"Hey folks, welcome to The Other People Show, a weekly program featuring in-depth interviews with today's leading writers. I am Brad Listi and I'm in Los Angeles. I appreciate you being here. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button wherever you listen. You can also subscribe on YouTube. Follow me on social media, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and blue. So, my guest today is Kevin Berry, author of a novel called The Heart in Winter. What I'm trying to make with my stories and books is an experience for the reader that's qualitatively different from watching some bullshit on Netflix or some movie or whatever it is. It's an extremely intense experience where you need to put all your devices away and be in a room along with this book and be transported. I really love the idea lately of a shorter novel as well, I must say. I love the idea of like a three or four hour novel where you can just say to go, "This is novel night. I'm going to read this thing and you've got to do it in a one or you're going to do it in a city." I like that idea. Okay, that was Kevin Berry. His new novel is called The Heart in Winter and it is available from double day. The Heart in Winter is Kevin Berry's first novel set in the United States of America. It is a romantic tale, a darkly romantic tale of two young lovers on the run in 1890s frontier Montana. This is a beautifully written, richly evocative novel. And I loved reading it and I had a great conversation with Kevin Berry. That is coming up in just a couple of minutes. A reminder before we get started that I have a weekly email newsletter you can subscribe over at Substack. Also, if you are a regular listener of this program, if you get something from it and you want to help me continue this long project of mine, I hope you will consider joining the other people Patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod to help keep this show going into the future. Today's episode is brought to you by Tinhouse, publisher of a new story collection called Mystery Lights, the debut collection from Lena Valencia, from the all too real horror of a sexual predator on a college campus to a lost sister, transformed by cave dwelling creatures. The stories in Mystery Lights grapple with terrors both familiar and fantastical. And they introduce an electrifying new voice and contemporary fiction while bringing to light the many faces of the forces that haunt us. Then that's Mystery Lights, the debut story collection by Lena Valencia, available from Tinhouse. Alright, so my guest once again is Kevin Berry. His new novel is called The Heart in Winter, and it is available from Double Day. Kevin Berry is the author of the novels Nightboat to Tangier, Beetlebone, and City of Bohan, as well as three story collections including that old country music. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and other publications. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland. A pleasure to meet Kevin Berry and to get the talk to him for this program. He is a superb writer and I'm very pleased to share our conversation with all of you right now. So here we go. This is me talking with Kevin Berry and his new novel One More Time is called The Heart in Winter. It sounds like a piece of schtick, but it was the first novel I attempted back in 1999. I was a very young man, I was a 29-year-old working as a freelance journalist in Cork City in Ireland, and I had one of those classic 29-year-old kind of good, hard chats with myself. You know, I said young man, it's time to write your novel. I worked a lot at the journalism, saved up some money, and I bought myself three months and I went to the coast of County Cork and I bought a little old caravan, a trailer and put it on a beach down there for the summer and tried to write a novel and I had nothing. I had absolutely nothing. Then I was starting to go for these long walks in the mountains around there, in a mood of growing panic. I came across these abandoned copper mines, I thought okay, and started to read up a little about them. Really ghostly kind of place, really interesting place out in these kind of wind-bothered hills on the Cork coast. I learned that they had played out in the 1880s and all the Cork miners had moved en masse to Butte, Montana, and I thought, wow, this is a Western, but it's got County Cork accents. I'm in, I can write this one, all I need to do is get to Butte, Montana. And you went? I did. It was my first trip to the U.S. in October '99, I flew to Seattle and I got on a Greyhound bus for many hours, for about 14 hours, I went out to Butte, and I don't know, I mean, I guess you get a little bit more reserved in life in some ways, but I wasn't reserved at all at 29, and I was literally stopping people under Street in Butte and I'm writing a novel about this place, what have you got for me? And they were incredibly kind, they were really, really nice people, and Butte is very proud of its Irish heritage. So when you show up there with an actual brogue, with an actual Irish accent, you're very quickly embraced by the town, and I got great material, you know, they brought me to the library, they were open up the archives, I was reading letters that County Cork miners had sent back in the 1890s, I got all this great kind of ripe stuff about the bars and the brottles and the dope parlors back in Inbuten in its kind of a boom town days in the 1890s, but I had, I had no characters yet, but I went back to Cork City and I wrote, I found my workbook, my work diary recently, I always keep a work diary to try and convince myself I'm doing something, I wrote about it, it turns out I wrote about 120,000 words of fiction for Abute Montana novel, and I knew even as I was writing it, it was kind of dead on the page, it just wasn't coming to life, I had some great atmosphere and I had great texture, but I had no characters, there were no people really, really coming into into viewing it, and I slowly, but surely kind of pushed it to one side and kind of let it go. Well I want to say I read an interview that you did where you say about this, I think it's about this particular draft where you say quote, "I had almost too much, it was the first novel I attempted and I didn't know how to reduce the material, how to cut it back. I thought it needed epic sweep, a broad canvas approach. When I took up the story again a couple of years ago, I thought what if it's just about two lovers back there, back then. So this sort of process of streamlining and of kind of winnowing away everything that is unnecessary and finding the true human story at the heart of the novel, that resonates with me. I've had similar experiences where you, I think most novelists do this, where you start out by just sort of making a big old mess. Yeah, and it's kind of like when you read the very best kind of historical fiction that's out there, and I don't read a huge amount of historical fiction, but when I read someone like Hillary Mantell and her great Cromwell books, Wolf Hall and so forth, like you can't see the research on the page, it's there, it's beneath the surface of the page, it's submerged and it's giving everything weight and life, but she knows how to chop it back and cut it down and you can't sense it. When you read a bad piece of historical fiction, you can see all the research on the page and the writer desperately trying to elbow it all into place, you know. I was literally late in the pandemic, walking, walking in the woods one day, a late autumn day in 2021, 2021 and saying to myself, well, you know what, if you're in the woods, you're in a western, all you need is some imagination, and I kind of saw them then. I saw a man and a woman on a horse riding double, and I told, okay, if they're riding double. This would be Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie of your novel. In my mind's eye, as I walked in, what's it thought, okay, if they're on a horse, if they're riding double, single image, they're in trouble, they're trying to get out of some place quick, and I thought, what if it's Pute Montana in 1891, I have all that stuff, I have all that material, you know, it's kind of stored somewhere back in the murky subconscious, like I can draw and all that, maybe now is the time to write my western. Like that week I had started a different novel. I'd been planning this novel about early 90s Amsterdam, Stoner Detective. This was my setup, and I thought this is an unbeatably good setup for a novel. I'm going to go to town on this, and I was about three days at it and I was bored out of my skull. I just didn't have enough about the character yet, I didn't know anything about him. I know he was very stoned, and he did his investigations by facts often. I was trying to get to some period. But then I was sort of, and it's often like this when I'm beginning an novel, there are kind of competing ideas, and I'm trying to find the one that's going to give me some flow that's going to kind of open up for me on the page a little bit, and I was immediately taken with the image of a man and a woman and a horse, and even in that single image I kind of had a lot about them. I felt they were both very slight physically, these weren't heroic characters, they were kind of small and kind of wiry people, and it's often the way I get praised and I'm grateful for it, sometimes for my dialogue, but when I start thinking about characters first I'm not thinking about what they're saying, I'm generally thinking about their physical hold of themselves in the world, how they're displaying themselves in the world, what kind of level of a front, they're giving to the world, and I just felt I could see the sense of these two, and I knew they were in trouble and they were kind of tricky, and they were also trying on airs, you know, and it was a very good time to write this story, to set it in 1891, because it's the period when every little main street in North America suddenly has a photographic studio, and for the very first time ordinary, working-class people are thinking about how they look and how they project, how they can project an image and they're posing. The rich people have been doing this for many centuries and having oil paintings made, but now just every ordinary kind of Jane and Joe on the street is thinking I can, you know, I can have a look here, I can put out an image, and in the book, Polly says of Tom at one point, he was trying on versions of himself as if they were jackets, you know, he doesn't know who he is, and he wants to be sort of an outlaw character, a poet, balladie, or outlaw character, like he's straight out of a Bob Dylan song, you know, before Bob's era, and Polly, by contrast, I think is fully aware of who she is, and is pretty settled in her own skin, and I think in that horrible, modern phrase, they complete each other, and it makes it work as a romance, because one is completely uncertain of their identity and the other is fully sure, and they kind of come to define each other in relation to each other, if that makes any sense. Sure, and I think, you know, when I contemplate the long creative arc of this novel, you know, decades in the making, this book is, I'm wondering how you feel about the mysteries of the creative process and the work that the subconscious mind might have to do, I mean, you take this trip to Butte to do all this research, you're in the archives, you're, you know, stopping people in the streets, and then you go back to Ireland, you write several other books and do all sorts of other different stuff, and then you come back to this book and have this vision of a couple on horseback, and that's what opens things up for you. What about the weird and mysterious subsurface process that I think has to happen for any creative work to manifest fully? It's, you know, so much of it, so much of the heavy lifting is going on in your subconscious all the time without you realizing it, like, and I talk about this a lot, but I think the only thing that writing fiction, it's a kind of almost spooky esoteric business, and I think the only thing it's close to in life really is dreaming, that it comes from the same kind of subconscious place, you know, and storytelling and making narratives is utterly effortless when we dream, we don't have to try these scenes just present themselves and this dialogue presents itself and crazy setups present themselves all the time, every night, you know, and we wake up and we can't do it. I think in some way, being a fiction writer, you're trying to access that place in your waking hours at your desk, you know, you're trying to get into that same sort of subconscious place, that's where the work is going on, and it can be such a slow game, you know, and the nice thing to finally write this novel for me was I kind of realized I have more patience than I realized, you know, I always think of myself as an inpatient writer is hungry to get the thing on the desk finished and wants to have it done and move on to the next thing. But this showed me actually I'm prepared to wait it out when I need to, even if I don't quite know, I'm waiting it out at the time, but I think another thing that like a couple of decades worth of a writing practice at this point teaches me and teaches all writers, I'm sure, is that there are always abandoned projects. There are always abandoned stories, but they're never quite abandoned. They are always still lurking back into subconscious places and they're just waiting for a spark, you know, waiting for something to bring it to life. In this instance, when I saw that sort of image of a slight cobbler making a break for it on a horse, the spark was realized and I had their word already, I had butte Montana, I could put them there, it was a perfectly logical kind of stage for them to operate on. And that's often the kind of the little magic moment really is when your characters find their stage, that's when the novel kind of clicks into place for you and you can just kind of start to follow it along. Well, what I find when I read good novels is that typically the plots of well constructed novels are very elegant in their simplicity. It's almost always the case. It's very rare that I would read a novel, if ever, where the kind of major dramatic question of the book is not very clear early on that the, I always call it the vessel, like it's the, I think it usually has something to do with time and just the propulsive nature of the story and where it's leading to or not, you know, which is tied I guess to that major dramatic question. But when I look at your novel, this is, like you say, it's two lovers on the run. Are they going to make it? That's it. And, you know, I, I wish I had known when I was 20 something trying to write novels that you have to be able to do that. You have to be able to put it in a sentence, to put it in a line, because then you can always refer to that line as you write the book as the long, slow, difficult months writing it, you can always refer to that line and you have the threat, you have the narrative thread. Am I still within reach of that thread all the time? Is it still about two lovers on the run in big trouble? Are they going to be caught? What's going to happen? So but yeah, I think weirdly enough, you become more adept at novels that the more you write them, they're a thing you get better at. You know, I quite recently had the kind of kind of slightly strange experience of what an American college class they were looking at, my first novel, City of Bohan, and I went on to Zoom to talk to them. And they were asking me to read bits. And there were bits of the novel I hadn't read literally since I'd written them in 2009, you know, because when the book comes out, you find a little bit, you do readings and events and then kind of just read those over and again. So there's lots of the book I hadn't seen since I recorded the audio book actually in 2010, maybe. And it's like visiting a distant cousin of yourself, you know, stuff that you wrote 15 years ago. You realize, gosh, I was a very different person, even a decade and a half ago. And one of the reasons it seems to me at this point, the best way to write a novel is inside a year, as quick as that, because you're still more or less the same person at the end of the process as you are to start and you can keep a coherence in note and tone. If it goes longer than that, you're changing as a person and it's very hard to keep a coherent note and tone. But when I look back at City of Bohan, it was like visiting a cousin of myself, I found great vitality in the language and I could sense a youthful, boyish excitement in what I was able to do with the sentences. But in terms of the kind of structural engineering and of having that central narrative tread that you can sum up in a sentence, I didn't have it at all at that point, you know. But you get more adept, you get more skillfully developed chops, looking as a reader, looking at the careers of favourite novelists, I have a theory that often their best novels are like number 4, 5, 6, you know, in around there, in the career of novels, you hit a point where you're able to do it and you still have a lot of energy for the process. There can be a slow decline afterwards, I'm going to stop at 6, is my plan, maybe. I do feel I'm getting to that kind of mid-career, this is my fourth novel and I feel like I'm getting to a point with them where it feels like I'm able to control them more and I'm able to get under the hood of the novel and fix it if it seems to be going awry. And I felt that with the last novel that little as well and I bought the Tangier, with my John Lennon novel, The Beetlebone, I was searching blind in the dark for four years trying to put it together. But yeah, you become more adept and I do think often a novelist's best work will tend to come in a kind of a little cluster of books mid-career after about four, so I'm hoping that I'm hitting into that now. Well, this book is wonderfully built and I feel like it is so atmospheric, it does such a wonderful job of putting the reader in that place and time with these people and really making you feel the way that life was lived back then, especially outdoors. And I want to read something you've said in a past interview about literature where you say it is above all a mode of transport. It lifts you up out of whatever situation you're in and it puts you down somewhere else. It fucking escapes you. That's what literature is. I think that's a very apt description of what this book did for me. Like I have never been to Butte, Montana. I didn't know its history. I knew it was a mining town or I know that it is a mining town. And I want to say, isn't there a pollution issue because of the mining? I feel like there's a nuclear plant or something, I don't know, but that was my understanding of Butte. Yeah, the Berkeley Pit and Butte is the most poisoned open body of water in North America, I believe. Yeah, that's lots of environment issues from the old mining operation. Yeah, that quote you read out, I think I was talking about the effect that Wuthering Heights had on me as a child when I was 10. It was my first real experience of what a novel could do to you. I remember it very, very, very clearly I was off school. It was winter in Limerick City. I was pretending to have flu or a cold just to get a few days away from the school. And there was nothing lying around to read. But one of my older sisters was doing Wuthering Heights in school, Emily Bronte, and I picked it up and started reading and was completely transported and just sat down on a Yorkshire moor in the early 1800s in the midst of this great gothical romance that was going on. And I thought, wow, this tattered old paperback here can do that. And that's what I still look for, you know, as a reader myself, and I wanted to be that mode of transport with Butte, Montana, and with lighting out into the mountains and all that. I loved a snow western, that kind of subgenre, the winter set western, things like McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I just always loved the atmosphere of those, you know, just seeing the horses and the outfits against a snowy background is just so such an iconic kind of image, our field of imagery to be able to draw on. And like so many of the influences on this book really are from the screen as much as from anything in literature. Yeah, you know, as you were talking earlier about how slight Tom Rourke and Polygo SBR, what flashed into my mind is sit and Nancy. There is maybe a little bit of that, like doomed lovers and like this sort of like really super romantic junkies on the run kind of thing. There was a couple of great references already actually, and I hadn't told of it, but it's absolutely true in early reviews to Barry Hannah and the things like his original stories for Wild at Heart and stuff like that, Sailor and Lulu on the run, you know, and that's absolutely I'm sure in the bank of imagery that I've been drawing on as well. Barry Hannah is one of those southern writers who always reminds me of Irish writers, I think southern writers and Irish writers have a lot in common, face a lot of the same kind of problems on the page, are dealing with a people who are kind of over-elequent and love the sounds of their own voices, southern people and Irish people love to talk, you know, and it can almost seem overdone on the page and there's a kind of a wild streak of dark surreal humor as well. So Hannah for some reason always reminds me of home. I took down a collection just the other week actually, I hadn't read him in a while, but after he was mentioned in one of my reviews, I took down Highlonesome, his collection from the early 80s and it's just magic, you know, it's just great stuff. It's an interesting comparison to make between the Irish and the southern American writers. I can see that, that, through honouring, in someone like Flannery O'Connor, it's very under-sleeve or in Faulkner and it's so interesting to read Faulkner and see what he's taken out of Joyce and drawing in a very direct, sort of Catholic Irish tradition, kind of a stained glass windows, a school of prose, you know, where everything has got to go on to the page for effect, but also, I think, southern writers have that tradition of, you know, being sentence makers, you know, just really operating at the level of the sentence and really going for it at the level of the sentence and I admire that and it's not, it's not, it's not a common place now, you know, a lot of books and a lot of novels tend towards a more stripped down kind of kind of style, but I still like to read the writers who go for it and go for the old high style, you know. I think your book does a little bit of both because there is a great economy to the language in this book and to the descriptions and there's a bluntness to a lot of the sentences, like a declarative bluntness, but there's also within that declarative bluntness, like some really beautiful language. So I don't think, I mean, I will defend you a little bit, I don't think you get carried away on the page in the manner you described it. I think I've become more adept at raining it in places when I was reading over those sections of City of Bohan with my American, this American college class recently, I felt I had no ability to rain it in at all at the time, I was just sentence after sentence after sentence and now you know, like you can get more effect if you slow it in places and then let it loose in other places. When it goes back to all the time for me, now when I think about making fiction really come to life on the page and to be a really intense experience for the reader, it's all about maintaining a very precarious balance of wildness and control, a novel has to have both to be, to be worth anything in my view. It has to have a looseness, a kind of a wildness where I can go on sudden sort of darts and tangents and can approach a condition of almost shapelessness because life does, life spins out of control all the time, but also there has to be that sense of the novelist being in control and being the puppet master and steering it and having a narrative plan and having a stylistic plan. I want there as a reader, I want there to be something going on with the language, you know, it can't be just a yarn. There has to be some attempt stylistically, now that stylistic plan might be to really strip it down and go for a very bare austere style, that's fine, I don't need lyricism myself all the time as a reader or whatever, there has to be some plan in place, you know, and what I'm trying to make with my stories and books is an experience for the reader that's qualitatively different from watching some bullshit on Netflix or from our movie or whatever it is, that's an extremely intense experience where you need to put all your devices away and be in a room alone with this book and be transported, I really love the idea lately of a shorter novel as well I must say, I love the idea of like a three or four hour novel where you can just say it and go this is novel night, I'm going to read this thing and you got to do it in a one or you're going to do it in a city, I like that idea, I think it's maybe a way for a novelist to think in some ways, you know, there are such presses on people's time and there's so much stuff to watch and listen to and to read and to experience out there in the contemporary cultural landscape, you know, so, so to make the novel a really, really intense moment and I kind of love now to be presented as a reader with that 200 pager, you know, if you're given me six or seven hundred you better be Hillary Mantell or Roberto Bellano, you know, it's kind of, you have to earn that kind of commitment. 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I agree, I couldn't agree more and I want to ask you while it's top of mind on a related note, when you talk about the approach that you take creatively to delivering this kind of immersive experience, I want to circle back a little bit to something you said earlier about research and how in, for example, the Hilary Mantel historical fiction, the research is there but you can't really see it. It's subsurface. It's embedded into the text in a really beautiful and artful way. I want to ask how you do that because you do the same thing in this book of yours where we're in late 19th century butte, Montana, we're out on the frontier with this Irishman and his bride and they're on the run and man, I was there and it felt like, just like note perfect as a period piece, how do you bury the research? What is it that you have to do in the process to make it so? I want to say probably the tactic is to do your research and then leave it 22 years before you write it off. Just keep all that stuff, marinate in the back of your mind. When I started to write it in 2021, I told to myself, okay, I have to go back to butte now, I have to go back out and refresh all the feeling of the place and the research and do more. No, don't do it. I'm able to draw on that in a very natural way and the research almost had a very kind of elegical quality for me naturally because I did it as a young man, relatively speaking. To go back to it in memory seemed like the ideal approach but it's just like anything with craft, I think it's just time and kind of dog work as you develop your chops and we keep going back to Hilary Mantel but she did say something once about writing. She said about one days and seven. About one day and seven tends to be good in the writing room. Most days are really slow and really they feel sludgy and your brain just feels like old meal that's been left into part too long and nothing seems to be happening and you've finished the day and you've written like 37 words and it's just been let me out of this room. But those are the days when the writing is going on. Those are the days when it's all been rearranged in your subconscious places and it's getting ready and there's no shortcut but if you put in four or five of those days writing is weird it'll just give you enough suddenly under fifty or six days the hand feels guided and you have five or six or seven or eight hundred words down and you know they're going into the next book without much in the way of revision. But I guess one of the things that you develop the more you do it is a kind of a sense of economy about your time and I will now give a novel a couple of weeks to see if I can get some flow going with it and that was the plan of the start of this one. I said two weeks I'm going to write Tom's point of view for a week and I'll write Polly's point of view for a week and I'll see if I can get anything going. Well I also want to ask about the American Western as a genre and you're clearly playing with that in this book you're operating in a tradition like a storytelling tradition this lovers on the run narrative that you know you said earlier has a lot of references for you in the world of cinema but also literature and in particular I want to talk about the hybrid nature of the Western that you've created because it's an Irishman it's an Irish Western. And I think when I when most people think of the Western it's like the most quintessentially American of the genres right it's always some cowboy guy out in the you know out in the like Monument Valley and Utah or whatever on a horse trying to you know defeat the bad guys or whatever but I want to say earn and Diaz wrote a Western that is multicultural or multinational was for Trump and I think that might yeah before trust right yeah I think it was his debut and and I just want to say that like it might actually be closer to the mark in terms of the real history of the United States of America the way that you portray butte in the book is this hive of people from all over the place who have come to yeah that's the great thing when you start to read into the American West a little bit you find out that it was this incredibly multicultural place everybody from all over the world was gone the last frontier is the American West and anybody any country or community that had minds in it suddenly all the miners were moving to butte because they were there was great money it was really good well-paid work it was vicious dirty filthy hard work and they were all dead by 40 most of them but they were being paid seven and eight dollars a day which was fantastic money for for 1891 and they came from all over Europe wherever there were mines they came from South America so you had this crazy little multicultural city just up and running and what was great for me is because there was there was such a copper mining tradition in the west of Ireland that at that time ten thousand of the 30,000 population in 1891 was largely from County Cork so it was a crazy little Irish town hired the Rocky Mountains going on and I knew I could do this novel and have no other voices put Irish ones in it and it would actually be historically correct because the community was pretty entrenched and it kept kept to itself that the Irish miners drank with each other and they fought each other and they competed for women with each other and all that and there's lovely stuff they didn't get on with the Cornish miners for example at all the Cornish miners were considered very tough they were really experienced miners from a great tradition of it and they soon developed a reputation in the west have been been pretty handy with the gun you know being gunsmen as well so it was great to dig out all these little old rivalries and stuff and work with them in in the book as well and every every place that's named in it I think bar one or two inventions but most of the the bars and brothels and everything and the eating houses in bute existed in in reality I got to visit the last operating brothel in bute in 1999 it had just closed its doors haven't been opened since the 1880s and a lady called Norma Jean who was who was the last madam I had reopened it as a as a brothel museum and she brought me around and brought me to the the original cribs they had dug out down in the basement where the girls had worked in the in the late 1880s and 90s I was kind of heartbreaking you know these tiny little spaces and girls they were famous that the girls who worked on the line in in bute because they could speak seven or eight languages because there were so many cultures in the town or at least they could say a few sentences in seven or eight languages you know and there was an all advertising sign that was in Irish written in Gaelic in the place as well because a lot of the Irish miners didn't even speak English at the time where they came from in the west of Ireland we're still Irish speaking areas largely so it was it was amazing you know to get this kind of a close-up view of how it had been out there I can't imagine a more brutal profession than mining oh man yeah I actually wanted it wanted one of the mistakes I think I made in 1999 when I tried to write it was I was trying to trying to put stuff about the mining into it you know put put detail and stuff in it and I don't think you can write that unless you've been down a mine you know and it's it's horrifying I think my two my two ideas are the worst possible faith that are like prison or a mine you know I either yeah you couldn't pay me you couldn't pay me enough to get inside of a coal miner go down under the ground no way I was watching a great a great documentary recently the name has come to escape me but it was on it was on criteria and I think a documentary about Kentucky coal mines in the 1970s and man it's vicious work you know I mean I bet conditions have improved somewhat since the 1880s but it's it's still desperate hard hard labor and a lot of the reason that the Irish miners took to booze and took to opiates and took to a foreign occasion in in in viewed Montana was from sheer physical exhaustion and pain you know they went down to the the lung as the condition was called as well miners long and they were most of them died young and and it was kind of remarkable if you made it into your forties in that line but yeah it's kind of it's brave stuff you know it takes it takes courage to do that and but but you know there was it was just this this period in history where the demand was there for copper to to electrify the nation and they could make money and it was you know it was four times as much money as you could make back in Ireland doing doing anything back there well yeah I mean I think anytime there's a situation like that you're going to have people who are willing to do the work whatever the cost and I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about you and your trajectory as a writer you did not publish a book until you were 37 years old yeah yeah and that was that was quite a slim volume of short stories with a small independent press in Dublin like up until I was in this was the stinging fly singing fly press published their little kingdoms my first collection of stories yeah I but like up until I was like kind of 30 and I'm making this first attempt to debut novel I was working all the time as a freelance journalist and it was kind of you know that you're doing a lot of hours to to pay your bills in that line of work so it was time pressure I was trying to write various other novels and kind of unbeknownst to myself I was actually making progress as a writer of short fiction at the time now and again there would be a competition or something and I would write a short story specifically to see if I could win some money and kind of that sense of finding something of my own voice in in in the shorter form sometimes kind of looking down at the page and going okay that doesn't really you're not trying to sound like anyone else here you're not trying to sound like Saul Bello our Annie Dillard our Flannery O'Connor our whoever else I might have been obsessed with at that youthful stage the story started to get funny was it was a significant thing my own natural kind of very black very dark Irish humor started to show up on the page and I paid attention I thought okay now we're now we're getting someplace it's still the first question I always ask translators of my work is is it still funny in your language I do I do I do I do ultimately consider myself a comic writer often it's it's a very dark brand of comedy but I just love the effect it can have on the reader I love that the the power of manipulation it gives to me because a laugh is a physical response and if you get a low kind of level of chuckling going as they're reading your story or novel the reader is opening up to you all the time physically and you can really go in with the heavier stuff and the darker stuff and the more poignant stuff you can really have an emotional impact and you can really make it an intense experience and I would say that most of the writers I go back to the the novelist I go back to and and and love the most are all at some level operating on a on a on a in a comic mode I think I'm very much the same I think that as a reader if you make me laugh out loud if I make a noise you have me because that's such a it's such a rare experience it's a rare that I because usually I'll be like oh that's silently say like oh that's kind of funny but if I'm actually physically responding like you say to the to the words on the page yeah that's that's a magic yeah my wife Olivia says she she knows it's going well in my my building outside that I work and once you can hear cackling if I'm making myself laugh it's definitely a good sign yeah I was gonna say you're your first reader right I mean you're the first audience for the work so yeah I do it out loud a lot from merely on in the writing process as well I do kind of act it out and and and and do the accents and and and and do the voices and all of that I do feel you you've catch the false notes very easily that way in your story you catch the kind of evasions quicker than your eye will get them on the page so it's always been an important part of my process from even from when I have a very rough first draft I'm doing it aloud all the time with the text printed out with my hand and a pen and kind of uh cutting and and refining it as as I go along and I can't see that changing it's it seems very important to me it also seems very I mean it seems very important and I hear a lot of writers say much the same it also feels Irish to read your work aloud and take because this you know I listened to a lot of this book on audio and you do the read for the audiobook and quite well I should add it's a magnificent read I love the experience and your Irish accent and you doing doing the voices and I read that you do like you dabble in other things screenwriting and playwriting and I want to say you said that you wish like one of your core regrets is that you wish you would have done more playwriting earlier in your life and you have also described yourself as a frustrated actor which maybe many writers are whether they know it or not and if they aren't it's kind of a shame because I think it's useful to have an ability to be a little bit dramatic in the read and to embody your characters and to really get inside of them in a way not dissimilar to an actor I think they're first cousins writing and acting I think they're closely related in lots of ways they're channeling voices you know is so much of it I really love the way audiobooks have taken off as a thing within the course of my publishing career for sure they become such a big thing I had a launch for this novel in Dublin a few weeks ago in Hodges and Figures made amazing old old bookstore and I was signing books in the line at the end and I would say maybe not a quarter but at least 20% of the people said oh I really liked hearing your last novel I like listening to your last novel it's really it's really taken off my theory is that it comes from people listen to podcasts so much now they've just got into the habit of longer form listening and that's spread happily to fiction so I really take the production of my audiobooks very seriously in some ways I see the audiobook as the ultimate expression of the story and I rehearse them like a motherfucker for months I'll end before I go into the studio to do them they're hard work you know it's three days full on no audience so you're not getting you're not getting the the laughter back at you and you're just in a room and it's past the point where you can change the text so you can't fix anything anymore but yeah I definitely have an element of kind of frustrated ham actor in me and I'd like to do the accents I was happy in the book with all my Irish accents with my Yorkshire with Polly's even in places put put and she's a foundling from Chicago I would say I struggled with Cornish with the English West Country I don't know what actual Cornish people would make of my attempt at a Cornish accent in this audiobook but I always have to give it a go you know I have to try but it's yeah I'm determined to kind of to really make it go over as a project always the audiobook you know because it's become very important and I'm not letting I think the worst ones are when the actor is too well trained and too smooth and that's too kind of it's too polished or something I like I like when writers do them themselves if they make the effort you know it is hard I was just gonna say it is hard like a writer isn't isn't you know isn't supposed to be a performer in some ways I like I remember vividly in the 1990s Don de Lele was it was in Dublin to give a very rare reading and talk and then packed packed house full of all these adoring boy fans of de Lele and one of your writers at the time and he got just kind of like not into it you know as a thing he would just kind of mumble like through a couple of pages and I remember thinking if I ever get the chance to do it to do a reading I'm really gonna I'm gonna rehearse I'm gonna treat it like an acting job you know and even it's a good thing like Brandy writer like even if you rehearse a reading once or twice you know before you do it it improves with every rehearsal and you find more in it and you find the beats and you find the pauses and all of that and it makes it a better experience for for a for that delightful person who's who's who's decided to show up for your reading Well I think this is a very important point to make and I don't know how much I've talked about this on this show before but there was for me listening to you read this book I had the distinct impression that you were performing it in a in the very best sense and I think maybe and I also agree with you that I love when the author himself or herself does the audiobook assuming they have the voice and the you know the inclination to do so because it adds some degree of authenticity and like you say it's not overdone in the manner that like maybe a more like professionally trained actor might bring to the work and and there's just an intimacy with the work that the author has that nobody could possibly replicate yeah yeah that the downside is is you definitely you learn so much about your your novel when you read it aloud start to finish and it's a good tactic I think now for for late on and in the drafting process to read the whole thing aloud because again the year just just guides you to the places that are a little weaker into structure yeah and I want to talk to you about the method in which you write especially from an interior like an interiority perspective I read something that you said about I don't know what book it was it might have been your first book where you were on a boat and you had like some time because it was a long slow boat ride and like the slowness of that trip on the water kind of gave you space and time and it also it also activated something in you emotionally and you said the slow pace of boat travel tends to make me very emotional and this is the condition I need to be in to get a story yeah what does that mean exactly yeah this this was actually a recent story the most recent short story I wrote a story called Finister our Finis there which alright the coast of of of of Northwest France and it was in the New Yorker about two months ago it was an attempt to change my story writing approach actually I wanted to write a slower story I wanted to spend a few months on it my my tendency always has been to kind of treat the short form as a kind of a sprint and to try get a draft made in a week or two and and see what I have but I thought why not try and write one much slower and a much more kind of a kind of a lazy kind of way you know just 100 words 200 words a day for two or three months and I had to set up in mind because I had been on a a 16-hour ferry ride from Cork over to France on a beautiful summer's day and night last year just in in in 23 and it kind of felt like a good setting for a story a new or the story can all take place in this boat and it was kind of yeah there is something I love the pace of traveling by sea as well you really feel like an old-time grand Victorian traveler or something like that when you're about to make landfall you know and it just brings brings all those kind of those great sort of cinematic sort of emotions alive in you in a way that the airport and the plane just just just doesn't so yeah it was it was an attempt to really slow it down and and I think the result was a quieter story in some ways than some of my my my my short fiction not going to necessarily say more thoughtful but it was a quieter story and it felt like a slight turn in in another direction with with the short form I feel it's important to keep writing short stories anyone who does it because there's nobody in publishing who wants us to do it you know they'd be quite happy if there was never another short story written again because they're difficult to sell the books of them I've been lucky my books my collections have gone pretty well but it's it's important to stay true to the form and it was in a way my first kind of literary love I think it's it's it's the first form I felt in any way skillful with that I that I could get someplace there's something about timing for a short story that's unteachable you either have it or you don't and I found early on that I had a natural sense of the timing that's necessary to make a piece of short fiction work on the page but they're they're really hard you know they're they're in lots of ways they're more difficult than novels because you have no space to go wrong you have there's no kind of tangents possibly in a novel you can you can go all over and if the quality of the the sentence making is good enough and if you're close enough to a central thread the reader will go go with you but with the short story really every sentence is part of a little little machine that has to work and it's unforgiving as a form and and most stories go wrong at some point and don't work and you can never figure where exactly the story has got away from itself but it was nice to to try a new approach to spend three months and I think I had I had it worked out in my head I was going to do 150 words a day or something like that so might only take 15 or 20 minutes or whatever sitting there and quietly writing a couple of sentences to see if I could build one like that I find it's a very common thing with writers to have a little bit of OCD as well about numbers and about arithmetic and having this kind of work oh sure yeah word count stuff going on and ahead all the time I think it's very common with writers in fact and I'm always doing it you know if I do 350 words a day for five days multiply by 16 weeks I'll have a draft like that it's just I think it's a kind of helpful bit of OCD for the profession but you know makes it makes you able to plan structures and and and and view a kind of a longer period of time and what you can get done I do work to a plan all the time very much but it's um things generally end up taking much longer than you think they're going to well yeah I mean I think what you're talking about and you mentioned it more than once in this conversation is is like the issue of speed yes and this strange desire that can often present itself in writers where you just want to like get it out of you you want to externalize whatever story it is that's within you or novel that is within you and I read something about City of Bohan your first novel that was the first novel published but not the first novel written and you say something to the effect of I worried about so many things when I was trying to write previous novels and with City of Bohan I thought to myself careless so I heard you just talk about Finister the short story and trying to slow down and kind of play with your process that way in an effort to maybe like make it new and make it vital and then with City of Bohan you did something not quite the same but similar in the sense that you you made a concerted attempt to mess with your approach yeah what did it mean in practice to careless yeah I think it goes back to that thing I was saying again about about about balancing kind of wildness and control in the work and I was trying to let it go loose in places and I'm sure to have fault in particular places in that particular novel but yeah I do think it's a really good idea to continually interrogate your process as a writer I think writers of prose fiction can fall into habits and can fall into a mode of thinking about their work and it's like this worked for the last story or the last novel I'll jump through these hoops again and see what I can make but I have kind of a fear of repeating myself I think so my foreign novels to date if nothing they're various and they try different things and I have a weariness about going back and doing the same thing again it I did at one point promise a publisher I'd write a second City of Bohan novel and I got to even got to the stage of sitting down one one Monday morning to start it you know but very very quickly over the course for a couple of hours thinking no there's no discovery in this for me I'm going to be bored I can probably do it I can probably render a reasonable fact simile of the first novel in terms of the world and characters and language and all that but there won't be a sense of enjoyment on a daily basis in it for me and I think that becomes palpable to the reader and kind of similarly what with butte montana it's such a good world it feels like great fictional real estate for me in some ways and I had to talk on back and do more with it but I put I'm also wary of that thinking it would be kind of you know you can't you can't recapture the moment sometimes I think and that's what it's all about like the trick of it is a horrible phrase to use about something as as weird as fiction writing and as esoteric as fiction writing but the trick of it is to is to figure out what the right story is for your desk at a particular time in your life what's the story that you're ready to write what's the one that you have now often early on in any writing career there's a kind of an imbalance between ambition and ability as often as you write that first novel or attempto you're years away from the skills necessary to write that book you know and figuring out what the one that's ready to go now is is the whole trick of it you know what what's what's what's the stuff that I that I have and that I'm kind of worked up enough about to get some get some flow going on the page I had a lovely experience with this book when I started to write from Polly's point of view in the second chapter and it was my my second week on the book and I went in on a Monday morning I was slightly worried because she's a she's an American background so Tom was a young literary Irishman and a complete wester so I was on solid ground writing Tom you know right well what Polly I was a slightly nervous but after about 20 minutes at the desk that Monday morning I went oh sorry of relief I have a novel because I knew her voice was there and I knew where I was getting it from you know there are influences on it it's it's coming out of Terence Malick movies in the 1970s badlands of days of heaven there was great voice over is he from Sissy Space I could lend a man's kind of beautiful blank poetry and I knew there was a lot of that influence in Polly's voice but she felt real as she began I she had a lovely kind of certainty in herself as well and I knew she was going to be the kind of she was going to art the novel in some way she was going to be a kind of a calmness at an added center that it needed poor Tom certainly wasn't going to be the still calm center of anything you know so it needed her to hold as a character put she she felt like she was ready to go and it was very enjoyable experience like the form itself the western as a form gives you a lot in terms of momentum and plot you know when people are constantly hopping up on horses and lighting out for the territory it just gives you a natural sense of propulsion you know and thing is moving yes and it's kind of that's why I like to bring genre notes in you know because you can get that sense of kind of pulp heat almost after pages you know where the readers Tom is moving and turning those pages and they're gone with it and that's nice and you can shortcut now as well you know you don't have to give all the traditional kind of furniture of a novel the reader knows the kind of stuff you're drawing on they know it's a snow western they've seen Terrence Malick movies they've seen the cape and Mrs Miller they've seen deadwood if they have any sense at all you know they know where a lot of the references are coming from and I nod all the time to my various influences in the book I acknowledge them in the text whenever I can but yeah it was it was definitely the sense with this novel of absolutely finding the right moment the writers I was ready ready to go well you know again this is a like an Irish western it's an Irishman in the American frontier in the late 19th century so it's this mix of places and influences and to try to maybe bring the conversation full circle because there was such a long gestation period for this novel going back 25 years and that first trip to the states that you made where you flew to I believe Seattle and then took the bus to bute I want to say I read that you maybe on that very trip correct me if I'm wrong we're standing in a bookstore in Seattle and you stumbled into all of these little literary magazines that we're publishing short stories in the United States and this ended up having an impact on your trajectory yeah correct yeah it was actually the following year my second trip to the US I was on journalistic duty it was the it was the Bush Gore election and I was writing some color this is for an Irish newspaper and I found myself in a barns and noble in Santa Barbara and just finding the the journalist section and going wow there were dozens of little journals from all over all over the US and thinking and at the time in Ireland there wasn't a healthy journal scene there is now there were only a couple of places really publishing short fiction but find all these places I thought well if I actually wrote a few I could send them off and my first publications were in tiny American journals and there was some operation in North Dakota I believe took a story for me and the Adirondack review in upstate New York and I think it was the sheer novelty of them getting stories in from some guy in Cork in Ireland that they thought okay let's listen you know not anything in particular wonderful event about the stories my apprentice efforts I'm sure but writers are venal you know they would respond to venues being available and to the possibility of publication so yeah just that little visit to a barns and noble in California in the year 2000 got me really fired up about writing short fiction yeah well and things have changed the landscape the literary landscape in Ireland with respect to short fiction and journals has changed a lot in the intervening years correct for sure yeah like you mentioned a stinging fly earlier and that's been very important starting in the 1990s also the Dublin review but there are literally dozens now and there's great that means there's great um there's a great sense of example for emerging writers and younger writers you know like when I was growing up in in Limerick City in the 1980s the city of a small city but of a hundred thousand people and there was like one novelist the late Michael Curtain that guy who was kind of publishing abroad and publishing at a kind of a at a serious level you know and when there's only one guy in your city doing it it doesn't seem like a very likely road to go down but there's great example now that there's there's a lot of really strong Irish fiction appearing all the time and when you're when your friends and contemporaries are knocking out kind of really world-class stuff all the time it's very healthy you know you you have to bring your a-game when you go to your desk in the morning and you and there is a strong sense now like my wife and I Olivia doing a journal called winter papers once a year a cloth covering book that we kind of an annual that we bring out and when you read the submissions there is a sense of of writers here really uh having a serious go you know really trying to do something still uh with the essay form or with the short story and and with kind of weird hybrids and auto-fictional hybrids of of the two that are emerging all the time so it's uh it's good it's good it's good it's in a good place at the moment um Irish fiction it's been well supported you know compared to some other countries like this arts council money and stuff like that that that that gets well well well put around oh that sounds lovely and I got to ask too because there is like you said this frustrated actor living within you and you have some dramatic flair as a performer of your own work and this book to me as I experienced it was very very cinematic have you had any conversations with people about adaptation have you ever adapted your own work yeah I've two kind of very advanced projects and they're with city of bohan and night boat at hanger both both are at advanced ages where the scripts are done and there's money in place and actors in place so it's waiting for the final white smoke which is actor schedules lining up with each other is always the hard bit at the end but I've already yeah started talking to I've talked at three or four different producers are already about about the heart and winter and possibilities for it and I'll definitely do the screenplay myself um as well uh I like screenwriting I enjoy it I've had one feature made from based on short stories a small Irish feature called dark dark lies the island but I kind of like the sociability of it I like having the zoom meetings and I like getting the notes and all that it's it's just a kind of a change from from the lonesome hours on my own with a novel or with a play script or whatever it is you know it's it's kind of it reminds me of my journalistic days it's more sociable you have colleagues for a while and it's kind of nice it's also it's also yeah I would say it's been you know a significant part of my income over the years it has been writing screenplays as well well yeah it can pay better oftentimes than literary fiction uh are you working on anything new I feel like you probably are you like a guy who's always got something going you go on yeah god bless me um there's a there's a play which you're not going to say anything about called a cave and I'm about to workshop it with some actors at the end of the month at the end of July so I'm excited about that that'll probably be the next thing to to see the light of day hopefully sometime next year the cave the cave no no hints at all about I mean it's about a cave two two brothers living in a cave and county slide oh yeah it's it's I'm terrified of it it's it's the most crazy text I've ever written but I think it's very funny so hopefully hopefully somewhere else all right well I wish you best of luck with it and with all that you have going congratulations on this novel of yours it's excellent and I really appreciate the time it was great to meet you and to talk with you it's been an absolute pleasure thanks for having me okay there we go that was my conversation with Kevin Barry his new novel is called The Heart in Winter and it is available from double day I don't think he has a website and I don't think he's on social media if I am mistaken I apologize I could not find it a cursory glance at the internet and I could not find it so you're just gonna have to read the book it's worth doing check it out again it's called The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry out there now wherever books are sold from double day go get your copy right this second don't forget to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen hit the subscribe button follow me on social media tiktok instagram twitter and blue sky join the other people patreon community over at patreon.com/otherpplpod and subscribe to my newsletter at sub stack if you have two minutes and you want to do me a favor please give this show a rating wherever you listen spotify apple podcasts wherever it is rate it review it it helps the show find new listeners if you want to join the other people book club or get another people t-shirt just head on over to the shows official website other ppl.com and if you want to read my latest book it is a novel called be brief and tell them everything it is available in trade paperback ebook and audiobook editions I narrate the audiobook so if that sounds good check it out it's a book it's a novel it's called be brief and tell them everything all right so that does it for today I will be back on thursday joined as usual by mira gonzales another episode of brad and mira for the culture a summer series that i've been doing with mira where we talk about popular culture or she tells me about popular culture and I try to absorb it I try to learn about what's going on in that realm so that's coming up on thursday stay tuned [Music] [Music]
