Interview with Marita Conlon-McKenna
- Interview with Marita Conlon-McKenna
In December of 1993 on a visit to Ireland I asked Finian O’Shea to list some of the New Irish Writers for children. At the top of his list was Marita Conlon-McKenna, a writer I had never heard of. I should have because by that time she had won the International Reading Association Award for her book Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990), a story about three children surviving the Irish potato famine after the disappearance of their parents and the death of their baby sister. The story was continued in her book Wildflower Girl (1991), which saw the youngest child in the family, Peggy, emigrating to Boston where at age fourteen she went into service. The third book of this trilogy, Fields of Home (1996), follows the family’s fortunes in both Ireland and America.
By the time I actually met Marita Conlon-McKenna in 1995 at the Children’s Literature New England Institute held in Dublin, I had read her remarkable book about travelers, The Blue Horse (1992, winner of the Bisto Book of the Year Award) and had taught her book, Under the Hawthorn Tree, in a graduate course at Mankato State University. When I returned to interview her in December 1996, O’Brien Press had published six of her books, including Safe Harbour (1995), a book about Sophie and Hugh being sent from their home in London to their grandfather’s house in Ireland during World War II.
The year 1997 marks the one hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Great Famine, the impact of which was felt on the United States as well as on Ireland. Conlon-McKenna’s books about the experience make it accessible to children in both countries. One understands the horror in Ireland, the danger of crossing to America, the treatment of the Irish immigrants, and the living conditions for those left in an Ireland still controlled by the British. As Celia Keenan writes of Conlon-McKenna’s books, “There is an underlying sense of resilience, of self-reliance, and of enterprise in the poorest of people” (The Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books 72).
Conlon-McKenna’s book, The Blue Horse, vividly presents the life of a young girl who is part of a traveler family. When their home is destroyed by fire, their only recourse is to accept council housing and give up part of the traveler life. Access to information about traveler life is limited, and I had wondered how Conlon-McKenna had researched this. In her acknowledgments, she thanks those who took the trouble to talk with her. During my visit, one of those persons [End Page 379] dropped by and I could witness the friendship between them. Afterwards Marita explained how this book about a people who have few books written about them opened the understanding between traveler children and other children in the schools.
I first asked Marita if she could walk us through her writing process.
The writing process will come first of all with an idea. The idea sometimes will have been there for many years. I call my ideas seeds. I’m a great seed gatherer; I’ve become a gardener, I’m afraid. A seed could be something I’ve read about, something I’ve heard about, something someone has told me about their own life.
Do you write your ideas down or keep a journal?
I have seeds sitting there for many years, and sometimes I write them down. I met a little girl two years ago, a little girl called Elona and someday there will be a book with Elona in it because this little girl was very lonely; she was stuck in a class and she was an outsider. So ideas come from all over.
The way it usually works is that usually I start getting pictures and the characters really give pictures. All my books are character driven and the characters start giving me pictures. Something’s happening, something they’re doing, something they’re feeling and that is usually so strong that my first instinct is to write that; that...
