Few writers explore the workings of the human heart and the complexities of emotion more deftly than Tessa Hadley and Claire Keegan.

Over morning coffee and pastries in the book festival’s Spiegeltent, both writers read from their latest collections and then embarked on a spirited enquiry into the nature of their work and the power of the short story. They also discovered halfway through that both of their collections feature stories with eggs in.

Hadley read first, from her story ‘The Enemy’ (taken from her collection Sunstroke), in which a woman in her 50s looks back to her days as a student radical. Caro – ‘sexy, defiant, capable’ – causes a stir at a revolutionary meeting when she turns up wearing a trouser suit. It is a good and funny reminiscence of a time gone by, when revolutionary organisations couldn’t agree on how to organise a protest, ‘girls really did get asked to make the tea – and really did make it’, and a wolf-whistle was accepted as an affirmation rather than an insult. When Caro is berated by the group’s leader for her choice of attire, she is angry, but also ashamed of her bourgeois appearance.

In contrast, Keegan gave us a measured, almost mesmeric reading of ‘The Parting Gift’, a quiet, terrible tale of abuse in rural Ireland that is about ‘running away … and misery’. There is a sense in Keegan’s writing that she has whittled away at her stories until only the essential elements remain: seemingly simple phrases such as ‘the cattle dealer’s eyes, taking it all in’ and ‘he gives it to you when he knows you thought you’d get nothing’ convey a world of suspicion and pain in the merest blink of time.

Keegan, however, was quick to condemn the notion that she is drawn to dark issues in her writing. ‘I’m often told I’m dark,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone who doesn’t live without pain in some way. Books without pain don’t interest me, but I do think lots of my stories are hopeful – people are coping.’

‘Happiness,’ she explained, ‘writes white. Pain is inarticulate.’ For Hadley, the opposite is true: ‘I think often pain writes white. We have a thousand clichés for pain – the secret is to avoid being bland.’ She went on to say that there is funny to be found in the darkest places and dark in the funniest places.

Keegan was eloquent about the role domestic territory plays in her writing. ‘It is a huge part of our lives. I am very interested in what people do at home when they are alone. Usually it’s very little. So much of life isn’t lived – our private lives are going on in our heads. This is why reading is like nothing else. I’m drawing the dots but the reader is linking these dots with personal thoughts.’

So how easy is it to put these stories together? ‘Let’s not think about it,’ said Keegan with a sigh, before adding ‘it takes ages. I write 30 drafts of a story – it’s more intense than a novel.’ Hadley defended the novel: 'There should be places you can relax in a novel, which you can’t do with short stories. The best novels don't have thinness; they sustain their thinking. I can throw things into a short story and never mention them again, which I can't do in a novel.’

Keegan took up the theme, quoting Frank O’Connor’s dictum that there is something ‘train-journeyish’ about the novel. She likened it to a marathon: stop for water, go up a hill. The novel is more willingly told and requires, as Alistair Macleod said, 'a sustained variation of pace.'

In contrast, short stories are told, according to Keegan, with some reluctance. ‘I like the resistance in the telling. I like making the reader work hard to get everything out of the story.’ After hearing so much about the creative process behind both authors' stories, it seems only right and proper to make the effort.

(August 2007)

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