Writers and Readers Network -Shaw

An interview with Maura D. Shaw

Interview conducted by Charlene Austin

Maura D. Shaw has been writing all her life, when she is not caring for her family, editing, and traveling to research her own novels. Her newest novel "The Keeners" took her to the land of her ancestors, Ireland. With her gift for storytelling, Maura takes readers on a heartrending journey to County Clare and into the devastation and grief of the 1840's potato famine, to live it with young Margaret Meehan as she keens for the dead and, with her rebel husband and the strength and courage of her own rebel heart, starts a new life in the new world.

Char: Maura, editor, wife, mother, researcher, speaker, you are a busy lady. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us on Writers and Readers Network.

Maura D. Shaw: Talking with writers and readers is one of the joys of my work. I learn so much from everyone. You can't be a writer if you're not a voracious reader, and often readers will take the risk of writing themselves. It's a scary step, but you can move back and forth between the two roles whenever you need to!

Char: Margaret's story is a heartrending and uplifting tribute to the strength and courage of the Irish people. "The Keeners" A wonderful title for this, I did not know about this ancient art until I read Margaret's story. Can you share with our readers a little about this ancient tradition and art?

Shaw: Keening was an ancient Celtic practice in Ireland, a way of honoring the dead and providing a way for the people to accept the loss and move through the grief. Because it was mostly an oral tradition, few keens were recorded in writing, but there are several famous ones from the 16th century that have been preserved. What's so interesting to me is that the traditional form of the keen--a kind of epic poetry, really--follows exactly the process of grief and acceptance that Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified in the 1970s in her book "On Death and Dying." We go from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to acceptance, and this is true of the ancient keens and of the one that I wrote for Margaret in the book. Keening died out in Ireland after the Famine and was not carried over to America. (But I remember that my aunt used to wail and fall off the chair at Irish wakes when I was a child.) A scholar in Ireland has written some interesting articles about how keening was used as a voice for the women who had no other way to express their opinions in a male-dominated society, and it was also politically subversive because the English oppressors could not understand the Gaelic language and thought it was merely shrieking howls. But it wasn't.

Char: Researching for new novels is always interesting and educational. I imagine traveling to Ireland, visiting there was wonderful. But, the history and devastation of the blight, that journey into history could not have been pleasant. What or who inspired this story?

Shaw: The Keeners was the surprising result of my effort to tell the story of a real person named Nora Connolly O'Brien, the daughter of James Connolly, a union organizer who led the Dublin Easter Uprising in 1916 and was executed. I met Nora when she was in her mid-eighties, because I was inspired by her book about her father and her own role as a young woman in the Irish rebellion. Before I could tell Nora's story in 1916, I wanted to go back to the roots of the Irish Famine, to tell Irish Americans what happened to their families and why the hatred of the British was passed down in our bones. No one wrote or talked about the Famine for nearly 150 years--it was similar to the Holocaust survivors who didn't pass their memories to their children. But the feelings are still there, and they affect us. We're always waiting for the next tragedy. I want to bring a sense of hope for the future to The Keeners, as it shows what true love (and hard work) can achieve. At the end of the book, Nora Connolly is only a young girl, but we'll hear more about her in the next volume.

And yes, some of the research in Ireland was heartbreaking, visiting the Famine graves that now lie underneath golf courses and the ancient tomb where my character Nuala Lynch lived (that part's based on a real woman named Biddy Rabbit), but it's such a beautiful place that I'd go back in a heartbeat!

Char: You have a strong supporting cast of characters, but the Keeners is Margaret's story. Who is Margaret Meehan?

Shaw: Margaret is a composite of the bright, true, loving, courageous women who emigrated to America and made a life for themselves and their families. She happens to be Irish in my novel, but her sisters came from all the countries of the world. Margaret also has a spiritual side, a gift for keening and healing, and she's wise in the ways of natural healing--as so many of our great-grandmothers were. She's brave enough to love a man who is danger personified, and to respect him for his commitment to freedom. She also tries to keep her sense of humor, without which we'd all be lost.

Char: "The Keeners" is a journey through not only Irish history, but he history of the Irish struggle to find and build a new home in a new land. Tom, Margaret's husband continues the rebel battle in the Pig Iron Factories of New York. I read you have more plans to share the history of the Irish battle for freedom and peace, tell us a little about what readers can look forward to in upcoming Maura D. Shaw works.

Shaw: Thanks for asking. The next volume of the trilogy will center on Margaret's great-niece Grace Meehan, who lives in Belfast and goes with Nora Connolly to serve as a volunteer nurse in the Dublin Uprising of 1916, and then escapes with Nora to America (smuggled out of Ireland dressed as boys) to tell the Irish Americans about the struggle for freedom. That's a true story I heard from Nora herself. The third volume carries the story forward to Northern Ireland in 1972, when Margaret's great-granddaughter Delia goes to Ireland and becomes involved in the IRA violence after Bloody Sunday. Years later, Delia's own daughter tries to bring the violence to a close when she goes to Ireland as part of the peace accord. I'm just hoping that by the time I write that book, the peace will be a reality. And of course the men that Margaret's descendents fall in love with are just as committed and dangerous as their rebel ancestor Tom Riordan was. I adore writing those characters. They're almost as much fun as pirates.

Char: You also write children's and young adult stories. Where can we find Maura D. Shaw works for younger readers?

Shaw: Yes, I write books that are meant to inspire young people to work for peace and justice in the world. Most are nonfiction, such as Ten Amazing People and How They Changed the World, but one that I'm most fond of is Owl's Journey, a book of historical fiction about a stone owl that travels through 400 years of American history. My website www.mauradshaw.com has information about those books.

Char: What authors have most inspired your writing?

Shaw: I love Maeve Binchy's stories of modern Ireland, because they're about the perils of love, too. And Mark Twain is probably the biggest influence, because he used his journalistic training to find the truth at the bottom of every story and then present it with humor, in a style that's accessible to readers of all ages--and continues to be after 100 years. My guilty pleasure is reading each new book by Janet Evanovich. My mom and I share them and pretend to be shocked by Stephanie Plum and Lula's antics.

Char: You are also an editor. What advise do you have for aspiring writers?

Shaw: I think that an editor's first job is to encourage writers to do the best work they can do--to tell the truth of their stories, as bravely as they can. It takes a lot of courage to write a book, and it can seem impossible when you first start out. But you have to be willing to write what you believe is real--whether in fiction or in nonfiction--because that's how you access your voice. You give your fictional characters real emotions from your own life, although of course you try not to violate the privacy of the people who might have been the source of those emotional experiences. (You don't want your mother to disown you or your ex-boyfriend to stalk you, believe me.) A writer learns to take the emotion and transfer it to a different situation in the book.

The other important advice is what every professional writer will tell you--just do it. Nothing gets written while you're standing around wringing your hands (trust me, I know). Sit down and do it. If you think it's awful on the first try, then don't print it out. But at least you've got a start. Fix it and keep going. None of us can afford to wait for the right moment to compose the most elegant sentence that ever appeared in print--we are driven to tell the stories of people that matter to us. My own motto is "Ever Onward."

Char: Where can interested reader purchase a copy of "The Keeners"

Shaw: The Keeners is now available, as of March 1st, from online booksellers and independent bookstores, as well as the major chains.

Char: Maura, again, thank you for sharing your time with us on Writers and Readers Network. I look forward to learning more about Maura D. Shaw and "The Keeners" in our upcoming chat.