Sometimes I find myself in the throes of writing agony. I don’t like the term writers’ block because it implies a certain impermanence. But what is vernacularly referred to as writers’ block, is part and parcel of the creative act itself. Anyone who’s tried to do something creative for an extended period of time can vouch for this. No one can exactly figure where creative impulse comes from, just that you have to be ready to receive it when it does. I was in one of these meandering phases where I couldn’t write much of anything. I’d abandoned a long story that took a few months to write, because of its lack of pulse, and overt dogmatism, and I had resolved to just write academic papers for the time being. This was before I spoke to 2023 Booker Prize Winner Paul Lynch.
I wanted to chat with Paul before he won the Prize. I’m a sucker for Irish fiction, and came across Prophet Song during a binge of Dublin-based novels. The novel fundamentally reimagines the city of Dublin in an ambiguous and ahistoric time-period where autocratic forces have come to power. These forces have clearly systematically disbanded the functioning democracy. The story is exceptionally contemporary, but there are no historical references as to why the situation is the way it is. Lynch’s writing has been stuck into the umbrella category of dystopian fiction, but it’s really not a dystopian novel. As you’ll see from the reading he gives at the beginning, he juxtaposes a beautiful and plaintive prose style with horrific events to find meaning in the spaces between them. Lynch chronicles the methodical unraveling of a world through the lens of his protagonist Eilish Stack, a mother and scientist whose husband has been taken by the police forces of the new regime. Through this personal conceit, Lynch interrogates ideas of grief, unity, longing, and the veiled ways power is accumulated and utilized in space.
My conversation with Paul centered around the novel, but it turned into a poetic articulation of creativity. From the first question to the last his answers provide a picture of artmaking that quelled any writers-block induced self-loathing that I had, and led to tremendous creative inspiration that fueled a semester of writing prose and poetry. I’ve been lucky on this show to get many writers to speak candidly about their processes, and it’s clear Paul has thought deeply about the art he makes. We weave between the textual and the impalpable and create a vision for how art and fiction can function in contemporary times.
Recommendations
Louise Glück
Mary Oliver
Other References
Don DeLillo
Cormac McCarthy
Joseph Conrad
Louis MacNeice