Yesterday, Irish writer Claire Keegan was interviewed by ABC Radio's Sarah Kanowski at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
The conversation began with a discussion of Keegan's rural childhood, including that she had little access to books while she was growing up. Keegan said she felt that their absence wasn't a hindrance to becoming a writer. Rather, it created a 'longing' that helped to shape her own storytelling.
When the conversation turned to the writing process itself, Keegan seemed to resist reflecting too much on how she finds and develops her stories, or their themes, echoing comments she made in a Guardian interview last year. Her emphasis, rather, is at the sentence level: creating good prose, and selecting events with great care.
Her commets reminded me of something Annie Proulx said in an interview with me some years ago: good writing is about good sentences. Themes, it seems, will take care of themselves, and for the most part meaning can be left to the reader. As in the Guardian interview, Keegan also talked about wanting to give the reader 'just enough', comparing this approach to writing to a good meal or a good conversation, when just enough is served or spoken about.
In the case of Small Things Like These, the result, I think, is a work that has fable-like, even saga-like qualities, revealing its meaning and political imperative in a structure that becomes more visible through selection: leaving things out, so that there isn't too much; creating a certain longing within the omissions.
