but not the kind with wands. I believe in love and stories. Those are powerful.

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Tangleweed and Brine is published by Little Island Books and available in all good bookshops.

 

Teenage Dreams – An Interview with Claire Hennessy

First published in Cinders Issue Three

Claire Hennessy has been a published writer since she was twelve. Since the release of her first book Dear Diary, she has been at the forefront of Irish teen literature. Now as a children’s book editor and author she has even more feathers in her very large cap! Meabh McDonnell had a chat with Claire about her last book Nothing Tastes as Good and her upcoming release, Like Other Girls.

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Continue reading Teenage Dreams – An Interview with Claire Hennessy

Write what you need – An interview with Meg Grehan

First Published in Cinders Issue Four

Last issue we had the pleasure of reviewing Meg Grehan’s gorgeous verse novel, The Space Between. This month editor Méabh McDonnell was delighted to talk to Meg about her writing inspiration, mental health and poetry.

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1.What was the inspiration for The Space Between? 

It wasn’t inspiration so much as desperation, to be honest! When I started writing The Space Between I was an absolute mess. I couldn’t go two days without a panic attack, I was afraid of everything, I couldn’t bring myself to leave my house and I needed to do something. I read a lot which helped at first but I could never find exactly what I needed in the books I read so I decided to write what I needed instead. It was inspired by the tough things I was going through but also the good things. I’m lucky to have had someone who was there for me every step of the way, my girlfriend came home every evening and listened to every rambling thought I had. She constantly reminded me that I had to help myself but that she would hold my hand while I figured out how. I wanted to write about how while people aren’t medicine, there’s power in letting people in and she inspired that in a million little ways.

Continue reading Write what you need – An interview with Meg Grehan

Double, Double Write Some Trouble – an interview with Erica McGann

First published in Cinders Volume One Issue two

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Erika McGann is a young writer from Drogheda, now living in Dublin.  Erika has written four books in her Demon Notebook series and is just about to release the first book in her mystery series for children: Cass and the Bubble Street Gang. The Demon Notebook series explores the adventures of a group of school friends who soon discover their powers as witches. I was delighted to get the opportunity to chat to Erika about writing, fantasy, female friendships in books, and how the sound of a coffee shop makes it easier to write!

When did you first know you wanted to be an author?

When I was really young, writing was all I wanted to do and my parents were very encouraging. They bought me a huge hardback notebook and they paid me 10p a day to write in it. I’m not sure about the ethics of that but it really really worked! It got me into the habit of writing every day. But I got out of the habit in my teens and I didn’t write again until I was about 28. That’s when I jumped into creating The Demon Notebook. So there was a huge gap when I should have been doing what most writers are doing which is working hard and perfecting their craft, but I went about it a different way!

Continue reading Double, Double Write Some Trouble – an interview with Erica McGann