Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane, as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. Recently we spoke with the Irish scribe from his home in County Sligo on Eire’s west coast about his latest work, The Heart in Winter.

Why did you want to be a writer in the first place?
I do think it’s genuinely vocational. It is a calling – kind of an insistence in an annoying way. I think a lot of people have the impulse to write poems or elsewise as teenagers, and a lot of people managed to get past that.

They grow up.
But some of us don’t. Some of us persist. It was a classic kind of situation as a kid in school, I was always told I had a fluent writing style in my little essays and whatnot. I kind of I knew I sounded like myself on the page from a very young age, and I knew my personality transmitted onto the page in some way. When you have that, it helps…as writers tend to be not very good for anything else. I was always inclined, however I didn’t get fully serious about it, I guess, until even now. I was working as a journalist and I didn’t get fully serious about writing fiction until I was well into my 20s. I had the impulse, but not discipline. The discipline took a while.

Journalism is a great field for discipline.
A journalistic background for fiction writers used to be very common, and now it’s quite rare, because fiction writers do MFAs and whatnot. I have never been near a writing workshop in my life, except when I was giving one. One thing journalism does as a background, however, is that it takes a lot of the preciousness out of writing. You can always do it regardless of where or what time of day it is, or what kind of condition you are in, or what is going on in your life. You can always get words down on the page. It fosters something good and pragmatic in somebody who wants to write books, because most of the time when you are writing fiction, it is not going very well – in fact, most of most of the time it is going badly. You just have to have that really stubborn streak that makes you hang in there when you’d rather be doing anything else.

It really is a type of madness.
For anyone who writes, you are all different – you are many different types of a writer at the same time. It is very interesting to approach your practice as a writer in a kind of investigative way and try different things all the time. You mentioned Night Boat to Tangier. That was my nighttime book, the book I wrote in the middle of the night because I was going through a period of insomnia, and I just wasn’t sleeping very well. I thought, if I am not sleeping – screw it, I’ll just get up and go on the night shift. I will sleep in the morning. And it kind of worked a while. But it gave the book a kind of velvety, nocturnal feeling, I thought. That story would have been very different if I had told it in the morning time. Writers can sometimes get into a kind of a fixed routine or habit, and this worked for my last story. So, I brought about this story in the same way. But it’s a really good idea to mix up your practice. What I really like about sometimes collaborating with artists and other fields like visual artists or musicians or whatever is I think they’re more inclined to investigate their own way of doing things, to investigate their practice more than writers are. It’s a good idea to try and keep switching it up and trying different things. You own stories and themes will always be the same ones that keep coming out, but it can be good to try and approach them in different ways.

 There’s a certain architecture to what you’re doing.
Yes – with the novels. And, over time, you become more adept at the basic engineering. Often, you find writers’ fourth, fifth, and sixth novels to be where they are really hitting their stride. There’s a lot of basic building engineering – scaffolding kind of work – they have to learn about novels; how much you can take away, so you become more adept. I think it’s very important to be suspicious of your skills as well. If you suddenly feel like you have real facility and you can do this easily, it should never feel easy. It’s like David Bowie said: a great thing with any new artistic project, you should always feel like you’ve gone into the sea and you’re just out of your depth. You’re just a foot or two out of your depth, and ground isn’t far away, but you can’t quite feel it. There should be a little element of danger, an element of, ‘I don’t know what the hell I am doing here.’ Because if there isn’t, you’re not going to surprise yourself in any way. And surprise is a great energy giver. What’s important for me with any story, novel, or whatever it is, is to have a sense of where it is. The setting; a strong sense of the geography, and to have a vague sense of a destination, where it’s going. But I don’t want anything in the middle. I don’t know anything.

What is your creative process like?
The fundamental thing, the number one thing, is showing up. It’s being there. So, I am always in the vicinity of my desk, which is out in an old building up at the back of the house, for eight or nine hours a day. I am not in there writing all that time, but I’m there. I’m available, if it strikes. I’m always in there for an hour or two, often first thing in the morning – you’re still getting some of the stuff from your dreams…still in that kind of half-world, in between sleeping and waking, and you are open to positive suggestions. So I tried to get to the desk as quick as possible in the morning. You’re never afraid to embarrass yourself first thing – you’re not too careful. When you are fully awake and alert, the guards are up again – you are kind of watching yourself and trying to make stuff on the page at some level sound impressive and cool. But first thing in the morning, those filters aren’t there. You just go to it straight away – grab your coffee or cup of tea and get the get to the page or the laptop screen and just go see what comes out. You can tidy it and fix it later.

So, being creative on different levels of consciousness?
Writing fiction is an esoteric business because most of it isn’t really going on in the front of the brain, the conscious part. Most of what’s going on is in the unconscious. It comes from the same place as dreaming. You’re operating with the same part of the brain. It’s effortless when we’re dreaming, those scenes present themself, the dialogue presents itself, and it’s unimprovable. But to do that in your waking hours is kind of the goal – to go to that subconscious place. Your story is sorting itself and preparing itself all the time once you’re committed to it. And that commitment is very important. I remember when I finally and fully committed to writing – it was August 13th, 1999. I was on a cliff in County Cork. I was walking out, and I had been writing bits and pieces of fiction, but I kind of stopped in my stride and said, are you serious? Are you really going to do this? Is it going to be the most important thing in your life? Are you going to give all your effort to it? And I said, hell, yeah, I am.

What was the process like for A Heart in Winter?
It came from that same part of the County Cork coast in the late 1990s, that same summer. I was kind of shopping around for something to write a novel about, and came across these old, abandoned copper mines in West Cork. I read up about them and discovered that all the miners had gone to Butte, Montana. Subsequently, I thought, I’ve got to go to Butte, Montana. This is a great setup for a novel. But I went there and wrote 120,000 words, and it just wasn’t there. I didn’t have the characters yet. I forgot all about it, but all the while it was sitting somewhere back in my own conscious. Then, in late 2021, I was walking through the woods one day and I had a kind of a picture in my mind of a young couple riding double on a horse, and I thought, there they are. Those are the characters for that novel from a quarter of a century ago. They are just runaway lovers – it’s a really simple story. I had it, but sometimes it’s just a waiting game and you have to wait long enough. Any writer will tell you that there are always abandoned stories and abandoned projects, but they are never fully abandoned. They’re always there, somewhere in the back of your mind, just waiting for that little spark that’s going to set the hay shed on fire, that’s going to let it suddenly take off. And I probably have lots more things waiting back there that that might come out yet – or may not. The terrifying and wonderful thing about literary inspiration is that you never know when it’s going to hit, and it could hit at any minute. And the terrifying thing is, it might never happen again. You never know if this story you’re writing is the last good one you get. So, you just have to have faith in it, and in your process, and the skills you’ve picked up, and try and make your own little world by being true to it – being true to the idea of making up these crazy stories, saying this is of value, putting it out to the world, and see if people will get something out of that.

Is that why you still write?
The great thing about writing fiction is that it gives you the chance to live life twice. All that youthful endeavour wasn’t wasted. And all those fuzzy, kind of naughty years where you didn’t know your arse from your elbow, none of it is wasted. It’s all there. That’s your material.