Tell us about your new collection of short fiction, The Comets.
Two short novels and 15 short stories. A seam of work started in my early 20s that when put together felt as if this had been the real life’s work all along.
What was it like, rereading stories, some of which you wrote almost 40 years ago?
I don’t know if rereading is the correct term. Being repossessed by them is more appropriate.
Have your style and concerns changed as you have changed or aged? (The plight of refugees is a recurring theme)
I think the refugee and those who arrive among us from other worlds are both a burning political issue and an allegory of spiritual displacement. They are the ghosts among us. They bring their own realm.
It’s broken into three sections. Can you explain them?
I couldn’t see the point of arranging the stories chronologically. When they were written doesn’t matter. The correspondences are internal, not temporal.
There is some overlap between The Comets and The Haunted Road, a BBC audiobook of eight of your radio dramas, which was published earlier this year. Tell us about it
There is an affinity of form between the short story and the radio play. There’s no room for redundancy or the inauthentic. Some of the stories in The Comets became plays. I had the privilege of working with Heather Larmour and the late John Simpson. And great actors: 12-year-old Amybeth McNulty incandescent in North of Riga; Gerard McSorley haunting in The Road Wife.
[ Eoin McNamee: ‘The ghosts of airmen have always been with me’Opens in new window ]
What compels you to write?
Sorrow, empathy, longing, money, voices in the night, memory, beauty, fear of death, mystery, envy, how light works in the world, justice, anger, distrust, regret, love I hope.
You are professor of creative writing at the Oscar Wilde Centre in Trinity College Dublin. Tell us about that
It is a great privilege to be admitted into the writing consciousness of people learning their craft. Doing that in the house where Oscar Wilde was born is an added privilege.
You’re from Kilkeel in Co Down, and the North is an abiding concern, from Resurrection Man about the Shankill Butchers to the Blue trilogy and your latest novel, The Bureau. Can you say something about exploring difficult subjects?
I think it would be more difficult to avoid them.
How did you react to the re-emergence of the Drumcree dispute?
I’m from Kilkeel, as you say, so I know exactly what an Orange march is. I’ll let Pat Boran’s Garvaghy Road sonnet speak for me: “But if beliefs of mine had somehow led/To the murder of three innocent wee boys/In a fire whose flames were fanned by what I’d said/Would I be out there calling for my toys/my fancy clobber, my sash, my fife and drum?”
[ The North Road: A short story by Eoin McNameeOpens in new window ]
You often write about real-life figures, from Princess Diana to murder victim Patricia Curran and your own father. What are the pros and cons?
You begin by haunting them. Then they start to haunt you.
You are renowned for your use of language, praised as the best by Sebastian Barry and Roy Foster. How did you develop your signature style?
Annie Dillard said: “I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
You have to make a bell of yourself and allow the world to ring it. (Although being lifted and struck might well be what I deserve.)
Which projects are you working on?
There’s a follow-up to the last novel, The Bureau, called The Roxboro. Some film work.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
God no. Although I did go to South Dakota recently to see the place where Crazy Horse was murdered, as part of a film recce.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?Read.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I would require Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan to abolish the utterly shameful use of petty regulation by the Department of Justice to deny visas to Gazan students with full scholarships to Irish colleges.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
Film: Marc Evans’s remarkable Effi O Blaenau; Book: Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail; Podcast: My daughter Kathleen’s women’s football podcast, COYGIG.
Which public event affected you most?
Events take you in different ways and rise up out of the past with new meanings so there isn’t a most.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Every time you open the front door you step into a remarkable place, but recently Wounded Knee. All of history at a lonely prairie crossroads with a rusted tin sign and a Lakota girl at a folding table selling bracelets made of porcupine quill.
Your most treasured possession?
A Damask rose taken as a cutting from my mother’s garden.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
Recently a friend of my aunt Phil McNamee gave me a box of her possessions including an autograph book belonging to my grandmother Nora O’Neill when she was 12. Her friends had written short poems, jokes, messages, full of the longings of the young. I can hardly bear to open it. You can be a refugee in time as well.
The Comets is published by riverrun