If there is an author worthy of your "day one" purchase of a new novel, it's Keith Donohue. Donohue is the author of three extraordinary books, all of them
fascinating stories that explore the many facets of mystery and wonder. The first two, the acclaimed The Stolen Child (2006) and Angels of Destruction (2009), dealt with childhood, promises, and legends that capture our imaginations. The third, Centuries of June (2011), is a story of multiple lifetimes, revisited in a single incident. While the story is set in more adult surroundings, with firm building blocks of love and betrayal in place, it is still a magical and mysterious visitation worth your time.
Keith Donohue possesses a Ph.D. in English from The Catholic University of America (his B.A. and M.A. were acquired from Duquesne University). He had been employed with the National Endowments for the Arts, where he wrote speeches for the
chairpersons, John Frohnmayer and Jane Alexander. He now works full-time as Director of Communications for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of The US National Archives, located in Washington, D.C.
In addition to his very busy and fully
immersive schedule, he still manages to find the time to contribute
reviews, articles, and the occasional short story (like "Cat in a Box," found at Bethesda Magazine online) to several prestigious publications like The New
York Times, The Washington Post, and other important cultural
magazines and newspapers. I found it amazing that Donohue
would take the time out from such a busy schedule to provide
answers to a series of questions that not only explore the novels he
has written, but to also talk about the challenges of being a writer.
Writing is a
grand calling. I believe that you are born to tell your stories, and
barring that, then you are born to do something else. When did you
realize that you were born to be a writer?
When I was a boy of
seven or eight, I was supposed to be home for dinner when my father’s
car appeared in the driveway. Usually, I was out playing somewhere,
never saw the car on time, and was invariably late for dinner. The
first time I came in with a made-up story explaining my tardiness, I
got a few raised eyebrows. The second time, my story got a laugh.
From then on, the family kind of expected some wild story, and I was
hooked. There were some great teachers along the way, encouraging
this sort of delinquency, and by eighth grade, I wanted to do
nothing else.
How you would
classify writing? Is it often frustrating, or is it an easy process
for you?
Process is the key
word, I think. It’s not really a matter of difficulty, but getting
in the right frame of mind to enter into the process. Concentration,
flow. Revision, on the other hand, is trickier. There are different
problems and challenges in getting things right, but when it is going
well, there’s nothing better than putting down the bones and giving
them a good rattle.
Do you remember
your first submissions of The Stolen Child? Were publishers
accepting of it?
It took me two years
to find an agent for The Stolen Child. I had finished a draft
and then started sending query letter after query letter. Sometimes
the agent would not answer at all. Sometimes they sent a form
letter. Occasionally, a short letter of apology. You have to kiss a
lot of frogs.
Did you retain an agent to do the submissions of The Stolen Child for you? Were there a lot of disappointments in getting feedback, if any, from publishers?
My agent submitted
it to a bunch of publishers, and only a few came back wanting the
book. Given the nature of the novel, some editors didn’t see its
potential. Thank goodness for Nan Talese, who accepted the book and
did a great job with the editing, mostly through Coates Bateman, who
worked there at the time. A good editor—and my agent, Peter
Steinberg, also made a number of editorial suggestions—is always
aware that it is the writer’s book and will make suggestions that
serve as a springboard for another round of creativity in the
revision.
Do you have
longer versions of any, or all, of your stories that add to them?
No, I never removed any large sections from the books. My trouble is the opposite, having enough to say.
It is said that
the inspiration for The Stolen Child came from the Yeats poem. Can
you give us a few words on that? How did the actual storyline of The
Stolen Child come to you?
I had read Yeats’s
“The Stolen Child” in college and had heard it put to music in a
wonderful song by The Waterboys, so it kind of floated around in my
subconscious for years. I loved the sound of it, and the notion in
the poem that the natural world is so appealing to a child, but would
also mean leaving home and family behind — a kind of pull at
establishing identity. Then I read about the changeling legend in a
book called Mother Nature. So I had that stuff stored away,
and when I wanted to try to write a story with a double narrator,
then combining those threads seemed natural. It always seems to be
the way for me, juxtaposing disparate elements into something new.
I felt as I read
the story that as the town grew, the places for the changelings to
live had diminished. This led to their dispersal. And being
dispersed, and in some places isolated, how would their
reintroduction into civilization ever happen again? It actually felt
extremely sad, as if there was something else intertwined in those
thoughts. Were there?
One of the other
threads that interested me was the loss of enchantment in the modern
world, particularly when opportunities for a child to go out into
wild and natural settings are reduced by the encroachment of housing
developments (not to mention the fact that a lot of kids nowadays
simply stay indoors to play). When you are out in the woods, you have
that sense of wonder and enchantment, where things like faeries and
dragons might be around the next corner. Myth is much more difficult
to pull off, and I wrote The Stolen Child, in part, to
re-enchant that setting.
I believe the
story of The Stolen Child to be one of dealing with the loss of
childhood, and watching all of our memories of it change to dust as
time moves forward. Am I close?
Every reader brings
experience to the book and, in a sense, completes the story. Lots of
people see that “loss of childhood” as part of it, so they are
right. The quote from Louise Gluck at the beginning is perhaps the
closest I can come to a declarative sentence: “We look at the world
once/In childhood. The rest is memory.”
Aniday never
really seemed to resolve his abduction, transformation, and his
increasing separation from his parents and family. Is there a model
for the character? For any of the characters?
All of the
characters are made up, an amalgamation of autobiography, memory,
observation, and invention. There’s a bit of so-and-so in some of
the characters, but they aren’t modeled on any particular people.
Are there
intentional metaphors and allegories inside the story of The Stolen
Child?
Wilhelm Worringer
wrote a book called Abstraction and Empathy that plays a part
in my decision to make Henry Day a musician and Aniday a kind of
writer. I was drawn by the life of Glenn Gould, the pianist, who
played with a furious abstraction (and great artistry) and by the
more naturalistic aspects of Yeats. But these are my own conceits and
hardly necessary to enjoying the book.
The Angels of
Destruction is a story of lost and found. From the lost daughter
(Erica) to the found girl (Norah) who both wrap around the sad life
of Margaret in different ways, this story explores ambiguity in many
ways. There's the mysteriously threatening and unknowable man who
taunts Erica. There's the question of Norah's origins, her miracles,
and her many solutions to sad people (Sean, Margaret) and their
pressing issues. None of these ever really become discerned by the
reader nor openly answered. But still the end of the story brings
immense satisfaction with a kind of “draw your own conclusion.”
Do you have clear ideas of what is happening in this story, or did it
progress exactly as it's written? If you have less ambiguous
answers, any that you care to share?
All of the answers
are in the novel. Margaret says a little prayer before she opens the
door to Norah and it is answered in a way she could not expect. Sean
has his own prayers and hopes. I’m a firm believer in leaving
interpretation up to the reader, perhaps too much so.
I have to ask.
Is Norah an angel?
If an angel is an
answered prayer, yes. Just perhaps not the kind you were expecting.
(They never are.) I wasn’t trying to write a
touched-by-a-little-angel story. The question of why people believe
in things unseen was far more interesting to me. Why people hope.
Like The Stolen
Child, what were the influences that led to the creation of this
story?
Paul Klee’s
paintings of angels. The Patty Hearst story. “A Mind of Winter”
by Wallace Stevens. Robert Oppenheimer’s statement when the first
atomic bomb went off. The massive loss of jobs in Western
Pennsylvania during the years the book is set. New Mexico and the
desert light. Many threads.
Centuries of June
revolves around a central character who upon awakening falls and hurts
himself. During a time, he is visited by a series of women who
recount their stories to him (and the reader). I admit to struggling
with the story, not in its writing, but in its intents. Could you
help me to ease my inability to gain an insight to the story? Or am
I struggling too hard?
Centuries of June
is about a man who gets a bump on the head and winds up being visited
by his former loves from his former lives, all of whom have a grudge,
sometimes held for centuries. He gets this one night in which to try
to learn from the past so as not to repeat it, only to realize at the
end that we lose all memory of the past just before we are born
again. If you read that last chapter, you’ll see that the whole
thing has been told by a baby just before it is born. You may be
struggling too hard, or maybe I struggled too hard to write a comic
story about how we never seem to learn about life and love no matter
how many chances we have.
I'm always amazed
at the ability of a writer to put together a fantastic story. And
I'm sure it's a laborious process that doesn't just involve sitting
down and letting the ideas flow outward. Can you give us a “day in
the life” of Keith Donohue as he writes?
Every part of the
process is different. Lots of time goes by when I’m just thinking
of the next story to tell, usually when I’m revising the
work-in-progress. As far as the daily writing, I do it when I can,
odd moments snatched at lunch or on the subway or a park bench. I try
to write a whole “scene” at a time, leaving myself a problem to
gnaw on during those many hours when I’m not writing. Usually, I
come up with a way of dealing with that textual problem by the next
day, and I’m off to the races again. Revising is harder, as I’ve
said. I get stuck more often trying to solve a problem I’ve
unintentionally created. It might be laborious, but it’s a lot
easier than manual labor.
As a writer, do
you re-write much of the story as you read through them before their
final submissions?
The very first draft
is written by hand in a notebook, and then I type up the results,
editing along the way, and so on. If I am stuck, sometimes I go back
to the beginning and read it through to find out where to go, but
usually, I proceed to the end and have a manuscript. Then I change
the font and the spacing and print that out and revise it. You’d be
surprised what you find. Then I give it to my wife, to my agent, and
they have ideas, and the whole thing goes through another round or
two or three of revision before it is ready to be submitted. And then
the editor gets involved, and off we go again to the Land of
Revision. At some point, someone puts an end to all that nonsense,
and the damned thing gets printed.
I'm sure that you
have been writing a new story. And I believe that I speak for all
Keith Donohue fans that it is highly anticipated. Can you give us any kind
of hint as to what is in store for us?
Nearly finished with
a kind of Gothic tale about a boy whose drawings come to life. A
scary story, I hope.
I enjoy the fact
that you're easily accessible via Facebook, where you have created a
page, post regularly, and actually answer back fans. What makes that
a necessity for you?
Writing is such a
solitary endeavor that I like to hear from readers and spy on what
interests them. It’s endlessly fascinating, sometimes to the
detriment of getting work done, but I procrastinate...
Thanks, Keith for
not only your books, but for the books you have yet to write. I also
want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to
entertain our quest to understand Keith Donohue better.
You can catch up on all things Keith Donohue at his website, or his Facebook page, and Twitter feed.
"As I let go of the past, the past let go of me" — Keith Donohue, The Stolen Child