INTERVIEW: Dundalk author Jaki McCarrick finds power in place

Back in September we spoke with Jaki McCarrick about her new poetry collection, Sweeney as a Girl, for Louth Life magazine.

Acclaimed Dundalk writer Jaki McCarrick has earned recognition across multiple literary genres, from award winning plays like Leopoldville and Belfast Girls to her short fiction collection The Scattering, which was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and includes her Wasafiri winning story The Visit. Now, after over two decades of writing, she publishes her debut poetry collection, Sweeney as a Girl.

Heavily influenced by her years in Dundalk, she is quick to explain that the town and the border are never far from her mind when she sits down to write.

“Firstly, we’re on a border, and that is so fascinating. This sort of liminal space, your place between… maybe years ago, you could say your place between two cultures. But now you can’t really say that; things have blended much more.”

This in-between place, half here, half there, is something Jaki has carried since childhood. Born in London she moved to Dundalk with her parents in the late seventies.

“I’ve probably always been writing. I’m one of those who would have started at school. I went to the Louis which had a magazine called Inklings, and I was always writing in that. So I sort of always knew I was going to do something in writing.”

Her path wasn’t straightforward. She first turned to journalism, working for a music magazine in London before finding her way into performing arts. 

“I did a performing arts degree at Middlesex University in the mid 90s. I noticed that I was good at sort of putting physical theatre pieces together with text; I was always writing text. So that was my way into creative writing.”

Eventually, she found herself back in Ireland, studying for a Creative Writing Masters at Trinity College. It was there that old loves resurfaced. “I sort of went back to what I originally did… and that was poetry and short stories. So I rediscovered that whole journey.”

For Jaki, reading has always run parallel to writing. “I had a summer where I was very sick and I was home, so I just went through [a lot of books] at quite a young age. I think I was about 14 or 15 and I read War and Peace and the Russian writers. I read a lot of French writers. And then Southern American writers, which I really loved as well, like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.

“I do really love the Southern Gothic genre. People would say that it’s similar to that Ulster Gothic sort of strand of writing and I would agree.”

While the gothic shades her fiction and short stories, it’s the local landscape that often roots her poetry. Her new collection, Sweeney As A Girl, emerged from a single poem that pulled everything else into focus. 

“It was when I wrote the poem Sweeney As A Girl, which reimagines the character of Sweeney, the mythical king, as a female. I thought to myself, I really like this poem. It’s very sort of anarchic, different, and other people really liked it.”

Once that poem existed, “suddenly, a lot of the poems that I had written about, you know, being in Dundalk, or maybe some references to the Cooley Mountains or whatever, seemed to link up. Even poems about my own past… seemed to match, seemed to link into this theme about this character who’s exiled in the Cooley Mountains.”

Borders and memory, physical and imagined, run through her plays too. Her acclaimed play Belfast Girls has a remarkable knack for staying relevant. “It just seems to hit on themes that are in the world and seem to be in the play,” she says. 

“For instance, in 2016 when it was in America the whole Me Too movement was out so that  struck a more feminist strand of the play, and there's Black Lives Matter [one of the characters is mixed race], these things  were always mentioned in reviews, especially when it was on in the States. So it just seems to hit.”

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Despite her wide-ranging output, Jaki is adamant about how she likes to work, even if it doesn’t always work out. “I am somebody who likes to do one thing at a time and do one thing well. I like to get one thing done and then move on to the other thing. I don’t mind if, like, for instance, I finish this poetry collection and then go on to another piece of writing. But it just so happens that every now and then things…you know, there are demands made on you, that this has to be done and that has to be done.”

Currently working on the final draft of her novel and a new play her plate stays full, but does she pause to look back and reflect on how impressive it is that the girl who wrote for Inklings now has a nationally touring play and countless other accolades? 

“Not really. I just do the work and if it’s good and it strikes a chord, and somebody likes it, that’s all great, but if they don’t, I still have to do it, and I still have to give my commitment to it.”