A Guest post by Áine Greaney
Author of Trespassers and Other Stories
Contemporary Irish short fiction set in rural Ireland, greater Boston and Cape Cod
Once upon a time, something made us say, “I must write about this!” So long before it lands on someone’s bookshelf or in our e-reader, every story has its own origin story.
I’ve always been a great “lists” person, so when I think about how stories begin or happen, here are four of my sources of inspiration:
Place: We all have places where we instantly feel comfortable and at home. Equally, there are certain settings that just feel wrong. Once, when I taught a fiction-writing class to teenagers, they ignored the “good” places, but were all over that “wrong” space idea. Why? Because misfit places have enough inherent tension to inspire a story—including all the sights, sounds and smells of that “wrong” place. Even more inspirational than the place itself is how we react and behave when we’re there.
Life changes: When I think of the personal life changes that can and have inspired my fiction, they don’t belong on any life timeline or within a memoir. At least in the rear-view mirror, these changes were more internal than external and were more about changes of heart than situational changes. But for fiction, these attitudinal shifts aren’t enough. We also need characters and settings and dialogue and back story and an ending. Mix and stir and … Voila! We’ve (hopefully) got fiction!
History: As a child growing up in a multi-generational household, I heard plenty of old stories. I also like to read history, and I believe that we carry part of our own and our ancestral histories with and within us. As a fiction and a non-fiction author, I hope I never stop interrogating this concept of how—and how much—we carry the past into the present day.
Night dreams: In my story, “House Devil,” included in my fifth book and recent collection, a woman uses a set of theater rigging to fly, Peter Pan
style, over and across her husband’s Fourth of July party. This story idea came from one of my night dreams. In that dream, I was flying through a summery blue sky and watching the startled faces watching me from down below. My dreams tend to be vivid—many with a beginning, middle and end. So why waste good, visual scenes that are just there for the taking?
Of course, this list doesn’t cover all my sources of inspiration—including my well-honed skill of clandestine eavesdropping. As writers we need to be alert, to trust our own imagination and never, ever leave home without a tiny notebook or someplace where we can jot down our ideas.
The 11 stories in “Trespassers” zig zag back and forth between coastal Massachusetts and rural Ireland—sometimes within the same story.
Regardless of setting or country, there’s a connecting theme of place and displacement, and this book brims with each character’s attempt to reconcile past and present, loss and hope and here and home.
A woman travels from her Massachusetts home to her native Irish village to care for her estranged and sick father. Back in her childhood home, she comes face-to-face with previously unspoken losses.A wealthy couple travels to Cape Cod to spend their 52nd summer on the wife’s ancestral estate. On their private beach above Nantucket Sound, the husband must confront the realities of their long marriage and its social-class tensions. A widow agrees to sell her west-of-Ireland farm to move to an in-law apartment attached to her daughter–and the daughter’s American family’s–Dublin house. In her new urban home, Grandma must confront the family’s abusive past and her adult daughter’s refusal to forgive or forget. An Irish immigrant takes her American-born teen to a raucous Boston house party. At that party, the teenager discovers that her mother had lied about her child’s birth father–a lie that will permanently divide the mother and daughter.
PUBLISHER: Sea Crow Press
ISBN-10: 1961864207
ISBN-13 978-1961864207
Print Length: 130 pages
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