An Interview with Dearbhaile Houston by Lottie Hall and Jessica Holmes

Dearbhaile Houston is an Irish writer from County Galway, whose work has been published in Banshee, The Dublin Review, The Irish Times and Tolka. Her short story ‘Credo’ was highly commended in the Short Story of the Year category for the 2021 An Post Irish Book Awards. She received an Agility Award from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2022 to complete a short story collection and in 2023 to complete a novel. She has a PhD in English Literature from Trinity College Dublin, where she currently teaches. She lives between Dublin and Montréal.

In 2024, Nova sat down with Dearbhaile in Bristol and spoke to her about her writing process, publishing experiences, and her favourite writers. We followed up with a few more questions over email.

Can you tell us more about your writing? What kind of stories do you write? What are the main themes and interests in your writing?

I write about women, mainly. I’m interested in relationships and, in particular, notions of motherhood from the perspective of women who aren’t mothers. I’m also interested in money: not having it and wanting it. Maybe more broadly, I’m interested in anxiety – how it can be quite absurd and melodramatic as a way of viewing the world. That’s probably the thing that links all of my work, I would say.

When did you start writing, and when did your work start getting published?

The age I started writing properly, and not just keeping diaries and writing stories for school, was probably around seventeen. I took some evening classes in creative writing during a year out between finishing secondary school and starting university, which was a great introduction to workshopping and feedback and being in a public setting with my writing rather than keeping it hidden in a notebook or Word document. After that, I submitting and publishing stories and poems in fits and starts. I won some national writing prizes during my undergraduate and got published in student journals and some (now sadly defunct) online journals. My first print journal publication outside of student-run ones was a story in Issue Three of Banshee journal in 2016, which felt like the start of a certain kind of writing journey.

What role have literary journals played in your writing life? What are the differences between them? What has it been like to work with the different editors?

Literary journals have been a way of motivating myself to write, particularly when I was younger and had less time/means to write. They offered three things: a deadline; the promise of glory (ha!); and sometimes payment (ha-ha!) – the deadline being the most important of these motivations. When your work is accepted by a journal, it’s also a confidence boost; it encourages you to keep going. It can lead to things like reading at a launch or being introduced to other writers and feeling like part of a community. Working with different editors has always been enjoyable for me – I’ve not yet had a difficult time working with an editor on a story. It’s interesting to see how editors differ in their style. Some editors I’ve worked with are pretty hands-off, changing a word or shifting around commas, and others are more involved. It’s always fun when they are more involved in the process and come to you with changes and ideas because then you get to talk seriously about your writing, which doesn’t always happen, given that writing can be so solitary.

A lot of writing and publishing experiences appear to be about submitting your work and dealing with rejections. Can you speak a bit about these in relation to your writing experience? Do you have any advice?

Yes, rejection is just part of the game. Sometimes the writing’s not up to scratch and sometimes it’s purely pragmatic, what I think of as ‘good rejections’: lack of space, the story doesn’t fit with the issue’s theme, or the editor’s taste. The hope is that you get a yes or two interspersed between the noes to keep you going. I’m currently at a point in my writing where I’m getting almost exclusively ‘good rejections’. I haven’t had a piece of writing published since 2021 but editors love my work, just not right now! Similarly, my novel is on submission at the moment and is also getting ‘good rejections’. I think no matter what there will be fallow times when it comes to having work published and my advice is to get comfortable with that fact. Frankly, it’s a pain in the arse but there’s a huge amount of ceding control to the whole operation that happens once you send your work out. I would say there’s no point pretending the rejection doesn’t hurt, because it does, but try not to dwell on it. I like watching The Paris Review’s ‘First Time’ interviews, particularly the one with Christine Schutt, for a bit of perspective. Keep writing – it’s not over until it’s over.

Can you talk more about your experiences of getting an agent, and what the relationship has been like for your writing?

Getting an agent was an easier process for me than I had imagined. When I finished my short story collection, I queried one or two agents, sent the manuscript, and got the ‘thanks but no thanks’. About a month later, I was put in touch with Marianne Gunn O’Connor by an editor of a journal that had published one of my stories. From my first conversation with Marianne, I felt she understood what my writing was attempting to do and above all, she was enthusiastic about it in a way that I sometimes struggle to be. She also spoke very pragmatically about the nature of the industry, which I appreciated. Having this encouragement and know-how has been crucial for me – I wouldn’t have written the novel without Marianne’s guidance, and now in this tricky ‘on submission’ stage she’s been a great support and a necessary barrier between me and the rejections.

How much does having work in literary journals change an aspiring writer's journey?

Literary journals are a place to showcase your work. Editors and agents read them and actively look for new talent there. It’s not to say that you can’t pitch an agent or publishing house without previous publications: plenty of writers do this and I’m aware I’m answering this with a literary fiction bias. Publishing in literary journals is only one particular route (and not necessarily an instantaneous one) but it is one that makes your writing visible to an audience of people who might want to support your work further.

You’ve written both a novel and short story collection. Do you prefer one form over the other?

After thinking I’d only ever want to write short fiction, somehow writing a novel has made me love the novel. The novel gives me space to spend time with characters, flesh them out, and the space to do the thing that novels can do that short stories can’t do (or readers prefer them not to) which is be unruly and even at times pointless, or plotless.

Regarding your writing, how do you document your descriptions? Do you keep notes throughout the day, or do the ideas naturally come to you when you sit down to write?

It really depends. I keep notebooks, which are vital to me for keeping track of ideas and scenes, particularly for the novel, or when feeling stuck or bored. But where I am most liberated is in the Notes app on my phone. I think it’s because I tend to think about what I’m writing when I’m walking or commuting somewhere so it’s more pragmatic and – I’m sorry – less pretentious than carrying around a notebook, which feels a bit like cosplaying Joan Didion and requires a certain amount of palaver. So, it’s either in the notebook or the Notes app but everything gets put into the same Word document when I sit down to write. At which stage the ideas either flow or they don’t but having a daily and somewhat spontaneous collection, however small, of descriptions or ideas or dialogue eases the first half hour of facing the page.

Your story ‘Viscera’, as well as a failing relationship, includes vivid descriptions of juxtaposed images, such as tender gestures and butchered animals. Was this stylistic choice intended to create a specific mood in the piece, and to make your readers feel a certain way?

I think with a lot of these images I was trying to convey the tension in a relationship that’s just about to break. It’s not a dialogue-heavy story at all and Maeve, through whom everything is focalised, doesn’t speak to her boyfriend Dan at any point. They’re almost beyond meaningful communication so something in the story had to speak on their behalf. It’s a concise story too, in terms of word count, so the images and descriptions are all shortcuts to Maeve’s emotional reality. Realising, as Maeve does in the story, that the person you love is in love with someone else is devastating and, in this case, jarring in such a mundane way in that Maeve’s realisation has been a long time coming. That’s why a lot of these images (roast chickens, babies, raw meat, a knife) are on the face of it quite ordinary.

Who are your favourite writers, and who do you feel that your work is most influenced by?

An impossible question! There are writers who make me envious of their style and clarity (Anne Enright, Ayşegül Savaş, James Baldwin), who make me cry (Marilynne Robinson, Shirley Hazzard), who I feel just get it (Elif Batuman, Lisa Halliday, Lorrie Moore)…I’m leaving out so many writers. I don’t really know who my work is most influenced by – I mean, everyone and no one. It’s as much influenced by people who aren’t writers but who nonetheless use language in interesting ways – my mother and grandmother being two examples. I really gravitated towards poetry in a way I haven’t in a long time while writing the novel: Hannah Sullivan, Frank O’Hara, Jorie Graham. I think their influence can be felt in the writing more than any particular novel or prose writer.

Illustration by Sky Costello-Ross