An Interview with Colum Mccann

ALISON GARDEN ‘Making it up to tell the truth’: An interview with Colum McCann Colum McCann is a writer celebrated for his dedication to the international: born in Dublin, in 1965, he now resides in New York City, where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Hunter College, after having travelled extensively. His fiction is similarly mobile and he has written about a Romani woman in former Czechoslovakia (Zoli 2006); an Irish man in Mexico and his Mexican wife in Mayo (Songdogs 1995); the Russian ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev (Dancer 2003); the Subway tunnels of New York (This Side of Brightness 1998). Most recently, in TransAltantic (2013), McCann continued the current trend in his work of writing about historical figures, including sections on John Alcock and Teddy Brown, Frederick Douglass and Senator George Mitchell. McCann started his career as a journalist, so his penchant for writing about real figures is not entirely unexpected. His father, Sean McCann, wrote for the Irish newspaper The Irish Press and McCann elected to study journalism at the College of Commerce, in Rathmines (the College now forms part of the Dublin Institute of Technology). In 1983, McCann won the ‘Young Journalist of the Year’ award for a piece he wrote about domestic violence against women in some of Dublin’s most impover- ished areas, beginning to show the empathetic engagements with what McCann has labelled ‘the anonymous other’ that have been a driving force in his work. McCann was subsequently given his own column in The Irish Press but, driven by a love of the American Beats and a desire to get out of Ireland, he left Dublin at the age of 21 in 1986 for the United States. After his failed efforts at setting himself up as a writer – including an attempt at writing a novel on an old Remington typewriter using a continuous roll of paper, like Jack Kerouac’s original On the Road (1957) manuscript – McCann decided he needed to expand the horizons of his own experience. He set off on an eighteen month bicycle trip across the United States, beginning in Massachusetts, snaking down the East Coast Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations © Symbiosis, 2014 2 SYMBIOSIS into Florida, down into New Orleans, Texas and Mexico. He completed his trip by travelling north, through Colorado and Wyoming, finishing up in San Francisco. The experiences of the vast open spaces of the Mid- and Southwest of the United States find their way into McCann’s first novel, Songdogs (1995), where McCann uses his own route as the map for two generations of the novel’s characters, Irish Michael and Mexican Juanita, and Conor, their son. Reflecting on the differences between the ‘confined’ spaces of Ire- land and the plains of Wyoming, Conor observes, ‘land like [Wyoming] seeps its way into you, you grow to love it, it begins to thump in your blood’ (94). This early novel gives a clear indication of the progressive and generous vision of Ireland and its diaspora that has characterised McCann’s work. One of the most striking features of Songdogs is McCann’s portrayal of Juanita’s plight in Mayo and the difficulties she has, as an immigrant, adjusting to life in Ireland. The novel prefigures the wave of immigration that Ireland was to experience during the Celtic Tiger era and in this way, McCann examines and subverts ideas of an Irish migrant experience. McCann has spoken about the way that this bicycle trip opened up a new catalogue of voices and stories, many of which have filtered into his own work. This layering of voices and stories is a distinguishing feature of McCann’s prose style. Originally displayed in an embryonic way in Songdogs – Conor’s narration is overlaid with the imagined voices of his parents and those that they encounter – this has now developed into a signature style across his subsequent five novels. In the interview below, McCann discusses the way in which Irish fiction has traditionally eschewed the ‘one voice; one tone; one movement’ of the English real- ist novel, and we might read his distinctive narrative polyphony as an example of this. It is also, argues McCann, a deliberate challenge to the singular narrative of history and the ‘official’ story that is passed down; his wealth of voices probe at the notion that any one narrative can claim an exclusive hold over history or fact. Indeed, the fictionality of history is something that is becoming increasingly of interest to McCann. His use of different voices also places an emphasis on the manner of telling and how stories are relayed: it highlights the importance of storytelling. Below, you will note that McCann makes reference to the ‘democracy’ of storytelling, and the rights that we all have to share our stories. To this end, McCann was one of the founding members of Narrative4, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages disadvantaged youths to swap and share stories in a bid to foster ‘fearless hope through radical empa- thy’. For McCann, storytelling goes beyond national borders. His braided GARDEN 3 narrative form, constructed through multifarious narratives, compliments and furthers his transnational aesthetic in that it accommodates a di- verse range of ethnic, cultural and national voices. Given this distinctive style of his novels, it is no surprise that McCann is a highly accomplished short story writer. His first collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, was published in 1994 and one of its stories, ‘Through the Field’, was selected by Dermot Bolger as part of his edited collection, The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction (1994). In his introduction, Bolger applauds McCann’s international leanings, arguing that his short story is fully evocative of Texas and celebrates McCann’s ability to look far beyond Ireland in his writing. McCann too, enjoys the fluidity of belonging to more than one space, and venturing, imaginatively, into other geographies. In this vein, his collection Everything in this Country Must (2000), consisting of two short stories and a novella, ‘Hunger Strike’, meditate on the Troubles in the North of Ireland. McCann’s mother was from Derry and McCann spent large amounts of time in Northern Ire- land in the summers of his childhood in the 1970s. Redemption and healing are recurrent themes in McCann’s work. His first novel to focus on the United States, This Side of Brightness (1998) delves into the lives of three generations of an Irish-African American family and the traumas and destitution that mark their lives. In Let the Great World Spin (2009), in which multiple narratives unfurl around Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, McCann redirects the energies surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Cen- tre to New York of the 1970s and in so doing, constructs a novel which is ultimately hopeful for the future. Let the Great World Spin was selected by two teachers at Newtown High School, Connecticut to help them deal with the horror and grief caused by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings of December 2012. McCann himself spent the day with students at the school in April 2013. Colum McCann’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Hennessy Award for Irish Literature, the Rooney Prize and a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government. Let the Great World Spin won the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, the American Na- tional Book Award 2009 and the Irish IMPAC prize 2011. In 2013, TransAtlantic was long listed for the Booker Prize and McCann was awarded an honorary doctorate by Queens University Belfast. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Colum McCann at Ulysses Pub in New York, sat perfectly halfway between the Irish tricolour and the flag of the United States. I would like to thank the Arts and Humani- ties Research Council for the funding which made this interview possible. 4 SYMBIOSIS Finally, I would like to thank Colum McCann himself for being so generous with his time and thoughts, and allowing me to publish this interview. Q. A recent critical companion to your work, Eoin Flannery’s Colum McCann and The Aesthetics of Redemption (2011), places you within the Irish literary tradition, whereas another, John Cusatis’ Understanding Colum McCann (2010), considers your fiction as part of a series of books entitled ‘Understanding American Litera- ture’. How would you respond to this and how would you position yourself within the literary landscape; do you find national labels enabling or restrictive? A. It’s nice to be considered a part of both, so you sort of straddle the two. Michael Ondaatje has this thing called the ‘international mongrels of the world’. He’s a classic example for me. He was born in Sri Lanka, educated in England, moves to Canada, but writes his first book about a jazz singer in early twen- tieth century New Orleans. To me that’s a perfect collision and that’s the way I sort of see my fiction: not operating within any specific national boundaries. When it comes down to it, when you’re finally asked what sort of writer you are – other than just a writer – and you have to put a label on it, I have to be an Irish writer. I come from that tradition. I was born into it. I still plough it. But what interests me is the idea that you might be able to break form and break ideas of national landscape and break borders, and so, for example, write a novel about a Russian ballet dancer and have it operate within the sphere of Irish literature as I tried to do in Dancer.

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