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I first met Dionne Irving in a workshop at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and I was impressed not only with her talent but also with her engagement and kindness. I’ve gone on to have the pleasure of publishing her first book, the brilliant historical novel Quint with 7.13 Books in 2021. Dionne is that rare writer who is able to combine innovation, an ear for the musicality of language, and attention to the truths and nuances of her characters’ existences.
Dionne Irving is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Her work has appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. She is currently Associate Professor in the Creative Writing Program at Notre Dame.
I was pleased to have this chance recently to talk with Dionne about her debut short story collection, The Islands, just released by Catapult.
Hasanthika Sirisena
In the first story “Florida Lives,” the protagonist realizes she has a lot in common with a white couple she had up to that point looked down on. In “The Gifts,” a middle-aged Jamaican woman discovers a devastating truth about her British lover while reading his obituary. It might be easy to think of your stories—particularly given the title of your collection—as being about isolation. But often your characters find moments of uneasy connection and those actually prove far more shattering than their loneliness. How aware were you as you wrote about finding this pattern of connection and disconnection?
Dionne Irving
I think that there is something about immigration that begets a kind of existential loneliness. We find moments of connection, of course—but for me, at its core, immigration demands the making of a life in liminal spaces, of a life forever caught between two or more “worlds,” never fully apart from—or a part of—either. So even in moments of connection, that liminality haunts you and, in some ways, defines you. The thing about immigration is that it demands that you can’t ever really go home again; the process of immigration does fundamentally change a person on all levels of their being. A person has changed; home has changed; memory is not reality, and that memory may not even be real—at the very least, it’s certainly not objective.
From my perspective, the protagonists in both “Florida Lives” and “The Gifts” have an idea about themselves that is informed by their sense of having chosen their isolation, a decision from which they derive a kind of power. And because of this sense of power—however accurate or inaccurate that perception—when they do connect with another, it upends their sense of self in some way.
Hasanthika Sirisena
You write mostly from the point of view of women of color. I thought a lot, as I read about the line, from Hélène Cisoux’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”: Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement. Would you mind reflecting on, elaborating on, the social and political forces pressing on these characters?
Dionne Irving
I really like Cisoux’s call to action here, and I firmly believe that women writers from all backgrounds are re-envisioning and re-imagining all of human history by centering the lives and experiences of women. Doing so, sadly, is very necessary, but it doesn’t seem to me that doing so is heroic. Rather, it’s simply realistic. Women are more than half of humanity and we have always shared narratives and images and ideas. Too many forces—intentionally and unintentionally—for far too long have marginalized women’s voices, and perhaps most particularly the voices of women who’re Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color. These women’s stories have historically existed only at the far margins and in the deeper recesses. I believe these women have always told their stories, but they’ve not always been heard, recorded, valued, or shared.
Hasanthika Sirisena
In The Islands you inhabit a wide range of characters seamlessly and convincingly. For example, the main character of “Weaving” is a boxer and you write about his life with acuity and depth. This must have taken a great deal of research, immersion, and, well, time?
Dionne Irving
That story did take a long time to get right, to get it to where it is. I kept at it because I just love boxing and I loved that character’s internal life. I don’t know why. I abhor violence of all kinds, but there is something about the sport that I find appealing and perhaps simultaneously appalling. Maybe those twin impulses pulled me toward this character.
The violence here was multilayered for me. There was violence in the ring, which is fascinating and, for a writer, dramatic. But the violence outside the ring, the many forms it takes—physical, mental, spiritual, emotional—were perhaps more interesting to me. I’m also drawn to the physical intimacy of the sport, bodies bumping up against each other, the begrudging admiration an opponent feels as a brutal punch lands. Boxing is different from football and hockey. All are violent. All visit profound violence on the opposition as well as upon the self. Without violence, none of these sports exist. No one would watch. But boxers stand face to face, nearly naked, and they try to snuff out the light in the other person’s eyes.
Hasanthika Sirisena
Your description of boxing just now is so real and visceral. How do you gain an entry point into the life of a character whose life is so different from your own?
Dionne Irving
My entry point in relation to any character—one I’m writing about or one I’m reading, watching, or observing—is empathy. I was watching The Crown with my partner recently, and at one point during an episode, he asked with disgust, “Am I meant to feel empathy for these people?” And my response was: “Absolutely!” That’s the starting point for me—empathy for the unlikeable or the foreign or the unfamiliar. How do we understand lives that are different from our own? How do we try to intuit other people’s experiences, to consider on some deep level what it means to be someone different from who we are, and to avoid judging that person?
Hasanthika Sirisena
Both your novel Quint and this collection of short stories tackle historical moments. In fact, I was enormously impressed by how much of the 20th Century The Islands covers and that it focuses on events, like the Panamanian riots, that aren’t addressed in contemporary American literature. What draws you to tackling history and particularly histories that aren’t well known in the States?
Dionne Irving
History can be specific to place, of course. And it’s so often understood based on geography—Canadian History, Chinese History, Mexican History. What I mean, I guess, is that Panama’s history is not different or disinterested or separated from U.S. history at that same moment. However, the narratives are different, and they are told, recorded, and understood differently. They must be. All narratives exist discrete from one another, but they cumulatively make up a chorus or symphony that is much more “accurate” than any individual articulation. We forget how interconnected the world is because we only hear or focus on one particular aspect of the greater song.
Hasanthika Sirisena
Finally, what short story writers or collections have you enjoyed in the past and also what do you see as the future of the short story as a form?
Dionne Irving
I love the flexibility of the short form. I love how it lends itself to experimentation and juxtapositions so unexpected they crumple me. I’m excited about so many collections that have come out in the past few years. A few of my absolute favorites, each of which is stunning in its own way: Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s The Heads of the Colored People, The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier, Karin Lin-Greenberg’s Faulty Predictions, Seeking Fortune Elsewhere by Sindya Bhanoo, as well as Nobody Gets Out Alive by Leigh Newman and Shit Cassandra Saw by Gwen E. Kirby. The fact that these books, each shockingly brilliant and different from the others, are all part of the monolithic idea of the short story speaks to the flexibility of the form, and the gorgeous multiplicity of voices and approaches. Short stories were my earliest and perhaps greatest love, and I continue to believe that some of the most exciting work being done right now uses the form. Reading Claire Keegan’s “So Late in the Day” this summer, I was blown away. That story haunted me for two or three days, and it still rattles away in my mind in one way or another almost every day. This little detail that Claire Keegan might have felt was thrown off or unimportant—although nothing in her work is thrown off or unimportant—was something that resonated with me, that stayed with me, that compelled my interest.
FICTION
by Dionne Irving
Catapult
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