James Lawless interviewed

5 december 2014

KAI Presents: Multifarious Author… James Lawless!
Kev’s Author Interviews Presents:s

author photo James Lawless

Ireland

Kev: In a generalized way, James, tell us a little about yourself. Where you grew up, siblings, family life, education, and how you got to where you are now.

I was born in Dublin in the old Liberties for which I have a great affection where my grandmother and later my uncle had shops. I moved to the suburbs when I was six. There was a gap of four years between each of four siblings so in the early years I felt like an only child forming a close bond with my mother. The age differences of course evened out in adulthood. I was brought up in a very nationalist time and was taught all my subjects through the medium of Irish in secondary school. I did a degree in that subject and in Spanish which broadened my outlook and later I did a Masters in Communications. Writing a thesis gave me the discipline later to tackle the novel form.

Kev: How long have you been writing for?

My mother always read to me from comics and later from books. I used to live for Wednesdays as a kid in pre-television days when my maiden aunt Nell would arrive on her weekly visit with the Topper and a Crunchie. I can remember my mother reading the hard words about the Adventures of Rob Roy at the back of the comic.

My father came home from work one day when I was twelve and gave me a Letts page-a-day diary. That’s when I started writing.

Kev: Why do you write?

peelingkindle (1)I was very excited at the idea of filling in the blank pages of the diary. I felt it was like a ritual that I had to complete every evening before going to bed like a recording of one’s existence. My initial writing however was a mere slapdash of quotidian pieces like going to the cinema, doing homework, overcoming a cold or a bout of asthma or sliding on the ice in winter. At university I changed from the diaries to notebooks and began to record ideas more than happenings on which I could put my own dates.

My mother’s sudden and premature death at sixty-three was like a seismic jolt to my psyche and it was that which propelled me into writing my first novel Peeling Oranges which is about a paternal and really a maternal quest through the intricacies of Irish and Spanish politics. I regretted taking my mother for granted so many times. I never thought of death until then. Death was something remote that happened to other people, a construct or myth of Hollywood or stories. Now death informs all I write about as it should do but not in an unduly pessimistic way, more like in an acceptance of its inevitability for which we should be prepared. Unless a death is sudden or calamitous, there should be no outcry.

Kev: What is your genre?

rus cover (1)I write what I hope is accessible literary fiction. But I have also written a book of poems Rus in Urbe with half the poems, as the title suggests, set in the city and the other half in the country. This is because I divide my time between an urban and rural base, I have a cottage in the mountains of west Cork to which I have frequent recourse. But the urban is ingrained in me and I could not reside exclusively in one zone.

I also have penned a study of modern poetry Clearing the Tangled Wood: Poetry as a Way of Seeing the World which was well received by poets such as Brendan Kennelly and John Montague.

I have just completed a collection of stories for children about the adventures of an endearing but sometimes mischievous little girl of eight. It is called The Adventures of Jo Jo. They are based on bedtime stories I used to tell my children when they were small and they asked me to write them down for their children. I got the opportunity to do this when I broke my ankle last year and was immobilised for several weeks.

Kev: Who would you say are your favourite/most influential authors and why?

Virginia Woolf I love for her attitude to the novel as an art form and the beauty and resonance of her prose as in To the Lighthouse. James Joyce of course for stretching our limits and Cervantes for starting the whole thing off. Pasternak for his poetry and the purity of his vision and the sacrifices he made for his art are an inspiration.

Kev: What is your latest (published) book called and what is it about?

My latest and most risqué adult novel to date is called Knowing Women and was prompted by the spate of paedophile cases in recent years. It set me to wonder what would happen in such a climate if a person were tainted in the wrong. Would he survive? Laurence J Benbo, the protagonist of the novel, is a thirty seven year old graphic artist and Dublin bachelor, awkward with women and lonely after the breakup with his girlfriend Deborah. He meets Jadwiga, a lapdancer in the Botanic Gardens and, after winning a lottery, he bestows gifts on her. But his upwardly mobile brother Maoilíosa and his scheming wife Ena, on hearing of his win, try to blackmail the innocent Laurence into handing his money over to them by alleging that he interfered sexually with their daughter Lydia. Laurence seeks out Jadwiga for advice in her lapdancing club. To his dismay, he sees her going into a room with Maoilíosa. He spends the night awake listening to the rain pattering at his window, thinking of Deborah and he imagines little Lydia coming to seek out her uncle Lar to finish the story he had started reading to her. As the rain gets heavier he knows there is going to be a storm.

knowing_women_kindle (1)

Here are the opening lines:

A warm September sun shines as Laurence J Benbo, returning the customary smile to the friendly official in the office window, enters through the gate of the Botanic Gardens Dublin. Dapper in his shirt and tie and navy wool overcoat, and wielding his teakhandled brolly, he walks the curving path for his daily lunchtime constitutional. Viewed from the back, one can perceive his grey worsted trousers riding up his short legs revealing thin black cottoned ankles. He walks briskly – for the exercise, but also conscious of his limited time – along the Poplar walk and past the wide canopy of the cork oak under which he often shelters from a shower of rain.

Kev: Which of your works do you like best (feel most proud of) and why?

I suppose my first novel Peeling Oranges because it was so close to the bone and my debut.

Kev: What are you working on now?

Doing the final edits to my new novel American Doll which is just completed (73,000 words) and tells how 9/11 opens a can of worms on an Irish/American family.

When Laura Calane of New York comes to Ireland to further her studies and to live in what her father considers a safer environment after 9/11, she discovers that the land of her ancestors is not the haven she had believed it to be. When she meets social worker Danny Faraday, she is torn between her attraction towards him and the emotional blackmail of her uncle Thady who is domiciled in Ireland and who never lets her forget that he saved her father’s life in a terrorist attack in New York in 1993.

The story is about loss, losing someone as Con the firefighter did with his wife in 9/11; it’s also about hope, never giving up and knowing when to give up and let go, and how the process is in danger of repeating itself in the new generation with Laura his daughter going missing in Ireland, and Danny’s parents who were also lost at sea. It’s also about coming into maturity as in the case of Danny with the help of Laura suffering the grief, and with Laura, herself growing out of her family engendered chimeras.

I believe this new novel is of the moment and could appeal to the huge population of Irish Americans and indeed to readers universally in its story of how religion and warped sexuality and pathological loyalties impact on a family. What exile means today and emigration. Who are the new Irish now and how do they differ from previous generations? On the surface the story is a sort of Irish Roots as Laura Calane traces her ancestry back to west Cork and the famine ships of 1847. But, as Danny discovers when he visits New York, Black 47 is a pop group now, so it is essentially new wine in a new bottle, a twenty first century work as it breaks down shibboleths and Hollywood myths and the shackles of deep rooted rituals and family fidelities about Ireland and the Irish, particularly heightened by the 9/11 disaster.

I studied in particular the fire departments of New York where two of my characters worked and I examined contemporary Irish and American perceptions of each other and how they compared with historical perceptions from memoirs and novels such as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Crossing Highbridge, Charming Billy, Dreaming of Columbus and Finding Jimmy. I was particularly interested in the bonding influences exerted by family, religion and love of the ‘old country’ and how these influences were brought to the fore by the 9/11 disaster. So while I hope American Doll will be judged artistically as a novel, I also would like to feel that it will be welcomed for shedding some new light on Irish/American perceptions of each other.

At the moment I am looking for an agent/publisher for this work, if possible in the US.

Kev: Could you give us a little spoiler?

Sure, here are the opening lines:

He first met her in late May at a talk on W. B. Yeats given by Professor Foster in the National Library in Dublin. He knew she was American the moment he saw her, before he even heard her speak. She had that all American healthy complexion of piano ivory sparkling teeth and bright smiling brown eyes. And the way she was so open was American too, he figured, as she made for a vacant seat, talking to everyone around her in a voice a little too loud for Irish decorum. She was pushing her auburn fringe back saying, ‘My bangs are in my eyes’, like someone who wanted to share the world. ‘Imagine, accounts of my ancestors are stored here. Oh my god, and those green shades like one of the forty shades when I was looking down from the Aer Lingus plane. It was so exciting.’

Kev: What new challenges are you facing?

I never realised how difficult it is to promote one’s work. It takes up a lot of time doubly so as a hybrid writer. I am giving a lot of energy at the moment to the translation of my works through babelcube.com. They are translated into ebooks by highly qualified and enthusiastic translators. I am anxious to get them out in paperback. One of my translators, the brilliant Rocio Paula Sanchéz from Spain, who translated Peeling Oranges into Spanish, has set up a special James Lawless Facebook in Spanish link https://www.facebook.com/esjameslawless dedicated to the novel and its historical connections and embracing other translations of my works. I am so grateful to this twenty first century Sylvia Beach and I am trying to help in whatever way I can.

http://www.amazon.com/James-Lawless/e/B001JOXD96.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/James-Lawless/e/B001JOXD96/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

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https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2856218.James_Lawless

http://kevs-domain.net/2014/12/05/kai-presents-multifarious-author-james-lawless/

It was very big and heavy, cardboard, cheap painted white with clasps and lock, a holiday case which I used as a school bag, awkward to hold all the books I stored, caught on my bicycle carrier. Cycling home I felt a thud and heard a guffaw: the big school bully had knocked the suitcase onto the road. A challenge, a fight in the field, fear entering my bones.

A school memory which sparked the bullying incident in Peeling Oranges.
http://www.amazon.com/Peeling-Oranges-James-Lawless/dp/1496007646

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Author: James Lawless

Irish novelist, poet and short story writer.

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