NEW VOICES credit: Cassie Mcreavy
Debut novelists Helen Fripp, Michelle Grierson, Hilary Hauck, and Eimear Lawlor journey into the past using research and imagination.
Helen Fripp
Hilary Hauck
Michelle Grierson
Eimear Lawlor
Dublin’s Girl (Head of Zeus, 2021) by Eimear Lawlor is the end of a journey that started in 2013, when she did a creative writing course at her local university and her second child, Ciara, told her “to do something with my life other than drinking coffee in town with my friends”. Shortly after Ciara was born, Lawlor continues, “I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, so I became a stay-at-home mum and left teaching. I was an avid reader from my early childhood, and our house was full of English literature and historical books.” She can remember that as a child her father “had been immensely proud of his aunt Vera McDonnell and her time fighting in the War of Independence, and especially after independence. Vera became the private secretary to Eamon De Valera, President of Ireland from 1959-1973.” However, Lawlor’s interest in her great aunt Vera came while on the creative writing course. Her cousin, who was researching their family tree, sent her “a copy of Vera’s statement to the Irish government in 1954.The Irish government took statements from everyone involved in politics in Ireland from 1912-1922, and they are online in military archives.” Reading Vera’s statement, Lawlor discovered that Vera “went to Dublin at 17 and worked for the political party Sinn Fein (which later branched out to Finna Fail and Fine Gael). She had been in a building under attack from students, delivered a gun to a priest, and was captured during the civil war and possibly going to be shot. The country was split into anti-treaty and pro-treaty. She was antitreaty and captured when delivering a letter.” At that point, “Eamon De Valera intervened, sending a letter saying under the Geneva Conventions, it was illegal to detain couriers. She was released.” 4
COLUMNS | Issue 97, August 2021
During the course Lawlor wrote a short piece, and this developed into a novel. “Vera never had any family, but I felt more comfortable changing her name to Veronica McDermott, and the story flowed.” Unfortunately, Lawlor’s daughter Ciara died suddenly in 2016. “Grief robs a person of so much, not just the person you have lost but also the person who you were. I couldn’t concentrate, let alone think of writing. But, I was pulled back to the novel in 2018 and looked at it again.” Hilary Hauck drew the inspiration for her novel from Pennsylvania’s coal history. From Ashes to Song (Sunbury Press, 2021), she explains, “is inspired by the true story of three Italians who immigrated from Italy to the US ninety years before I did. “I came to Colver, a small coal-mining town in Pennsylvania, because of my husband’s work. It wasn’t the America I’d expected, yet I was fascinated by how it brimmed with nostalgia. In its heyday, everyone here was an immigrant. The locals had a deep sense of their history; everyone had a family story to share.” There was one story told to Hauck by Irene Smylnycky that hooked her from the beginning. “Her dad was a musician, coal miner, and composer—a compelling combination. There was an intriguing love story, too. Irene had often thought her parents’ lives the stuff of novels. She generously gave me permission to write their story and adapt events to build a compelling plot.” For Hauck, it was almost, she says, “the perfect story for me to write, but there was one disconnect. My musical repertoire includes Chopsticks on the piano, and I once came third in a ‘worst singer’ contest. Yet here I was, tackling the story of a man who merited the title, Maestro. So talented, he would still the liveliest of dance floors with his legendary clarinet solo. He composed songs for young Irene, the ‘Shirley Temple of Colver,’ scores for weddings and other celebrations—rumor had it he even wrote a symphony.” Writing Pietro’s viewpoint was intimidating to Hauck until she realized that “he most likely learned music from a family member—in the story, his grandfather, Nonno. He had no classical training. In the evening, he’d perform; in the day, he was just another coal miner— an ordinary man. And so, instead of using terms such as overture, cadence, cantata, Pietro processes life around him through sound, expressing those sounds in terms even the less musically inclined can comprehend.” “Though not without challenge,” for Hauck the novel “was a joy to write, immersed in the setting where I now lived, following the journeys of people whose immigrant experience paralleled my own. It also pushed me far beyond my comfort zone, inspiring me to experience the world through a new lens—that of sound.” Sound and research were blended together by Michelle Grierson when writing Becoming Leidah (Simon & Schuster, 2021), which, she says, “was born out of my reverence for water.” “Even in landscapes that are bone dry,” Grierson can hear water’s call. “Some of my favourite places in the world are shorelines. To me, the ‘in-between’ space of sand and sea is a threshold: a magical portal that leads to realms unknowable, the mysteries of the deep singing like a chorus of sirens in my blood. Researching and writing Becoming Leidah felt like taking a long, luxurious bath; I soaked in tales of Norse gods, mythological creatures, and magnificent landscapes;
