tDQ: How long have you been writing fiction for? What got you started?
Morrissy: I’ve been writing since I was 17. I got started in fiction by doing a correspondence
in freelance journalism
| "I can’t say what is typical
and often one only sees patterns in retrospect. With
regard to my novels, I have always chosen real-life events or characters as a springboard for the
fiction...I suppose you could say that that’s one of the perks of being a writer – you’re allowed to indulge
your obsessions." |
and one of the assignments was to write a short story, and without any
preconceptions and with the fearlessness of youthful ignorance, I did. Most times the tutor--who
only signed his name with initials so I don’t even know his name - would write a few non-committal
comments at the end of the assignments. But my story elicited an entire paragraph of praise,
finishing with the query – have you ever thought of becoming a writer?
tDQ: Your first collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye, has
been described as “dark” and full of “cruelly deformed love”. Do you recognise such epithets as
they are applied to your work?
Morrissy: Yes, I suppose I do. These are not cheery tales.
tDQ: My sense from reading your work is that you are a writer of detailed
and even uncomfortable physicality – we are constantly reminded of the intimate corporeal presence of
your characters. Is this a conscious focus, or the result of the way the scenes unfold in your
imagination?
Morrissy: A friend jokily suggested when A Lazy Eye was published that I should have
called it Bodily Fluids. And yes, there’s a lot of oozing in it; but we are all physical beings and
dictated to as much to by our bodily functions as our heads.
The title story, for example, contains
a pretty candid description of menstruation. Well, as the main character in the story says – women
bleed, except of course in this case, it is exposed publicly and it is other people’s reactions to
it that turn it into something threatening and sinister. But I chose this scenario not because I
wanted to make that point, but because the character had always wanted to be singled out, to have
her 15 minutes of fame. But when it comes, it’s this humiliating exposure not a moment of glory as
she’s always anticipated.
tDQ: Again, looking at A Lazy Eye, what you seem to depict is a
universe governed by a primal, almost Old Testament imperative of checks and balances – where every
pleasure entails an equal and opposite pain, and every gain arrives hand-in-hand with its preordained
loss (clearly seen in a story like The Cantilever Principle). Can you comment on this?
Morrissy: There is very
little in the stories about Catholicism per se – rather, religion has been sewn into the characters’
psyche at a much deeper level. It seems to me as a Catholic child, the readings from the Old and
New Testaments were our first steeping in a rich and powerful literature which has a hold long after
the observation of the rituals have fallen away.
tDQ: Typically, what subject-matter attracts you, and why?
Morrissy: I can’t say what is typical and often one only sees patterns in retrospect. With
regard to my novels, I have always chosen real-life events or characters as a springboard for the
fiction. Mother of Pearl, for example, is based on a kidnapping that happened in Dublin in 1950
and my interest was sparked when I read of the death in her thirties of the child at the centre of
the events. There was something so poignant not only about this woman’s premature death, but that
her life had clearly been defined by the transgressive act of another. With The Pretender, which
focuses on the Polish woman who claimed to be Anastasia, the daughter of Tsar Nicholas 11, the
interest came from a nerdy adolescent interest in the Russian royals. I suppose you could say
that that’s one of the perks of being a writer – you’re allowed to indulge your obsessions.
tDQ: Mother of Pearl strikes me for many reasons as a novel
which could not have been written by a man. How do you react to gender-based or feminist readings
of your work?
Morrissy: I think a feminist reading of my work is as valid as any other, but it is not
the only way to read it. I suppose you could say the impulse behind writing about the characters
I do is feminist in that they are mostly women, and often silenced in one way or another. And I
am a woman and a feminist. But I don’t see my work as being in any way polemical; I don’t think
that’s the function of art.
tDQ: Even though you subject your characters, their inner motives,
to a Yeatsian “cold eye”, we are never allowed to withdraw our compassion from them, to the extent
that as readers we almost find ourselves condoning truly reprehensible behaviour (such as the theft
of a child). Is there a deliberate strategy on your part to create such an “imaginative tension” in
your audience?
Morrissy: I wish I could see there was a deliberate strategy in any of my work. Most of the
time, I’m just muddling along, trying to make sense of the thing myself, for myself. In Mother
of Pearl, for example, which was my
first novel and a thing of terror for me, I was intending
only to write the story of the child who had been kidnapped. It was partly only an exercise to
include the story of Irene, the kidnapper. I felt I should know about her even if it never appeared
in the novel. And then, I realised that she was as much part of the story as the child, as was the
biological mother of the child. So it was merely trial and error, an attempt to find a way into
the story that created the character of the kidnapper. The “imaginative tension” probably emanates
more from the ambiguity of the writer than any deliberate strategy.
tDQ: Who would you acknowledge as early influences on your writing?
Are they still as important to you?
Morrissy: I think the writers you read as a teenager when you’re wide open to influences
are probably the ones who stay with you. My favourites then were Flannery O’Connor and Carson
McCullers, both American,
| "To write often,
to apply yourself to the act of writing, is the way to solve
the problems you’ve created for yourself. Most tyro writers believe that they must know what
they’re doing before they commit to paper, whereas the opposite is often true. You often only
discover what it was you wanted to say when the work is completed."
|
southern writers with a taste for the gothic, which I suppose you could
say is still in evidence in my work. I still turn to O’Connor’s work, McCullers less so. When I
started writing, other writers come into play. In terms of language, how to craft and wield a
beautiful sentence, I would have to say John Banville; in terms of form, the Canadian writer
Alice Munro, who has stretched and moulded the short story so that it has all the power and
intensity of the short form and the wide range and complexity of the novel.
tDQ: Can you tell us anything about what you’re currently working on?
Morrissy: I am currently writing a novel based on the life of Bella O’Casey, sister
of the playwright Sean O’Casey. It’s written in the form of a faux autobiography, i.e. a
testament in the first person, in which Bella argues from beyond the grave with the depiction
of her life in O’Casey’s own autobiographies (he wrote six volumes of memoir in the latter part
of his life.) and sets down her own version of events.
tDQ: I know you have taught creative writing. Is there any general
advice you’d be willing to give to writers starting out on their career?
Morrissy: At the start of my career, I remember writing to Bryan McMahon, the Listowel
writer, with questions about a
story I’d submitted for competition at Listowel Writers’ Week.
His response was very simple – solvitur scribendo. i.e. it is solved by writing. I think it’s
very good advice. To write often, to apply yourself to the act of writing, is the way to solve
the problems you’ve created for yourself. Most tyro writers believe that they must know what
they’re doing before they commit to paper, whereas the opposite is often true. You often only
discover what it was you wanted to say when the work is completed. No writer produces a perfect
piece of work first-off and many of us wrote badly for a long time before we wrote well.
* * *
