An Interview with Sinéad Gleeson
Hilary A White | Tolka, Issue Six, April 2024
Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for an emerging writer. It was part of a cultural moment in which brave and bold non-fiction written by women (see Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat) seemed woven through a period of great social change in Ireland.
In May 2023, it was revealed that the award-winning writer, poet and anthologist was set to publish Hagstone, her debut novel, in spring 2024. Sinéad and I had crossed paths on the arts journalism circuit, and I had attended one of her essay-writing workshops. As a great many people will have experienced, she has been very supportive of my own tenuous beginnings in writing. We arranged a chat over Zoom about Hagstone, the writing life and her transition from non-fiction to fiction.
Hilary White (HW): When I saw there was an island setting in Hagstone, I immediately thought of ‘Islanded’, your essay in the Women on Nature anthology about the artists’ retreat you attended on the Aran Islands.
Sinéad Gleeson (SG): I can’t believe you remember that.
HW: My memory is funny. I don’t remember what I had for breakfast but I definitely remember that essay, probably because I have connections to the west of Ireland. There’s a real heaviness to the landscape that you capture, but you also reference strange sounds emanating from it, which appears to be a motif in Hagstone as well. Was the germ of the novel found on that trip?
SG: This book predates Constellations by a long way. I had bits and scraps and pieces of it, but you need a lot more focus for a novel. You need to have bunker time and away time, and, as you know, that’s very hard to do when you’re freelancing in the arts, when you’ve got children. I never found a run of time that would require that engine you need for a novel. It’s also the capaciousness of it – it’s very hard to keep a 300-page book in your head. When one essay isn’t working, you can go and work on another. Did I start with the island? In a way, but the thing that the book actually started with was a sound. I remember one holiday, we were staying in Cork and I was making my husband drive a hundred kilometres because I’d heard that there was a phenomenon, this sound that happened in this place in Kerry. I’ve become really interested in who can hear things, why people hear things, and that idea of hearing the supernatural is really interesting to me. I wrote a little bit about that in Constellations [‘The Haunted Haunting Women’]. And, also, I’m married to a composer and sound engineer, and his ears are his tools. He’ll ask me to listen to things that he’s mastering, and I just simply can’t hear the things that his ears can. So, it started with this sound which was quite mysterious that some could hear and some couldn’t. And it was always going to be on an island, somewhere remote, and while I do draw very heavily on the West – it’s very clearly based on an amalgamation of the Aran Islands, Inishbofin and Arranmore – I didn’t want it to be any one of those places. It’s also a much bigger island than any we have in Ireland, and I was reading work by Amy Liptrot or Malachy Tallack and thinking about Orkney and Shetland and places like that. Because of the story, it had to be a place that’s not easy to get away from. It’s maybe not an easy place to go back to either.
HW: In ‘Islanded’, you mention how James Joyce ‘keenly felt a mysticism, Celtic or otherwise, that comes with the logistics, the location, the isolation of the people on these isles’. This feeling that they’re at a slight remove to everything else.
SG: I spent a few days on the Aran Islands for that residency – it should have been a month but I couldn’t get away for that long with family commitments. I talked to so many people on the island about what it was like. How do you get a car on to the island? What do you do when the boats don’t come in? Does everybody know everybody else? I found that sense of community fascinating, but also that sense of claustrophobia, which is a huge part of the book as well. Any place you can’t quickly and expeditiously escape from is always interesting to me. In Ireland, we romanticise these places, but I imagine it’s very, very hard to live somewhere like that.
There’s only so much looking at the sea and the cliffs you can do.
HW: From the synopsis, it almost sounds like there is a Wicker Man/folk-horror vibe to the novel – an outsider encountering a cult in an insular community.
SG: I always had the island, the sound, the main character. The Inions came a lot later. And like all those great moments, you don’t have them very often and it’s usually when you’re doing something utterly banal. In my case, I was hanging out the washing and I had this very striking visual image of all of these women. I won’t say too much about it but their arms were linked and I just thought to myself, Who are these women? I came in straight away and started writing about who they might be. I didn’t even know what the scene was. I was going, Where is that coming from?
HW: You must have some idea.
SG: I’ve always been interested in our traditions and folklore, and studied history as the other half of my degree. I’m forever picking up books about the history of trees, myths, rituals. I don’t know if you know Stephen Ellcock, who is a visual curator and publishes collections of photographs. Every time he publishes a new book, it’s as if he’s climbed into my brain and filled the book with all the kind of stuff that interests me: mythology; spiritualism; costumes; the occult; the planets; Surrealist painters, particularly channelled through artists like Hilma af Klint, Leonora Carrington, Ana Mendieta and Dora Maar. In my novel, because Nell is an artist, there are a lot of references to other artists, and I actually think the work of Irish female cubists like Mainie Jellett, Eva Hone and Mary Swanzy echo around the book too. I’ve been told it’s a very visual book, and the influences extend to film, so of course things like The Wicker Man, The Witch and Midsommar hover over it, but that’s more tonally than thematically. I wouldn’t have called it a horror book by any stretch. I recently saw the brilliant Cornish film Enys Men, directed by Mark Jenkin, and got such a jolt as so much of it seemed to be in conversation with Hagstone. So many aspects of Irish culture fascinate me too – the rituals of Wren boys, changelings, banshees, sheela na gigs and how, despite how repressive and Catholic Ireland became for centuries, these very tribal, ancient and often transgressive interests survive. The fact that you’ll still find farmers who won’t cut down trees or build near fairy forts, and that it’s not considered weird or supernatural here because it links back in many ways to who we used to be as a people before colonisation. I also read a lot of sci-fi, horror – not just literary stuff when I was younger – graphic novels, I was into all that kind of stuff. No more than yourself, it’s rare you find a writer who’s just into books. Most writers are interested in art and visual culture and film and music. And a lot of those things feed into the books, as they did in Constellations.
HW: What was it like working with characters?
SG: Oh, really good. You get to have a lot of fun with that. I love Nell, my character. She’s an artist, and she’s very complicated and independent and doesn’t really want much from anything or anybody. She just wants to make her art and have people leave her alone. And then as the book goes on, people keep coming into her life and she doesn’t get left alone. With the group, the Inions, they’re all from different places and they’re all very different people. Writing non-fiction comes from your own life, so you know all the stuff already; as in, you know what art you like, you know what terrible experience you had in the hospital, you know about writing about your family members. But with fiction, you can literally decide, I can do anything. And I loved that. Dialogue is difficult. It’s something you don’t really do in the essay, so that was quite a new thing, learning how people speak.
HW: You did a lot of music journalism in your early years. I’m interested in the idea of music journalists going on to write very interesting long-form work, and how it can be a good training ground. Perhaps part of it is developing an ability to write about things that are intangible, putting colour on things you can’t actually see.
SG: Those early days of trying to write about music – it’s the old phrase of ‘dancing about architecture’, because it is difficult to describe, but also, like book criticism, it’s quite subjective. Trying to use colours and synonyms and metaphors to describe music is tricky. You’re thinking about the words but you’re also thinking about the shape of the piece. I remember that I decided not to do print journalism any more because it just felt like all the energy I had for words was going on that. When I was starting to write a bit more, I just thought, I can talk about books on the radio or the telly, or I can interview people in front of an audience, but I can’t do the print stuff anymore. I do occasionally now, but it tends to be people will ask me because they think I might be interested in the book or it corresponds with my own work in some ways. Also, all writing for me is a piece of writing. It wouldn’t just be a case of dashing it off or writing it in a night. I can remember you’d have to go to gigs years ago and review them in two hours so it’d be in the paper the next day. Whether it’s a review you get 150 quid for or it’s something that’s going to be in your book, I still take the same time and care and attention; probably too long, in some cases. If somebody spent years and years writing a book, the least you can do is give it your full time and attention when it comes to critique. Lots of people did that for Constellations, including you – I was very grateful for your very insightful review of Constellations – and that’s a huge gift for a writer, not just because somebody likes it, but because they engage with what you try to do and you learn things about your own work, which I’ve found one of the most fascinating processes of the whole thing.
HW: Did that happen often with Constellations?
SG: Several times. You might remember the essay ‘Second Mother’. It’s very much about my godmother and the impact she had on me and my brothers, and also the opportunities that certain women from working-class areas didn’t have, especially ones who didn’t get married. But one thing that kept happening when I did the events was a lot of women came up to me and just said, ‘I don’t have children,’ either ‘I couldn’t have children’ or ‘I didn’t want to have children’, and ‘I’m the Auntie Terry.’ Lots of people said, ‘Women like me are not represented in the culture.’ You know, the beloved aunt who does all this, who’s like the second mam but doesn’t have a place in that nuclear family. And I found that hugely touching. People will transpose their own experience, even if it’s not the same as your own. Again, I had a lot of that with people who are ill and sick. I did an event in Cambridge, a literary festival, and there was a woman sitting in the audience in the front row and she was nodding along to everything I said, and she looked very emotional. I thought she was going to ask a question at the end and she didn’t, but there was a signing after and I kept seeing her at the back of the queue. Every time she would get near, she’d go to the back of the queue, and I thought, OK, what’s this going to be about? And she came up and said: ‘I was born in a mother-and-baby home in Ireland and it’s dominated my life massively, and lots of things you’re talking about in your book are really relevant to me. I also have cancer and I’m terminally ill, and I think a lot of that has to do with the pain and the trauma and things that have gone through my life.’ She was very emotional and I was very emotional. So you don’t know the impact it’s going to have. The essay is an act of interrogation, trying to figure out how we feel about a subject by writing about it and engaging with it. And if other people get something from that, whether that’s emotional or they learn about an artist or it makes them feel better about their illness or whatever it is, that’s an utter bonus and not something I could have foreseen. It was a really humbling thing.
HW: There are things from your essay-writing workshop that I still draw on every day at the desk. Did you find that you could bring a lot of those tools with you into fiction or was it a very different apparatus?
SG: Lots of things are the same, like just showing up, sitting down, plugging in the laptop, even on the days you’re like, I don’t want to do this. I’m tired. I’ve got to do that other work instead of writing this thing that’ll probably be rubbish anyway, and I’ve got to pick people up in the school at this time. Most days are like that. Most days are not good days in writing. I recently wrote a piece for Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer about those most dispiriting days when you are trying to write something and you’re noticing the clock ticking and ticking and you’re just going, Oh, God, this was the day. I’ve got other things on, and this was the day to write. And you get more and more frustrated and you’re tempted to just go, I’ll just do the shopping or clean up or whatever. But you go, No, I can’t let this day pass. I have to do something. And I wrote about just not giving up and going until the end of the working day and seeing what comes up. And sometimes, weirdly, at five o’clock, when I really think there’s nothing going to happen, something happens.
HW: I subscribe to that newsletter. I’m not saying I do 1,000 words a day, but I find there’s usually some little nugget of encouragement, even just a sentence, that I can take away.
SG: That’s the thing. In terms of your question, what I did try and bring to fiction is that even on the days that you don’t get much done, just get a paragraph down. The other thing I found is if I think the thing I’m working on, the place in the book that I am, isn’t going well but I know I’ve got to do something further on, I’ll often go off and do that, just to keep the wheels turning because it can be really paralysing to get stuck on something, and then you get frustrated and start to hate that bit of the book. So I wrote it kind of horizontally, which I don’t think I will do ever again. I will start at the start and try and go towards the end. But it was all I could do at the time because I wasn’t getting that staring-out-the- window time that’s really crucial.
HW: Did Constellations change your life?
SG: Oh, yeah. For sure. It changed my career and made it viable to try and attempt to write full time. Well, I say full time – I’m not a full-time writer. I never will be because I just think the books industry has changed. A handful of writers are full time but it’s just not an economic possibility for most of us. But that’s not why we write. We write because we have to. I don’t feel myself if I haven’t written for a few days. It made me now go, I’ve done it once. I have to keep doing it. I can never go back to those days where I can bunk off and not do it or not maintain the routine or not see something through to the end, which I did before I was a published writer. It’s easy to ditch things. It’s easy to bail. It’s not so easy when you’ve met a load of people who are like, ‘What’s your next book about? Are you working on something else?’, and that you’ve found readers, which still always amazes me.
HW: Do you worry about being a writer during a cost-of-living crisis?
SG: Yeah, of course. Like all writers I know, we’re doing things we don’t necessarily want to do. While being grateful for the work, all of us would like to be writing more than doing things that take up time that don’t pay an awful lot of money. That might involve travel that takes you away from your family and your writing. At the same time, I’m always happy to be asked to do things like that. I do want to say at this point I’ve been the recipient of money from the Arts Council in the past and I’d still be trying to write Constellations if I hadn’t got a bursary at the time. While there’ll always be people who complain there’s not enough money or where the money goes or what’s happening, I can’t stress enough how important those bursaries are. I talk to other writers from the UK who have nothing like the structures that we have. But I do worry, especially with everything just costing so much more. There’s the argument of, like, I’m sitting in a room writing something that may or may not end up in a book, so is that a day wasted? I could have done some freelance work and that is money that will go into the bank when I have people to support. There’s always that conflict. I think sometimes there’s a lot of misconceptions about income and writers. There was a Society of Authors piece where it’s something like seven grand a year they reckon most writers earn.
HW: How do you respond to being a parent during the climate emergency?
SG: We’re a mostly vegetarian house, and try to be better about consumption, sustainability. It’s just little gestures because it feels really overwhelming when you look at anything that’s going on and you see the people who don’t recycle or have three cars in their driveway. You can’t judge other people for the decisions they have to make in their life, but I can only try and make these small incremental ones in my own life and encourage my children. But, yeah, it’s extremely, extremely grim, the state that we’re in. And it seems that no matter how long it’s been said and how vociferously the argument is being made by people who know about this stuff, climatologists or scientists, it still feels like a lot of people are not listening, people in power, people who can do things, who can change things. HW: Do you believe in civil disobedience, as we’re seeing from Just Stop Oil?
SG: I absolutely believe in civil disobedience. Well, it depends – there’s degrees of variances. I’m not necessarily down with looting or violence. But, at the same time, there are things that need to be done sometimes to make change. If you look at America and civil rights, sometimes it’s absolutely the only way to be heard. Maybe not quite in the vein of civil disobedience, but when you look at Repeal, the marches got bigger and a younger generation joined the conversation, and that felt very important to me. And then that horrific, galvanising moment of Savita Halappanavar dying, when a lot of people just went, ‘That has to be it.’ While there wasn’t disobedience, it was definitely speaking up and saying things. And because we’re on the subject of writing, personal testimony was a huge factor in getting both Repeal and Marriage Equality over the line. I know some people who have not been the same since having spoken out on these subjects. Their lives derailed a little bit and they paid a very high price for telling a personal story. When I do workshops with people, I often talk about this, that if you’re going to write an essay about something that’s very big in your life, especially if it involves other people, you have to be prepared to stand over it, because it might not go the way you necessarily want to go. My mother was very involved in left politics and was always at meetings and going to marches, so I was always quite engaged from when I was young. I really admire a lot of the work that’s gone on with people who are turning up at evictions and are prepared to put their own bodies on the line for those being thrown out, often with the gardaí overseeing the whole thing. We’re in the middle of a lot of different crises, not just in the world but in Ireland, but if you don’t do anything, if you don’t say anything and you aren’t active about it, things aren’t going to change. And then the people who are above all of that, whether that’s government or other authorities, will just take that as complicity and maybe even try and push things further. So, yeah, it’s very important to speak up, to be active, by whatever means you want to do. I canvassed a lot during those campaigns. I got a lot of ‘no’s at first, but then you start to talk to people and they listen and it can turn things around.That’s something you can’t necessarily do with the internet or online, that one to one, that humanity, that encouragement of empathy. People ask me what Constellations is about, and I always said it was a book about empathy.
HW: Why do you think the essay is having a moment in this country in particular?
SG: It’s all linked into our social, political and cultural history, a culture of being told to be quiet, being told to shut up. And I don’t just mean women. A fear of authority. A fear of the Church. The idea of living in small towns and that if somebody knew something terrible about you, that your family wasn’t perfect, that you had a drinking problem, that you’d had an abortion, any of these things. The unwritable, the unsayable. It’s having a moment because, in Ireland, we’ve changed more in the last ten years than the last sixty or seventy, and out of that social and cultural change people have found their voices and people have things they want to say. Myself and Emilie Pine did a lot of events together around that time. She’s an incredible writer and a lovely person, and we said a lot at the time that ten years before that I’m not sure books like ours would have been published. There was a whole breaking down of silences, where people wanted to hear these voices and a lot of that was aligned to those referenda as well, people starting to speak and talk about things that happened that felt singular and personal, but then when you tell a story like that, it ends up becoming something much bigger. Look at all the silencing around abuse. People didn’t talk about the things that were terrible, and often in essays people want to write about those things that are not necessarily joyful or funny. Of course, there are many exceptions – Samantha Irby, Patrick Freyne, people like that – but mostly people are grappling with something that’s difficult, that they want to figure out. And it’s been interesting to see not everybody’s writing straightforward, linear stuff. There’s been a lot of messing around with the form, which is exciting to see. One of the best students in the MA class I had in UCD, Jayne A. Quan, published a collection last year with Skein Press [All this happened, more or less], which was just incredible and inventive and moving and sad, but also funny as well.
HW: You spoke before about the importance of being published in journals very early in your career, and how it gave you self-belief when you really needed it. We seem to have more titles than ever in Ireland now. SG: Absolutely. I literally don’t think I’d be a writer without the existence of that kind of infrastructure. The idea of I’m writing a book was just not something I ever said to myself. It was too daunting. It was too much of a time commitment. It felt like a thing that other people did and not me. But essays are a very compact, bendy, malleable form. You can literally do anything with them. For me, there are less rules within them than short stories. It could be a page; it could be fifteen pages. There are essays that look like novellas and there are ones like, you know, Lydia Davis, that are a paragraph. I didn’t send to any of the journals really, but I loved the idea of Banshee, this new feminist journal, because this piece [‘Hair’] was about hair and the body and religion and the Church and preconceptions of what hair means in culture, in sexuality and identity, where it was in art and politics, head shavings in the War of Independence. It just seemed like the right place to send it. I didn’t for a moment assume it would be published, which it was. After that, two pieces got published in Granta, and that changed everything. The first one, ‘Blue Hills and Chalk Bones’, got a huge response that I didn’t expect. And at that point, Peter Straus, who is my agent, said to me, ‘Have you got a book?’ And I literally didn’t. I just had these essays. The second Granta one [‘Second Mother’] hadn’t been published at that point. And he just said, ‘I’d really like to take you on to write a book.’ He didn’t hassle me because he knew I was nervous and had other commitments. He just said come back to me when you think you’ve got a book. And that’s what I did. So those journals were a lifeline. And it’s funny. I never sent any work to the Stinging Fly or the Dublin Review. At the time, Brendan [Barrington] was always publishing non-fiction. The Stinging Fly, more so now, but for a long time it didn’t publish much non-fiction. But the fact that we now have Tolka, this publication that acknowledges the level, the talent and the volume of non-fiction, and that it’s being taken seriously . . . In a way, for a long time people didn’t know what an essay was or were confused about the form, what it could do, that maybe people were writing essays because it was easier to write from your own life – it’s not – than writing a piece of made-up fiction. Whether it’s a workshop at a festival or in UCD, where I had been writer-in-residence, lots of the people I teach don’t have agents or book deals. You have to start somewhere and the idea of writing a whole book is quite daunting. But accumulating a body of work and sending them out, one by one, to various places and building a little CV in different publications, that’s the kind of stuff that helps people get agents. You’re a writer whether you send the work out or not, but most writers are not writing to put it in the drawer. They’re writing to find readers and the easiest way to find readers is to put the work out in the world, and the first and most valuable platform I can think of is those journals.
Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her novel, Hagstone, publishes in April 2024.
Hilary A White is a writer, arts journalist and conservationist. His work has featured in the Dublin Review and is forthcoming in Winter Papers. He is working on The City of Hawks, a book about raptors in the fabric of Dublin city.
This conversation first appeared in Issue Six of Tolka (November 2023). Issue Six is available to purchase here. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year and receive two issues for €22.
