Fiction Scribe

Today we have a special interview with author Orna Ross who is currently virtually touring for her book Lovers’ Hollow. Today Orna is here to answer a few questions here in the post.

If you would like to ask her anything, please feel free to leave a comment.

When did you start writing?

When I wrote the first words of my first novel, Lovers Hollow? When I wrote my first nonfiction book? When I published my first article, the day somebody actually paid me for putting words together? When I took English lit at college and used to lie in my single bed, words chasing each other around my brain? When I wrote a poem in secondary school that my teacher read out to the rest of the class? When I read What Katy Did in primary school and copied out a few lines?

I still love the way they sound good. It was something about limes I remember. I didn’t even know what limes were back then – but they sounded exotic and exotic was what I wanted and what reading gave me. When I first pulled my ABC together into meaning?

I am always amazed by writers who have a clear sense of beginnings and endings when it comes to their work. All of my work seems to overlap one into the other and I find it very difficult to say when something starts or stops. At the moment I am first drafting my first novel, editing my second and promoting my first.

How would you describe the writing you are doing?

I write historical fiction but the story is always told through a contemporary lens. I am interested in how the part plays itself out in our lives, our own past, and that of other people and the places we live in. My books are heavily layered and interconnected – getting that layering right takes me a lot of time.

Only the novel has the capacity to do this. Other forms – the short story, the drama (in which I include the screenplay), cannot move as a novel can in and out of different time periods, in and outside the mind, from the smallest thought of a single individual to the widest experience of whole societies, whole worlds. It seems to me that this capacity is what makes the novel uniquely valuable.

I enjoy novels that are a distillation of a single experience – but I think of them as long short stories really. The novelists I like best of those that write the biggies – Eliot over Austen, for example. Tolstoy over Turgenev.

In the writing you are doing, who would you say has influenced you most?

George Eliot. Edna O’Brien. Dickens. Winston Graham. Toni Morrison. Helen Dunmore. Sally Beaumon. Many writers who flowered during the women’s movement — Grace Paley, Marilyn French… And, like every woman who writes, the Brontës.

What are your main concerns is a writer? How do you deal with those concerns?

My main concern is to try to capture the subjective, complicated response we bring to all that life throws at us. I deal with this concern by ensuring that I sit down every day with it and do what I can to give it the fullest possible expression.

How have your personal experiences influenced the direction of your writing?

I grew up in Ireland where there is great focus on history but where the stories that are told about the past – our 800 years of oppression by the English, for example – never seemed satisfactory to me - too simplistic. Lovers Hollow grew out of my own family experience. My father’s uncle was shot in the Irish Civil War but nobody in the family ever talked about it. Our village was still divided still about this conflict, with families not speaking to each other, though it had happened 50 years before. The silence that swirled around the topic drew me to it. It’s the same with anything I have written since. Wherever there is silence, there is pain.

How many books have you written so far?

Two nonfiction books in the 1990s - Health and Travel How-To’s, that I don’t think about now. Bodymatters For Women and Get Up & Go: A Travel Survival Guide, both from Attic Press. Now Lovers’ Hollow from Penguin. A Dance in Time, also Penguin, will appear September next.

Do you write every day? How does each session start? How do you proceed? How, where and why does it end?

Yes. The session starts with FREE-Writing, then I pick up where I left off the day before. How it proceeds very much depends on what stage I am at. If I’m in the germination stage, it might just be notetaking or working on the index cards I use to plan out the plot. If I’m drafting, I’ll just write as fast as possible, accepting any words that come, knowing I can fix it up later. (I even write “Shitty First Draft� at the top of the page to give myself permission to get any old thing out.)

I try to leave each writing session longing to go on, itching to get going again tomorrow. Hemingway called it leaving some ink in the well. It gives you that sense of continuity you need when putting together a long novel

Is your writing autobiographical?

Every novelist gets asked this and it is very difficult to answer. Certainly - despite what some readers seem to think when a story is narrated in the first person - I can say unequivocally - and with some relief! - that neither Jo Devereux (Lovers Hollow) nor Izzy Mulcahy (A Dance in Time) is me. But yes, I share some experiences with them — brought up in small villages in rural Ireland, went to boarding school, lived in London for a while…

Most significantly I suppose, my great-uncle was shot in the Irish Civil War, in an incident very like that described in Lovers’ Hollow — though the reasons attributed in the book are entirely imagined.

While my experience of birth, family, marriage, children, death and so on differs from my characters’, something of me is in them — and vice versa.

Why do you use a pen-name?

There are a number of reasons why I write under a pen-name. Firstly, people outside Ireland find ‘Ã?ine’ an impossible name to pronounce (it’s “awn-ya”, folks, not “ay-neh”) and my publishers agreed that a name that was easier for people to remember was a good idea.

Why Orna Ross?

I knew I wanted a pseudonym, something easy to read and remember. But what? I spent ages trying to think of the right one. Then, one day as I shouting up the stairs, calling my two children down to eat - ‘Orna! Ross! Dinner’s ready!’ - I realised: the perfect name had delivered itself to me.

Where Do Your Ideas Come From?

Sometimes it’s something I know I want to go into a book – and I’ll go to great lengths to get it just the way I envisage it. For example, I knew I wanted Jo to live in San Francisco in order to connect her to the liberation movements there, so I had to visit SF to research how the place felt (that was tough!). For A Dance in Time, I had to read every single word written by WB Yeats, Ezra Pound, Francis Stuart, Maud Gonne and Iseult Gonne and almost everything written about them – between them, those guys generated a lot of words.

Sometimes it arises out of other work I am doing – Nora’s experience in Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum (Lovers’ Hollow) was based on a case study I came across in research I did for an MA thesis.

More often, the ideas arise, as if from nowhere, when I’m lying in bed, telling myself I should get up, or when I’m jogging or walking, or in the bath…. And I engage in two daily practices that keep them coming: FREE-Writing and meditation.

I never have a shortage of ideas — my challenge is to manage my time so that I can get them written up.

What Are You Working On Now?

A family narrative set during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, a kaleidoscopic set of stories that explore money and war, sex and gender, family and race. Again, the historical story is told through a more contemporary lens (though the 20th century lens is also a historical moment at some distance from now).

The idea for this novel sparked during an evening course I took in American History while living in Knutsford, England. The story itself was shocking — of how a black man called Abraham Franklin was hung by an Irish mob, one of numerous atrocities against the black community by the Irish during the riot. After Franklin was cut down, sixteen-year-old Patrick Butler dragged his corpse down the street by the testicles. All to cheers from the onlooking crowd of Irish men, women and children.

As powerful as this story itself, were the feelings circulating in the classroom. The teacher and the (largely English) students were all uncomfortable about my presence in the room — as if the fact that I was born in Ireland in some way associated me with the actions of those people, in that distant place and time.

The novel tells the story of two families, one Irish, the other black, and plays out the myriad connections between them during this troubled time. There is also a front story in a more contemporary setting — 1970s New York City — where the flamboyant and dysfunctional McIntyre family is enduring a tragedy.

A baby is dead. Officialdom labels it a cot death but each member of the family - father, mother, twin sister and brother - knows it wasn’t an accident. Which one of them did it? The answer is only revealed to the reader in the last paragraphs – and it is strangely connected to the atrocities that happened during that long-ago riot.

The working title of this story is Three Days in New York.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

In ten years I see myself just where I am now: spending half my day writing and the other half encouraging others along their writing and publication pathways.