Kathleen Murray and her summer holiday affair (with the New Yorker)

Submitted by stingingfly on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 15:00

I was on holidays for the last two weeks in Glencolumcille and Kilkee and have not been writing. Lots of reading going on but no writing and no kindles. I spent time with sisters and brothers-in-law and friends and cousins and second cousins and aunts from Canada and Atlanta and London, and I thought someone would be bundled up on the beach behind a wind breaker with their kindles but no, just lots of books.

Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture got a thumbs up, Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane was a big hit in Limerick-by-the-sea and my cousin said Emma Donoghue’s Room was unputdownable at home in Winnipeg; children left waiting at the school gate and piano lessons abandoned. A significant part of Maggie O’Farrell’s and Patrick Gale’s works was read, verdict mixed but the later books are better apparently. I read Molly McCloskey’s memoir about her brother, Circles Around the Sun, and found it fascinating and thoughtful.

I get a pile of New Yorker magazines every year before my August holiday from the Fly Boy. It’s my summer holiday affair, sneaking up to my bedroom to finish an article, or sitting on the beach, leaving disappointed children to their half-built sandcastles so I can finish a story. I read some great short stories, including:

  • Alice Munro’s ‘Gravel’ – I loved it, although when she mentioned an old gravel pit that filled up with melted snow and small unhappy kids who wanted to play in it, I got an immediate sense of ‘oh no let this not be the scene of a disaster or I will be sorely disappointed.’
  • Robert Coover’s ‘Going for a Beer’ – it illustrated for me the potential of very short stories, something I don’t come across so often in what I read.

But my favourite of the New Yorker stories I read was one by Frances Hwang called ‘Blue Roses’.

Was there a Reader’s Digest story or three novels in one book called Blue Roses? It rang a bell for me straight away, something to do with a tragically ill child. And the song ‘Paper Roses’, that’s a bit sad too. Roses are so definite. I have a new garden that was cleared of brambles and set with grass. Some of the old plants are coming up again; I have found two tiny rose bushes beginning to grow against the wall. I accept them because they are there now but I don’t know if I would have picked them. A good friend gave my son a rose plant when he was born and it died on me in the first year.

There were so many things I loved about this story ‘Blue Roses’, but one detail stands out. A revelation that came very late on in the story gave an insight into one of the minor characters, and it was as if light has just flooded into a room. It was revelatory in the truest sense of the word and I experienced a physical expansion and deepening of the imaginative territory of the story when I read it. And it did not feel like crucial information had been withheld up to this point because the pacing was spot on; as life yields up at its own pace so too with this story. When I am working on a story I often think about this issue, the pace of the unfolding; sometimes the correct thing to do is obvious to me and sometimes I really have to work at this aspect to get it as right as I can.

I’m going to read that story again.

While I did no writing on holidays, there was lots of talking and reading and sharing stories. And one story from my aunt has stuck in my head. It began with a family that lost five children to diphtheria not long after their father sank their fortune in railway shares, and it ended up with a descendent of that family, a young man, serving Kentucky Fried Chicken to Sarah Ferguson – one of the happiest hours of her life she is reputed to have told him.

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Kathleen Murray lives in Dublin. Her story, 'You Just Wouldn't Know' featured in Issue 19 of The Stinging Fly, and her work has been published in the anthologies The Incredible Hides in Every House and These are our Lives. Kathleen was the winner of the Fish Short Story Prize in 2006/2007 and was shortlisted for the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in 2009. She received an Arts Council bursary in 2010.

Kathleen will be reading at the Cork International Short Story Festival on Saturday, September 17 with Mary Costello. This special Stinging Fly reading takes place at 4pm at The Ballroom, Metropole Hotel, Cork. Further details about this event - and all the wonderful many others - can be found on the CISSF website: http://www.corkshortstory.net/