Interview
Maggie Armstrong, author of the acclaimed debut collection Old Romantics, joins us as the L’Esprit Featured Writer for Issue Eight
Read an original story from Maggie in I8
L’Esprit Literary Review: Tell us a little about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature? Give the audience a sense of your literary influences, styles, tastes, and philosophy.
Maggie Armstrong: The first few times I tried to write fiction it felt very unnatural and after that I avoided it like the plague. I never wrote a sentence that went anywhere until I was touching thirty. I think I was trying to write a story based on received ideas I had about what stories should look like, and not doing it my own way. Then friend, Moira Brady Averill, who is not with us any longer, asked me to write a story for a variety show and I had a day to do it. It was a Sunday and it was either write or go out and enjoy the sunshine. I sat at my desk all day and wrote what I think must have been a pretty terrible story, about two lovers on a failed mini-break, but I printed it out and an actor, Bryan Quinn, read it at the show that week. Nothing had ever made me so happy as watching him do that, and hearing people’s enjoyment of something I had written, and I decided I wanted to write forever. Another five or so years passed before a story of mine was ever published, in 2020.
When it comes to influences, aside from plays, films and every song I’ve ever listened to, books-wise I don’t know, my reading has fallen into serious disrepair in recent years. It mostly consists of dragging stacks of books around my house and moving them from one surface to the next in the hope I might find a moment of bliss. Stephen King advocates for everyone having a reading chair. That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard. But then you need a lamp too, and some peace and quiet. It takes many years to set yourself up, imo.
I read a lot of authors who are not alive any longer, particularly British and American 20th century novelists and short story writers. I can’t bear to mention one for fear of leaving out someone really important. Either way I’m pretty certain that I don’t know who my favourite authors are, because I haven’t read them yet since the above-mentioned decimation of my literary sensibilities.
LLR: How did your pieces come to be, and what do you want our readers to know about your new project? Is there any context you would like to provide?
MA: Before I ever wrote stories I’d worked for newspapers, covering theatre, restaurants, fashion. The experience of trying to meet deadlines every day and often late at night is always with me. My first editor, Peter Carvosso was a dapper gent who used to tear up my copy. He had a particular love of cutting the opening lines I’d laboured over. He would ring me up. ‘We have absolutely no interest in your opinions’, he’d say. ‘This is too obscure. This is an essay. We’ve asked for a yarn.’ I think the pleasure of writing obscure stories like the one you have published in L’Esprit might have come from being told not to. I’ve always filled pages. Life is very unhappy for me if I’m not filling pages, and that’s why I believe (even when it’s impossible to stick to) the maxim that you have to write every day. I long sometimes to reclaim time I frittered away as a person in my twenties and thirties trying to have fun. I’ve never found it so hard to be at my desk as in my forties and never so madly desired it either.
I do want to say that the first pieces I published were in Irish literary journals and I would have got nowhere without those journals. The stories led me to my Irish publisher, Tramp Press, then to Biblioasis in Canada. I don’t know why I’m doing something so strange as writing stories about a woman with the same name as me, but I’ve always loved George Orwell’s reasons for writing, in his essay ‘Why I write’, which is (as well as ’sheer egoism’ and other gems) ‘To get a hearing’. For some reason, there are things I want people to know. I’m edging towards a novel set in the same period as ‘The Glitz and the Glam’, among the same constellation of people.
LLR: We enjoy the temporal structure in “The Glitz and the Glam,” and are curious about your writing process there. Do you tend to organize using an outline, write one “time period” at a time and then arrange the pieces, or write straight through? Can you share more about your creative decision to depart from traditional chronological storytelling?
MA: I suppose I tell as story the same way I think or do anything, giving in easily to distractions and digressions. It pleases me a lot to be able to pursue digressions. This story, which mostly takes place in the head of a fantasist, brought me to a lot of different places. Writing any scene or story though it’s easy to lose hope and get the twisties and feel out of your depth and on a journey nowhere. I don’t think I do it the right way at all and would love to be taught how to do it right.
LLR: Relatedly, can you speak to the journey of working on this new project and how this story fits into it?
MA: I think you have to make a lot of mistakes and experience a lot of frustration before you get somewhere, sadly. I’ve toyed with the drafting of a few different novels in recent years, but this particular setting would not leave me alone — a deserted salon or TV room functioning as a bedroom. I didn’t really want to write it but it was not done with me so I pursued it. Lashings of apologies though (to quote Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient) for writing a story set in the pandemic! My understanding is that some publishers these days won’t go near that era. We’ve got pandemic-itis; we’ve put it into the delete file, locked that cabinet and thrown away the key. But I do tend to go back to that antiseptic time with a vengeance. My life and circumstances were changed irrevocably during those few years. I lost people and gained people and my family now has a completely different shape than before. What that time showed me was that we never know what’s around the corner, and how adaptable we people are.
LLR: Let’s talk a bit about Old Romantics. You consistently prioritize a sense of place in the collection, from Dublin to New York to so many other places. How does physical location enter into your work? Is it an element you write towards, or around; in other words, where in the process does the setting tend to emerge for you, in drafting a story?
MA: It’s the dilemma everyone who writes faces. How much to be in a place and how much to record while you are there, to be watching and sneaking into your filo-fax. People who write are kind of doomed to be correspondents to another world, one foot in reality and one foot firmly in the ether. I write about Dublin because I am here all the time. The wartime poet Louis MacNeice described ‘her seedy elegance’, her ‘gentle veils of rain’ and the ‘glamour of her squalor’. He’s really got it down. I can’t imagine living, or even being, anywhere else but here.
LLR: In the review we ran of Old Romantics, Devyn Andrews wrote that she found the book to be a “fresh and formally inventive character study borne out of a productive tension between the its central subject matter and its compositional goals… [which] eschews conventional novelistic structure in favor of a patchworked narrative of powerfully distilled moments.” The dynamic between a linked or semi-linked collection and a novel-in-stories is such an interesting conversation. Can you talk a little about the construction of that architecture, and how you crafted that balance?
MA: I see the construction of a collection as an effortless process, the part when all the hard work is done, and links happen naturally and you can sit back and sip a cocktail or a mocktail and feel proud. I have no idea how to build structure, I must have been out the day someone tried to teach it. But I do think structure emerges almost of its own will in a story and then a whole collection of stories, with a beginning, middle and end and a building arc of tension, and this happens by itself as the result of growing up on a regime of storytelling since we were born. It might have influenced me that I stumbled upon Alice Munroe’s The Beggar Maid while writing Old Romantics. I just loved the suspense of following Rose from a child into her fraught and complicated adulthood. I was also hugely taken, thanks to the New Yorker, by John Updike’s Maples Stories about Richard and Joan Maple’s colourful marriage. These collections bring me back to all the Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High and Point Horror books I milled through as a tween. The excitement of getting my hands on a new Babysitter’s Club special issue is something I will never again feel in this life.LLR: In another review of your Old Romantics, L’Esprit Editor Dan White focused on the ways you mix first and third person. Can you talk a little about that, and how each allows you to mediate the goals of a story in different ways?
MA: First person writing is the most self-incriminating kind of disclosure. It is very enjoyable testimony until your character’s actions just feel embarrassing. I would see Margaret as an irritating little sister, if we are in any way related. A close third person study makes a lot more demands on your descriptive powers, your analytical powers, everything. But it can feel a little cold, I think, and Herculean too, to have to account for a whole world in just a story. A first person voice takes out the middle-person and creates an immediate but terrifying intimacy, like when someone looks too long in your eyes. Both kinds are exhausting. And that’s before we get into second person. I’ve never had the stamina for a ‘You’ voice. Poets and songwriters could teach fiction writers something about softening their address here I imagine. I wouldn’t know.
LLR: How do the Margaret and Sergio that we see in “The Glitz and the Glam” differ, if they do, from the Margaret and Sergio of Old Romantics? Does the absence of the larger narrative infrastructure that contains them in the collection change how we read them and their relationship?
MA: That is such an amazing question and I have absolutely no idea, I’ll be lying awake at night turning this over now. Unfortunately I think a lot of people don’t change, though changing people is the stock-in-trade of a fiction writer. Sometimes people just don’t learn! Bless them.
LLR: Speaking about Old Romantics, you mentioned in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail that: “I never believed this was going to be a collection of short stories. As I said, I didn’t feel that these were real stories. I didn’t feel that they were literary exemplars.” And that, a bit later, you came to think that “now do I feel that they don’t need to be masterly. They just need to exist in the first place.” What made you change your mind?
MA: It’s a terrible thing to sit down at one’s desk and believe you have to write a masterly, or at least winning story. Always, when you sit down to write there is an enormous canyon between where you want to go and where you are currently perched. I think maybe the only thing to do is plunge in, swim to safety! There are stories that are astoundingly perfect, polished jewels like Evelyn by James Joyce or The Love Object by Edna O’Brien or In the Cart by Chekov, and then ones like Champagne by Chekov that are just very amusing but a little rushed; but I’m still so glad Chekov wrote Champagne before his death from tuberculosis at 44. It’s very important to keep writing through the flaws of a piece and don’t compare your chaotic early drafts with the perfection of the published stories you admire.
LLR: For you, what does it mean to be an “Irish writer”? Do you actively think of – or locate –yourself in that tradition?
MA: Only insofar as I naturally read writers from the place where I’m from. When I think Irish writer I think of the anthologised stylists of the 20th and early 21st century. Mary Lavin, William Trevor, John McGahern, Frank O’Connor, who wrote with omniscience in sometimes pastoral greens. My dad used to tell me despairingly ‘you’re a Dublin girl’, as if my view on the world would always be narrow, and he was correct. But I feel immensely proud to walk the same paths as James Joyce, literally – I work in a building adjoining Belvedere College where Joyce went to school – and as my contemporary writers. There is a very nice community of writers dotted around Ireland and without those friends I would probably crawl under my desk and cry.
LLR: Do you tend to read while you’re writing, or do you prefer to keep those practices separate?
MA: I read a lot, but rarely one book at a time. I acquire promiscuous amounts of books and read them all at the same time and rarely from cover to cover; I am just very worried about copying another writer’s style. It’s one of the great sorrows of my life that I do not have a newspaper or magazine subscription and struggle to keep up with the important things in the world.
LLR: What’s next for you and your work?
MA: The future causes me no end of anxiety: I find it hard to see beyond today. The laundry does not do itself, nor does it ever end. I have small children, and I would be a worse mother if I was a better writer. All we can do is try and do a little every day.
LLR: Anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
MA: Well, I don’t know what I’m doing but for what it’s worth: please keep going, no matter how unfulfilling your day can feel. It will pick up the more you write, it always does!
It’s a solitary life but we are in this together. And people need to read stories written in the time we are living, your stories have worth, whatever shape they are in.
Maggie Armstrong’s debut collection of stories Old Romantics was published by Tramp Press and Biblioasis and nominated for Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien award. A former journalist, she has written fiction and essays for the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Irish Times, Banshee, Paper Visual Arts and more. She lives in Dublin.
Photo Credit: An academic physician, internationally known amateur photographer and writer, Ricardo Gonzalez-Rothi has had his work awarded, published or forthcoming in Black and White Magazine, Light, Space and Time Gallery, Northwest Review, Fusion Art Gallery, London Photo Festival, Wanderlust Travel Journal, Grey Cube Gallery, Hispanic Culture Review, Tiny Seed, Stillwater Review, Small Harbor, Ilanot Review and About Place journals among others. gonzalezrothiphoto.com
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