I'M A talker. I find myself making narratives, telling people things about my life in order to make sense of it all. This usually applies to bad things. I try to write my way out of them. Angela Bourke, whose first collection of short stories, By Salt Water, is published this week, began to write fiction after her father died nine years ago "After a bereavement, that's a time when you are often overwhelmed with feelings, most of them not very pretty."
Better known for her role as lecturer in Modern Irish at UCD, and for her research in women's lament poetry and Irish folklore, Bourke (44) came late to writing fiction because of a niggling suspicion that "writing short stories was a frivolous and self indulgent thing for an academic to do".
She began to change her mind when she heard the poet Anne Hartigan give a reading "Anne read out a poem about having a hysterectomy. I thought `She can write a poem like that, read it out, and the sky doesn't fall?' I realised then that yes, I was allowed to write."
Bourke describes her mother as "a natural storyteller and raconteur". However there was no obvious role model for her during her formative years. She grew up in Terenure, one of five children, in a house with few books. Her father was an office manager in a small paint company We were lower middle class money was scarce. We had a strict upbringing. The summer holidays could be very boring. We spent most of the time playing in the back lane."
One book that she did discover at home was The Golden Legends of The Gael translations of the early Irish sagas by Maud Joynt "Joynt was a Celtic scholar, a contemporary of Yeats. I loved that book. It was full of stories about wonderful things like shape changers." This was the beginning of an enduring fascination with Irish folklore.
HER love of the Irish language also began early, during her primary school days at the Presentation went in Terenure, where the nuns were very committed to Irish". Later, as a teenager, she adored going to Irish College during the summers at Carna, in Co Galway "Getting out of the city was magic. I loved Connemara and I was good at speaking Irish."
Although her favourite subjects at school were English and History when it came to applying for UCD, she plumped for Celtic Studies "No one from my family had been to college. I felt that people doing English and history would be very confident and I wasn't. I knew the English and History classes would be large, full of people who were, I was sure, natural debaters, headed for the L and H. The Celtic Studies class was smaller."
But she was not, and never has been, the type who gives in to nerves "I've been doing things I've been frightened of all my life. I'm not the sort of person to stay at home and do my knitting." She did a BA and went on to complete an MA and a PhD, surviving largely on grants and scholarships. For many years now she has been in great demand as a visiting lecturer in universities all over the US, notably Harvard, where she was a visiting professor in 1992-3. She is also director of the interdisciplinary M. Phil programme of Irish Studies at UCD.
She got the idea for her PhD while living in Carna and recording songs for Breandan Breathnach who was collecting traditional music for the Department of Education "I went around on a heavy black bike with a big old reel to reel tape recorder strapped to my back. It could be embarrassing, going up to men in pubs and asking if I could record them. Finally I met Maire an Ghabha (who is still alive, now in her 90s) and her sister, Brid. They were lovely ladies. I used to go to Maire's kitchen in the afternoons and record their songs. Their repertoire was full of religious songs, not associated with authoritarian religious teaching, but learned from their grand mothers and very much part of their everyday lives.
"When I went to Brittany on a travelling scholarship later, I found that there were similar songs in Breton and that this like the laments for the dead that I had heard in Carna, was part of women's folklore. It was subversive of the pieties and authoritarian systems of education and the church, coming from a pre Famine, family based oral tradition." Her PhD, published in 1984 was entitled Caoineach no dTri Muire (The Lament of The Three Marys).
TWICE married and twice divorced Bourke's one regret is that she did not have children. "I think that is why so many of my stories are about childhood. I realised that I wouldn't be able to tell my childhood to my own children, so I decided to write it down instead."
Several of the stories in By Salt Water feature a young girl called Una Fitzsimons, whose forays into the world we are invited to share, from her witnessing of what really happens in a slaughterhouse to her sexual molestation at the hands of a youth she meets while out fishing for pin keens. Una is a winning mixture of innocence and wisdom the sort of child many of us remember being, in her determination to decode the mysteries of the adult world and to resist, in small but significant ways, the injustices she detects therein "I would say I was one of the medium bold girls. Not one of the really bold ones."
The recurrence of Una in several of the stories is reminiscent of a similar device used by New York short story writer Grace Paley as is Bourke's wry, intimate, concise narrative voice. She counts Paley's work as influential also that of Alice Munro and Mary Lavin "Theirs is the art that conceals art you believe every word they say."
She likes the short story form, because "while the novel is linear, about what happened next, short stories are about how it feels while things are happening. I often think that a good short story is like a beautifully made jacket as well finished on the inside as on the outside."
Certainly her technique involves pockets of imagery that prove deeper and more cunningly crafted as the story progresses, culminating in a disarming last sentence which neatly joins the layers together.
Like Mary Lavin, she writes particularly poignantly of widowhood, and how women seek comfort in each other's company to survive the pain of loss. The last story in the collection, Mayonnaise To The Hills, finishes on a uniquely upbeat note, however. The newly widowed Lucy is told by her friend Eithne to seek solace in the sensual awakening offered by the mountainous landscape of the Kerry coast. Rather than accepting the old stereotyped image of the land as female, Eithne has formed her own erotic relationship with the land "It doesn't matter whether it's a man or a woman, the land can just do it to you. I once had an orgasm just sitting on a rock up there," she says.
Bourke has written two short stories in Irish, one of which, Inion Ri na Cathrach Deirge, is now on the Leaving Cert syllabus.
"Although I want to write a lot more stories in Irish, I'm not a native speaker, so I am less confident of my ability to write the sort of dialogue that people would realistically speak. What I do know about are the old stories and songs, so this is the material I use when I'm writing fiction in Irish."
THIS material, which gives her work in Irish a flavour of magic realism's also a significant lynch pin for, some of her stories in English. In Deep Down, the narrator finds herself telling a medieval tale to a young man who is trying to seduce her in his car. Although she is tempted, she stalls for time by recounting to him how a congregation in Clonmacnoise was surprised to find a boat in the sky above the church, with its anchor caught in the church door. The young man responds with a strange tale told to him by his grandfather of fishing a fully clothed live baby out of the sea, and being threatened with a curse by the mother for hooking her child out of its cradle.
Diverse explorations such as a meditation on the similarities between salt harvesting in Brittany and turf cutting in Ireland also creep into the stories in By Salt Water, mined from Bourke's life of travel and her magpie inability to focus exclusively on any one subject for too long "I don't like the idea of being single minded, and a lot of the things I've experienced have no expression in my academic work. Fiction brings to light things that are otherwise invisible."
As we linger over our mugs of tea at her kitchen table, she concludes "I've always thought that somebody should write a book called `Anyway', about the stories you tell when you're sitting around the kitchen table, talking to people, and you keep saying `Anyway'. The phone rings, you get up to answer it, and you come back and say `Anyway' and start all over again. That's how I started writing short stories. It was fragments from the Anyway."
