Enright, Corrigan & the green writers’ conference
By Dana DuGan
Anne Enright has three rules: Stay out of Brooklyn. Stay out of London. Stay out of Dublin.
“I break those rules all the time,” she laughed. Somewhat to her surprise, she has spent most of her life in Dublin, where she is part of a growing number of celebrated women writers.
Enright, the first ever Fiction Laureate of Ireland, is one of those writers, who drops bon mots with abandon. When you watch her, she seems a wee bit bored. But, rather, she’s thinking about how to say things in a more succinct and poetic way. She’s self-editing, as we speak.
The 2016 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference had a distinctly Irish appeal. Besides Enright, there was a performance of W.B. Yeats’ work by the Irish Repertory Theatre of New York. Enright sat in as one of the readers of Yeats’ prose at the Sun Valley Pavilion. This performance included poetry and song, and a bit of dance, followed by a standing ovation in the Pavilion.
In explaining her rules, Enright said, “In those towns, people are so involved in their reputations. It maddens you to be around the froth of literary reputation too much.”
Enright’s novels are “The Wig My Father Wore,” shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Irish Literature Prize; “What Are You Like?” winner of the 2001 Encore Award; and “The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch” and “The Gathering” (2007), which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Novel of the Year. “The Forgotten Waltz” won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Enright’s latest novel, “The Green Road,” was published last year.
Enright’s breakout session was about writing 200 words a day.
“I looked over my output in the usual state of despair that most writers live,” Enright said. “If I get 200 words down – if they’re good words – it’s a successful day.”
Two hundred words sound doable, until you realize she’s talking about winnowing down from perhaps 1,000 words. Writing a book takes months and months of struggle to get a little, Enright said.
“The first year is the most difficult. It takes three years to make a book but people can read a book in a day. You can have joy and pleasure from the writing process, but people who expect it to be easy are very thrown by the reality of it. I’m Mrs. Reality Check.”
Enright’s latest book, “The Green Road,” has been on the bestseller list in Ireland for a year.
“I wanted to do a big, spacious book. You don’t know why a book takes off. I’m glad it’s finding its feet, for sure. I was interested in ideas of goodness and compassion and doing good.”
Enright has a sly sense of humor. It can creep up on you, like her beautifully crafted books.
“What is so terrible about sitting down and writing?” she said. “Self-censoring is paralyzing, particularly with women. The fact is most people won’t read it anyway, so it won’t matter.”
Awards, of which Enright has many, help.
“They’re good for business. Different markets view awards differently. American sells differently than in the UK. It’s a great place to sell books, the readers on the ground. The book club movement started here. Publishers work hard here.
Americans are so nice – so supportive,” she said. “I’ve been to a lot of festivals. This is more thoughtful.”
Maureen Corrigan
It’s her voice that is so recognizable. Maureen Corrigan (yes, half Irish) gave me a mini-lesson on book criticism, and on F. Scott Fitzgerald, and “The Great Gatsby,” of course.
Corrigan is best known as the longtime “Fresh Air” book critic on National Public Radio. She is also a lecturer and critic-in-residence at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and the author of two books: the memoir “Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading” and “And So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures.”
Corrigan has been a Pulitzer Prize juror and an AP essay judge. She calls herself a “gatekeeper.”
Born in Queens, New York, she attended Fordham University in the Bronx and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 1975, when she went with beloved English teacher to the Yeats School in Sligo, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heany was there.
“He would lead the American students on pub crawls,” Corrigan said. “We’d have to recite poetry and sing” in public.
“When I was at Fordham, I thought there was nothing better to be than an English professor, surrounded by people of like mind. But I was miserable at Penn. It was cutthroat with an atmosphere of contempt.”
Around the same time, she began writing book reviews for the Village Voice in New York City.
Corrigan turned what could have been a one-time assignment into a career.
She was attracted to, and learned from, the works of critics of an earlier generation, people like Pauline Kael and H.L. Mencken, “who wrote fully,” she said. “They were funny and enthusiastic. Irving Howe taught us that ‘enthusiasm is not an enemy of the intellect.’ I thought about their voices. You have to have substance to weigh in.”
Corrigan receives books from many outlets, and barring those that are self-published, she reviews 45 books a year.
“I look for the voice, something authentic in the setting,” she said. “I look for the power of the narrative and the internal coherency. I’ll take notes on a legal pad while I’m reading, or, if I’m lost in a book, I’ll put a sticky note on the page.”
(Note to aspiring writers: Aim for the sticky note).
Corrigan also was enthusiastic about who she’d met, seen and spoke to at the conference.
“It has literature, politics, psychology, the different modes of learning. People like Ryan Stevenson, Juliette Kayyem, Justice Stephen Breyer. I was speaking with Firoozeh Dumas. This was her first time and she said it spoiled her for all festivals afterwards.”
We talked Gatsby. She made me want to read it again, and then again.
“It’s so much with us,” she said. “It’s the greatest American novel about class, the drowning images and water, the fear of going under. I could spend a month on each page.”
Corrigan said she liked what Jonathan Franzen once said.
“It’s the central fable of America. It goes down so smoothly. It’s like whipped cream.”
Corrigan’s voice is like that, too. As she grew more passionate while discussing F. Scott Fitzgerald, her familiar voice became creamier, even with its Queens inflection. And so it beats on.