We featured an excerpt from James Claffey’s new collection, Blood a Cold Blue, (Press 53, 2013) last week and have been fortunate to have published two of his stories on Extract(s) in the past as well. Claffey hails from County Westmeath, Ireland, and lives on an avocado ranch in Carpinteria, CA, with his wife, the writer and artist, Maureen Foley, their daughter, Maisie, and Australian cattle-dog, Rua.
You write in A Tearing of Skin, “Most days I don’t have the energy to spin fabulist passages of an Irish childhood.” Do people expect you, as someone who grew up in Ireland, to write only about those experiences? Have you found yourself wondering if that is what you are supposed to write about? How have you dealt with those expectations?
I don’t think people expect me to only write about Ireland and the Irish experience. For whatever reason, the stories I’ve written about Irish childhood, growing up in Dublin (very much fictionalized, but rooted in the real), are ones people like, and pay attention to when they appear. In America there’s a level of fascination with Ireland and all things Irish, and writing out of that realm, with the rhythms, inflections, and tonality of the language, is a rewarding endeavor. I love writing about the world about me, whether it’s here in Carpinteria, surrounded by the foothills on one side, and the Pacific on the other, or Louisiana, with the swamps, bayous, and expanse of Lake Ponchartrain. My childhood is the repository of so many memories, like a giant seam of coal under the ground, and it’s that seam I tap into for many of my stories, and there’s a freedom about writing about home from 5000 miles away, a distance that functions almost as permission. I never wrote about Ireland when I lived there, and even when I visit family and familiar haunts, I find I need the distance to tell it the way I need to.
Your love of writing about the world around you is evident in your ability to capture precise detail even when it is imagined (I’m thinking of the flight of the peregrine specifically, but I know you do it elsewhere). How did you develop that type of “seeing”—both actual physical detail and the imagined—and how do you deepen that ability?
After I stopped trying to write what I thought people wanted to read, and by people, I ,mean agents and editors, I decided to write what I wanted to write, rather than some perceived notion of what I thought people wanted to write. So, instead of writing this “inauthentic” fiction that I wrote during my MFA years, I let it go, and began to write about the things I love. And what I love is the way the world unfolds in front of my eyes, whether it be a hawk’s corpse on the edge of the road, or the angle of a tree limb reminding me of something completely unconnected. Somewhere, probably after I returned from Louisiana, my wife said to me that what I wrote was poetry, and instead of rebelling against that, I decided to embrace whatever form came from my mind. Fiction, prose poetry, flash fiction, whatever label it’s given, is not important. What means the most to me is writing into subjects, seeing the wholeness of an object, the possible in the visual. In terms of how to deepen that ability, maybe it’s putting the iPhone down and paying attention to the world, or maybe it’s the realization that time is short and the work needs to be done, but I’m constantly attempting to write fresh material that counts to me.
With so much of the population distracted by gadgets and technology, how much responsibility do you think writers shoulder to remind folks about the actual/physical world? Instead of providing “an escape,” can contemporary writing help people connect? Does the act of reading itself go a long way in grounding us?
We’re sucked in by technology, and it’s hard to break free of the electronic world to take in the actual events unfolding in front of our eyes. I recently returned to the classroom, 10th and 11th grade kids, and the number of students with their eyes only focused on the small screen of the smartphone is quite alarming. There are readers amongst them, plenty, but I worry that by blocking out the outside stimuli, such as nature, architecture, people, we’re going to see a slew of writers and readers who ostensibly avoid the natural in their writing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a heavy user of technology, and personally find it vital and rewarding for promoting, staying in touch with other writers, finding out about what books are coming out, etc., etc., but I’m also amazed and absorbed by the non-technological realm where the beauty of life, both in its gore and its glory, is to be found. each to their own, I suppose. And I do think reading grounds us somehow. I’m happiest within the pages of a compelling book, making connections between the writer’s world and my own experience, and this is something I value, love, and don’t think will ever go away.
“Three Questions” originated with our video series “In Place” and was so popular we decided to expand it. Writers have the option of having their interviews conducted via email, phone, or video. If you have a question you’d love to ask a writer, let us know. If you are a published author and would like to participate, drop us a note.
