Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see as a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Louise Kennedy, author of the novel Trespasses which is a forbidden romance set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. So because my audience is primarily American, if you could just even illustrate what the Troubles are.
Louise: Okay, first of all, Mindy, thank you very much for having me. The reason for that is that it was first used in the early 1920s. So the part of Ireland that I was born and raised in, in the northeastern corner, has really seen a lot of sectarian conflict - basically conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In the early 1920s this erupted, and someone then called it the Troubles. Then in 1969 rioting happened as a result of civil rights marches that were handled very briefly by the police. A journalist apparently referred to it as the Troubles - said that it resembled the Troubles of the 20s, and I think that kind of stuck. So that's why it possibly sounds like a strange term. So I suppose from 1969 until mid to late 90s, three and a half thousand people were killed and very, very many more were injured as a result of sometimes sectarian violence and sometimes state violence. I grew up in a small town on the edge of Belfast Loch during those years.
Mindy: My family's also from the north. It's something that I've always educated myself about and tried to learn about for a lot of different reasons. Of course, obviously part of like the history of my family, but it is also very much a wonderful backdrop for so many things. Romance and of course, fighting and families being torn apart. It's also a true story. These things happened, have continued to happen. Setting this story, setting your novel Trespasses in this time and in this environment, is so interesting to me and to so many people. Like it's just compelling stories. But also it's somewhat based on your life. Is that correct?
Louise: My family owned a bar in a town that was predominantly Protestant. We belonged to a small, tight Catholic community. The town had a very large British army base on the edge of it, which wasn't particularly troublesome until the Trouble started. And then that meant that there were vast numbers of extra troops had been sent in by the British government. My family - we have to tread a fairly fine line in dealing with these British soldiers who were coming in in a place that was very mixed. You know, there's another thread in the story, which is, you know, Cushla, the main character, her role in the book as a primary teacher. I was probably seven or eight in 1975, the year in which the book is set, and I could have been one of Cushla's pupils. So the school day, you know, that the children in her class have is very much like the one that I had. The story is completely fictional, but maybe to compensate for that I felt it was really important to make everything else as true to what those days were like as possible. The news reports in the book correspond with what actually did happen in the news on corresponding days in 1975. All of those other aspects of the world, I tried to make them as real as possible.
Mindy: I wanted to talk to you about the fact that this is your debut novel. Have you always wanted to be a writer? Is this something that has always been present for you or is this a later decision?
Louise: I don't know if I could even call it a decision. So I suppose maybe when I was a young child, I read a lot. My mother kept me very well supplied with books. Maybe when I was around seven or eight, I had a teacher. She used to do these with everyone in the class where she made me play a piece of classical music and ask us to write about it. Which was fairly ambitious of her. But we did write some things, and she was always really encouraging. But that was probably about the last bit of encouragement I got. I borrowed money and trained as a Cordon Bleu cook when I was about 21. And yeah, so I spent nearly 30 years cooking and running restaurants. I always read a lot. So when I was 47 a friend of mine asked me to join a writing group with her, which I thought was a ridiculous idea, but I went along and tried my hand at writing a short story. When I brought it to the group, they were insanely encouraging.
Mindy: And so Trespasses is your debut novel. And you already mentioned so you were a child in the 70s when the Trespasses is set. So you're now in your 50s, and you've written your debut novel. So what is that like?
Louise: Well, it's sort of great, I have to say. You know, I've had people ask me before, and I think there are some people who are of the opinion that maybe publishers are only interested in youth. And I really didn't find that to be the case. I had a collection of short stories that came out last year. So I mean, I guess I had a little bit of practice with publication with that. I think it's never too late. I think it's kind of a great exercise also in just kind of blundering along whether you think it's a good idea or not. I think I possibly couldn't have done this in my 20s, to be honest. I think I wouldn't have been able to sit in a room and have my work critiqued. I think I would have had a lot less to write about then. Now, that's not to say there's other people in their 20s. But just for me, I don't think it would have worked.
Mindy: So you think that like life experience for you was such a major part of helping to build that?
Louise: Yeah, I think so. I think all of the reading I did really helps. You know, I think as a reader we don't just take in story. I think we take in the shape of things and techniques, or there's even knowing what it is that we're taking in. So I think that that probably had a huge influence on me. It's probably just about practice as well. The Irish writer Anne Enright said, "You know, just treat it like yoga or anything else that you do all the time. If you habitually turn up, there's a possibility that something's going to happen on the page."
Mindy: I agree with that entirely, and I agree very much about reading being a huge part of being a writer. It's always a big part of my life. And that's something I like to tell people because obviously you are someone that has extensive training and extensive experience in the restaurant business. You are not someone that has training in writing. You don't have like a background or a special degree.
Louise: I did come to writing late, and actually the year after I started, I did do an MA in creative writing and then I did a PhD. But those would have been recent. So, I think really what I was trying to do for myself then was I felt that I'd left it very late, not too late, but I felt that I'd left it late and I wanted to learn as much as possible. So I think maybe very quickly it had become quite serious for me. So I did enroll in an MA when I was 48 and then the PhD the following year. I think maybe very quickly I realized that writing was going to be very important to me and it seemed very serious. Not that I ever thought anyone would ever pay me to do it or that anybody would ever publish me, but I just wanted to have some sort of structure around the deadlines and things.
Mindy: For you, it was something that you discovered could be a part of your life and a pretty major part of your life outside of your career.
Louise: I joined a writing group in January 2014, but I probably wasn't at a really great place with my current life as a chef. So myself and my husband had been running a restaurant for around six or seven years. It had opened during the recession and it just got worse and worse and more and more difficult. I think things probably had to be fairly bad for me to even consider trying to write. It wasn't that I thought it was ever going to materially solve any of our problems. I was ready for something that was going to take me out of myself, and I think that writing really did that for me.
Mindy: So you're utilizing it as an escape very much.
Louise: I could sit in a corner and scribble away making things up instead of checking the bank balance. It was fantastic.
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Mindy: So then tell us a little bit about Trespasses.
Louise: So Trespasses... It's set in 1975. It is about a young Catholic teacher called Cushla Lavery. By day, she teaches a class of seven, eight-year-old children. In the evenings, sometimes she helps out in the pub that her family owns. So Cushla is in the bar one evening on a quiet night - a stranger walks in. His name is Michael. He's a barrister. He's a lot older than her. He is a Protestant, and also he has a wife.
Mindy: So when it came time for you to say, I think I want to try my hand at a novel, what was it that made you decide this? This story. This setting. These people.
Louise: For a few years this young female character in the north of Ireland was wandering into stories and bits of things that I'd written. And it wasn't Cushla, you know, maybe sometimes the character would be quite different. I think maybe that this character was sort of playing on my mind. You know, just the idea of placing her in the seventies. And I think maybe the thing about the north that I'm really interested in is a relatively small number of people were directly involved in the fighting, but yet it affected everyone else every single day and every single thing that they did. So I just wanted to maybe show how this young woman, you know, she's had all the normal feelings like sort of desire and frustration with her mother and you know, the role of these constraints on how people lived back then. In March 2019, I got a diagnosis for malignant melanoma and I had some surgery and I knew I was going to be off work for a few months. Partly to take my mind off whether I might be dying or not, I suppose, I decided to try and write a thousand words a day. And I figured that if I managed to do that most days that I would at some point have a draft of a novel, and that's what happened. So I guess within about three months I had something that... A fairly crazy first draft.
Mindy: That's exactly my process as well. Thousand words a day and you keep that up long enough and you will have a novel eventually.
Louise: Absolutely. And I think also, I'm sure you find this too, that even if what you've got is an awful mess, I think that some of that energy and that momentum of the writing every single day stays on the page - even after you've cleared up all the mad stuff.
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think too, something that one of my friends says is "you can't edit what doesn't exist." You can fix it later, but do your thousand words a day until you have a novel. And then worry about fixing it.
Louise: Trying to do that at the moment. That is definitely the way to do it because when I write short stories I don't do it like that at all. I tend to just like torture myself over every paragraph for days on end and then move on to the next one. And it's sort of hellish. The discipline of turning up and working every day is the way to do it, isn't it?
Mindy: Yes, it is. Do you find that writing short stories then is harder than writing a novel? Because I certainly do.
Louise: I think they're really hard. I think because they're so unforgiving. I mean, you don't get away with the spare words - nevermind a sentence. You don't get away with like a big range of images. It all has to be working towards the same thing. I think tone is so important. I'm very slow at writing short stories, and I find them extremely hard. I also think that when they work they're the most beautiful things on earth. The idea of a draft of a novel... I just think it's a lot more freeing. I mean, that's not to say that it's easier, but it's just very different, isn't it?
Mindy: It is. You've got a lot more room to build your characters and establish your plot and build your environment. You've just got more space - "more forgiving" is the way you put it -and I think that's absolutely accurate. Then as someone who has become published and just like really changed the career path very suddenly later in life, what is that like? What has that been like?
Louise: It's been kind of amazing actually, because I never thought I'd ever earn a penny at this. I never thought anybody'd want to publish me. I probably needed a bit of encouragement. First of all, in my writing group and then maybe in my MA class. And then after that, pals of mine who are also students in Queen's University or was doing the PhD. I think I really wanted that. But like I was absolutely thrilled if something was accepted into a journal or if it placed in a competition. All along I thought I was just kind of doing it for myself. It's been really actually kind of incredible. Although I live in an ordinary town in the northwest of Ireland. It rains a lot. I have two kids who are 22 and 19 who are both students in Dublin. I need to get out and do some digging in my garden. I mean, my life, it's no different than it ever was. It's just that sometimes I get to go to festivals, or I get to have lovely chats with people like you. And sometimes it feels like somebody else did it. I don't know.
Mindy: I often feel like somebody else did it. When I look at my books that I've published, I'm like, "huh, that's interesting."
Louise: Exactly. It's like, how did I even do that? Like, was I even there?
Mindy: Yeah, absolutely. So now that you've moved into the realm of being a published author, does it change how you approach writing now that you're not just writing for yourself anymore?
Louise: I think maybe it's okay. I wrote a collection of short stories, which is published in the UK and Ireland last year. I didn't really look on that as a collection until really quite late in the process. I wrote that crazy draft of Trespasses. My editor in the UK saw it was three chapters and a synopsis. She didn't see anything until I'd done about five drafts. So I did kind of feel as if I was writing on my own. But also there was the obligation there because I was under contract. I was really worried at the start where I thought, "oh my God, is this going to just like stifle me completely and, you know, instill me with so much terror that I won't be able to do it." But actually it was okay. I'm hoping that it's going to continue to be okay. I'm trying to write another novel at the moment. I when to say trying to... It's just that my melanoma came back, so I'm getting some treatment for that as well. Although it's going really well, but it's just, you know, there are appointments and things. You know, I was worrying for a while. I was thinking, "oh, I'm not writing. I'm not writing." And then one day I sat at the computer and everything was all better. I mean, I suppose the cure for not writing is just to write, isn't it?
Mindy: Yes, it is. Well, and like you said, you have that discipline of showing up and sitting down and writing every day. And if you do that, I think it doesn't matter who you're writing for or why you're writing. You're still writing.
Louise: Exactly.
Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find the book Trespasses and where they can find you online?
Louise: Trespasses ... I think it's going to be at all bookshops. Is it All Good Bookshops? You can find me on Twitter, Kennedy Lulu. I'm also on Instagram a bit, and I think it's Louise.Kennedyy with two Y's.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.