Q&A with Maeve McCormack

“Yeats, Bannow and Hallmark” by Maeve McCormack is a nonfiction piece full of searching and remembrance. We loved the recollections of family, of Ireland, and how people, however briefly known, can remain in memory. Below is a truly fabulous interview between McCormack and Róisín Sheerin, one of our editors, which further explores McCormack’s writing.

You still have your uncle’s memorial card. You were only five when you last saw him. You write: “You don’t throw out those sorts of things.” But some people do. Why do you think you have taken such care to hold on to it?

A memorial card and why it is respected, is possibly a very Irish thing. It generally has a picture of the deceased, date and age of death and a scripture quote. It’s small, the same dimensions as a packet of tissues, so easy to slip into a book or a bag. Easy to get lost and then pop up again unexpectedly. One of these things, when you are tidying, you don’t quite know were to store, so it gets slipped into the side of a drawer, a book or a purse. I have no idea how I did not lose it all these years, but it’s one of those things I wouldn’t throw out. I think it’s out of a universal respect for the dead, regardless of particular beliefs or customs.

It’s probably the only photograph that I have that I own of my Uncle, the others being in long gone family photo albums. I may not look at it for years, then I come across it. Growing up, my mother always had memorial cards scattered in a bible or used as bookmarks. Even my Uncle’s old book of Yeats poetry had a memorial card.

Ireland overflows with religious traditions, that are so much part of life, they don’t seem like religion. Memorial cards are an example. To my parents’ generation they were sacrosanct, to be treated with love and respect like rosary beads or a religious relic. My generation and my children’s generation may not love or respect Catholic Traditions, some rejecting them altogether. Nonetheless, we have inherited a respect for the dead and consequently the card that represents them.

I also see memorial cards as an historical record of someone’s life, outlining the dates the lived and where they lived with a photograph to show what they looked like. This really useful if you are researching a family tree.

You decided to write to your uncle and ask him a few questions, even though you weren’t expecting any answers. What were the questions and can you imagine what he might have replied?

As my life moves forward in time, Iike everyone, I collect more and more experiences and memories. These cause me to reflect on previous experiences and memories. In the case of Uncle Owen, looking through a book he held, owned and read, gave me an adult connection with him. I was in my twenties when I realised he died by suicide

I wondered how he passed his days, if he had friends. I wanted to know more. But there is no-one left alive that knew him.

I wanted to know how he lived day to day. What was it like living at home all his life.   Did he ever have a job? A girlfriend? How did you pass the time? Most of all, did he have any friends? Was he very lonely? How did Granny treat him? I could go on indefinitely with questions. I think he must have been a patient man, to put up with my five year old gabblings. I think he must have been really lonely. I can’t begin to imagine what he would have answered to any of my questions, but I would hope that he found peace in death, if there is such a thing.

Your descriptions of the landscape, sights, geological features, smells are hugely evocative. Is this a skill that comes very naturally to you?

As a writer, I struggle with making my characters real. Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to write fiction rather than non-fiction. When I describe landscape and surroundings, I am writing from experience. I physically close my eyes and describe the thoughts, feelings, memory of that place, whether it is real or visualised. It’s almost meditative. I have to keep at it until I feel I have accurately described the place. In this piece I went down a rabbit hole of Irish flora, to find out the names of childhood flowers. If I can get the setting right, it’s a way into a story. The phrase ‘No that’s not it’, keeps going through my head until the piece feels right. For years I thought it was a line from Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg, but I’ve just checked a translation of the script and I can’t find it. Another mystery waiting to be solved.

I have learned a lot about writing about nature from reading John McGahern. The first few pages of ‘Memoir’ blow me away with their intimate description of an Irish laneway. This has taught me to look in detail at my surroundings (nature or built). I write settings using all my senses to get the detail, at the same time stepping back for the bigger picture and the atmosphere. Often, I struggle to bring some action into the exposition. It makes my stories slow. 

“A funeral could be had. My first.” Was it hugely exciting to you as a child? Did you feel a bit guilty about that feeling as you matured?

Reading this now, I think that line is coloured by time. As an adult my feelings about the funeral and the life that led to it, have varied from curiosity to anger to regret for a life that ended before it was properly part of my life. I suppose I was aware I had never been to a funeral before. Hower I didn’t start counting then. I wasn’t at all excited. It was a three-hour trip each way, and a lot of hanging around. But I did get a day off school. I don’t feel at all guilty about this, I was only about six. I recall sitting in a line of cars following a coffin and that’s all. I remember going into school the next day telling my friend in a put-on baby voice that my Uncle had got blown off a bridge, died, and I was at his funeral. I did not have the language to talk about death, hence the silly voice.

Childhood can be terrifying full of rational and irrational fears as well as joy, fun, innocence. Given some supernatural opportunity, would you ever go back there?

Never. As a child you cannot be protected from life. It will catch you at some stage. It’s part of growing up. I have two grown up children myself now and I parent different to the way my parents did. Sometimes I parent differently to their father! But that’s the reality of the imperfections of life. I don’t need to go back to my childhood. It is enough to remember. I am very lucky to have the childhood I did when I look at the world today.

It’s nice you explode the romance of seemingly idyllic family holidays, point out the scratchiness of the Foxford rugs, the sand that got everywhere you didn’t want it… And of course are writing about the death of an adult – your father’s brother. Is there still more you would like to go deeper into from that period of your life? Are you planning to write or have you been writing about adolescence and subsequent adulthood? Are you interested in writing a full memoir?

I’ve written to explore how we remember our past. How we can remember and re-imagine it in so many different ways at different times in our lives. I’ve explored this extensively in my writing. My parents were both from outside of our capital city, Dublin and met there and married in the 1950s, living in a newly built housing estate beside a newly built Catholic church. Dublin suburbs were new and shiny and I was born into this boom in the late 1960s. When I write about this, I can’t separate it from the social history and politics of the time. I think my parents’ generation went from living a life with few choices, to creating a new middle class that I was born into that my children take for granted.

It fascinates me how different people (and I include myself here) evolved in so many different ways from embracing all that was new, to clinging to all that was old. This was an Ireland where the Irish State was allied to the Catholic Church, the Troubles were happening in Northern Ireland, we had bank strikes, oil shortages, bus and electricity strikes, the Lebanese War. And that’s only the 1970s. In the meantime, the whole neighbourhood dressed up and went to Mass every Sunday. Contraception was illegal, sex outside marriage did not exist (!). Need I go on?

I’d hesitate to call this writing a memoir. Creative fiction with a few facts could be more accurate. Whatever the genre, I have the first draft written.

I think there is a huge immediacy when you come across something written, particularly handwritten, or a cutting saved by someone who is, or was, of significance to you. It brings them to you in a way that captures a small section of a time from the past and allows you an insight into their emotional mindset. The John C. Metcalfe poem, which is similar, very, in sentiment to Down By The Salley Gardens, by Yeats. It meant something to your uncle, maybe most of all that he knew the poet personally. But what a great story, that the poet and his brother actually worked for the F.B.I. exposing Nazi spies. Perhaps there is another story there?

There could be. The Metcalfe brothers story came up out of the blue when I was researching the poem. Coincidentally, I live in Sligo now in the northwest of Ireland, a few minutes walk from the Salley Gardens in Yeats’ poem. I love this kind of connection and serendipity that weave into stories.

People are full of the most unexpected hidden depths. Sadly, Owen did not grow to be very old. From being a person, he has become a memory. Do you think you are being successful in reclaiming some of that personhood for him? Is that something you want to do?

We all go from being people to a memory, but only if someone remembers us. Owen’s memory is kept alive by my cousins, the descendants of his eight siblings. I like to ask questions about him and talk about him in the context of the time he lived. I suppose this keeps his memory alive. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of ‘reclaiming’ a life. I prefer to think in terms of acknowledging a life.