The Intuitive Choices and the Surprises of Writing: An Exclusive Q&A With Colin Walsh, Author of Kala

By Colin Walsh / July 25, 2023 at 1:56 am

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Kala: A Novel

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Hardcover $25.20 ~~$28.00~~

Readers of both Sally Rooney and Tana French will be capitivated by this electric debut novel. When the remains of a girl who disappeared years ago are found in a small Irish town, three estranged friends find themselves examining their shared pasts as well as their role in her disappearance. This unputdownable book is both a page-turning mystery as well as a nuanced look at the bonds of our youth, and how they echo through our lives. Keep reading for a Q & A with Colin Walsh, author of Kala as he tells us about the intuitive choices of writing and the things that suprised him as he wrote this story.

As a writer of both short fiction and now a debut novel, is your writing process/approach different for each form?

Formally, I think the short story is as close to the poem as it is to the novel — every sentence of a short story needs to carry a large concentration of voltage. But in a novel, you need to modulate your intensity a lot more. Like, you can’t sustain the intensity and concentration of a short story over 400 pages — you’d give yourself a nervous breakdown, and the reader would start bleeding from their eyeballs.

But in terms of the writing process, short- or long-form, my work usually begins the same way. The initial spark is often an image or moment, and the image/moment has a heavy pulse of feeling. I spend a lot of time making notes around that image/moment, and at that point I think the whole story is already churning about beneath my thoughts, marinating with whatever it was that attracted me to the initial image in the first place. Eventually, I type out the notes I’ve been gathering, and even in the act of doing that I begin to play with the notes, tweaking a sentence here, an idea there. The fragments gradually expand, and hopefully they begin to reach out to each other and (I know this sounds mental) sort of vibrate. That’s when I know I’m ready to really start.

That intuitive approach (which can get you a long way through the writing of a short story) was essential to writing Kala, but not sufficient. A novel is so much vaster than a short story in terms of scope, dimension and sheer commitment. As a process, novel-writing means you simply can’t be ‘inside’ the story’s territory all the time; you need to be making and remaking large maps throughout.

The town of Kinlough acts almost like a character in and of itself in the book. How did you develop such a vibrant and complex world/culture and interweave it into the story in a way that made it feel like it had its own agency?

I want to give a very honest answer to this, because your question echoes something I’ve heard a lot about the book, and it raises a deeper topic that I’m still wrapping my head around!

The more straightforwardly satisfying ‘answer-to-an-interview-question’ would be this: I think the idea of having a fictional town might have originated with a Schiele painting I saw many years ago. The painting depicts various streets, houses and bars in Vienna. But objectively speaking, the painting’s all wrong. Like, in terms of the distance between locations, the proportion of one object to another, everything, it’s in no way an accurate representation of the Vienna ‘out there’ in our shared world. It’s more like a collage of all the places in Vienna that carried particular resonances for Schiele, a map of the Vienna that lived in his heart. That idea always stuck with me, of not being beholden to the objective physical reality of a place in a work of art, of staying true to a place’s emotional reality. I do think that Kinlough is an expression of something like that for me. There’s also a sort of mythic and cinematic permission you grant yourself when you invent your own setting. Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Stephen King’s Derry, loads of writers have done this.

But here’s the more honest answer: when my agent first sent Kala out to potential publishers, it was the first time anyone other than my agent had read the book. It was jangling to have strangers reading and commenting on this word document that had been so private for so long, but the thing I really couldn’t understand was the fact that all these people kept talking so much about the novel’s ‘sense of place.’ I was baffled. I’d never once thought about Kala in terms of its sense of place. Obviously, the book is entirely saturated with place, but I couldn’t see this myself, in the writing of it. And I think this says something larger about how writing works. It’s like the most elemental aspects of a piece of work are not something you consciously create for that piece of work. Kinlough is totally elemental to Kala — it wasn’t a distinct thing I had to create within the horizon of the novel, it was the very horizon through which every part of the novel came. I know how woo-woo that sounds, but it’s the truth.

This book has such an intense focus on the inner workings of characters — how did you develop them in such a visceral way? Did the characters surprise you at all while you were discovering them?

Well, Irish people are very good at talking a lot in order to make sure nothing ever gets said. I think this helps the country generate a lot of writers; as a kid you become hyper-attuned to the subtext of every interaction. I was always watching the adults talk and I could see that — beneath the relentless torrent of cheerful chat, people joking, singing, etc. — there were all these other things taking place beneath what was being overtly said. That cut-off sentence. That weird stutter of silence in the room. The flutter across her face when he said that thing. I paid close attention to all this from a really young age, trying to decipher what was going on.

This has shaped the way I am, but it also shaped how I approached the narrators and characters of Kala. I spent a huge amount of time getting to know the deeper, private universes of Helen and Joe and Mush. And it’s like in life, the more you get to know people, the more they surprise you. For example, Helen was the earliest character to show up, and I knew her heart immediately, this ferocious tremor she holds deep inside her. But she caught me completely off guard again and again with just how abrasive she could be in hiding her fragility, not just from other people but from herself. This is a deep-seated aspect of her that is visible to someone like Mush, for example, but very obscure to Helen herself. I think that tension exists for all the characters in the novel — what goes seen and unseen within them and beyond them.

When a character surprises you like this, it’s a galvanizing experience. There’s a real sense of the story pushing back at you, insisting on itself. I’ll never forget where I was the day that Donna and Marie, Mush’s cousins, walked into the book. I couldn’t have planned for them, they came out of nowhere, and they just walked through the door of that café and brought something like the entire novel with them.

Joe’s perspective is written in second person which isn’t something we frequently see in novels. We have our theories of why you might have done this ranging from his relationship with himself to his relationship with alcohol, but we’d love to hear from you: why is Joe’s perspective written in second person when Mush and Helen are both written in first person?

The short answer is that in the moment I first put Joe in the second person, something immediately went ‘click.’ It was like, straight away, no hesitation or doubt, I knew I had him. He was totally there. That creative decision came from an intuitive, pre-intellectual place, but — to echo your question — immediately I knew that the reason the second person worked probably had something to do with Joe’s relationship to himself and his relationship to alcohol. More than anything, it’s an expression of the degree to which he triangulates his relationship to himself through the eyes of others. An incredibly unstable position to be in.

You know it’s funny, my girlfriend is a therapist, and a few weeks after she read the first draft of Kala we were chatting about some books she was reading for work. At one point she was discussing the psychoanalytic concept of a hysterical personality structure. Nowadays, people hear the word ‘hysteria’ and think of Victorian patriarchal gaslighting or whatever, but that’s not what hysteria means in psychoanalysis. A hysterical personality structure in one where you don’t have any firm internal anchor of self; you’re constantly grasping outwards, towards others, hoping they will confer a solid identity upon you. Tell me what I am. Am I what you say I am? Who am I? Am I really that thing? Please tell me what I am. My girlfriend said, ‘It’s like Joe in your book. He’s a pure case study in hysteria.’ And I can see that completely. He’s under constant assault by the fluctuating gaze of the other, an internal voice that does not subjectivize him an ‘I’, but regards him as an object, a ‘you’.

But this ties back to what I was saying earlier, about how the most fundamental aspects of a story often come from an unconscious, intuitive place. I’d already written the entire book by the time my girlfriend and I had that conversation. So again, this is all post-facto reasoning for why that intuitive writing decision worked, but the decision itself was made purely on the level of gut certainty: ‘Second person feels right. This is Joe.’

As a bookseller, we simply must ask — what are you reading and recommending right now?

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My Phantoms

By Gwendoline Riley

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Paperback $16.95

The contemporary novel I’ve recommended most over the past year or so is My Phantoms by the Manchester writer Gwendoline Riley. It charts the (attempts at) relationship between a woman and her mother, two people who can never quite reach one another. Riley is mercilessly clear-eyed about all the knotted ambivalences and contradictions of the human heart, but that doesn’t convey just how darkly funny My Phantoms is. The dialogue is literally laugh-out-loud hilarious. Only, while you’re busy laughing away to yourself, Riley is quietly slipping all these blades between your ribs. Then, slowly but surely, Riley starts twisting all those knives. And you’re still laughing, but it’s agony. The book was only recently published in the US, and it’s a total marvel.