Katherine O’Donnell
To celebrate Pride month, bookseller Demi interviewed Katherine O’Donnell who has recently published her debut novel ‘Slant’, which Demi is calling their favourite book of 2023 and discovered while attending the Irish Book Trade Conference in Cork earlier this year. Demi feels a whole lot of love for this book and is excited to share this ground breaking piece of Irish queer literature and interview with you 🏳️🌈
Why not listen to the Spotify playlist created for Slant by New Island Books while you read?
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What does a day in the life of Katherine O’Donnell look like?
I aim to get up before 7:30am – so my alarm starts going at 7:15 – if I get up on time I am meditating on-line with the Dublin Buddhist Centre until 8:30am – if I’m a bit late – I meditate for 40/50mins and then have breakfast which comprises coffee, kefir & fruit milkshake, my homemade granola. A good day would have me playing for 30 mins or so on my bass guitar – otherwise I’m straight into work and I don’t play the bass until just before I go to bed at 10pm where I read for a while before sleep.
My morning routine is the most considered part of my day as otherwise my hours are a blur of work and catching food on the run. When I say ‘work’ I mean all that I do as Professor of the History of Ideas at UCD Philosophy and I generally love almost all aspects of that varied work.
You have a background in academia. Slant is your debut novel and I can imagine it would have been quite a shift from the kind of writing you normally would produce. I hear that Slant started as a story to your friend – that you write stories for your friends. Can you share a bit more about this and the genesis behind Slant?
Slant started as three different short stories that I was unable to complete due to suffering from burnout. It was 2016 and I had been working very hard for years with the Justice for Magdalenes campaign and research group and I was well and truly shattered with exhaustion.
I started one story for friends who had devoted themselves to working on canvassing on the marriage equality campaign in Ireland in 2015, it was basically written to contain some of the stories they told me of encounters they had while knocking on doors.
I started another story when I saw two young people fall in love with each other across a university seminar room one spring afternoon and I intended to pass that on to someone who I first met when I was in my early 20s.
The third story was about an Irish undocumented economic migrant, I called her Ro McCarthy, and she began as a reminder to Irish people that we have a long and recent history of young exporting migrant workers. I was living in Oxford at the time and was appalled at what I saw as the inevitable failure of their EU Referendum - what even BBC 4 was referring to rather gleefully as ‘Brexit’. I was worried that a similar narrative of hatred for economic migrants would take root in Ireland.
Those three stories merged in the character of Ro McCarthy and three failed short stories became the genesis of Slant.
I think Slant really hits a nerve on things – where and how far we have come as queer people – it feels classic, a part of history, and I’m confident it will become a favourite in Ireland and abroad, as it has for me. What are some of your favourite queer books? Are there any that informed your writing of Slant?
I have loads of favourite queer books. I also read queerly – so a significant number of books give me queer pleasure. The first draft of favourite queer books was far too long – let me just say that I love anything written by Sarah Schulman – her novels, non-fiction, histories and plays. And let me also list some of my favourite Irish queer and still living authors, (you will see that I have done my best to cut down my list, yet, I also worry that I am bound to have forgotten some important people).
We all know Emma Donoghue, Colm Tóibín and Frank McGuinness but not enough people have heard of Keith Ridgway (who is stellar), and Mary Dorcey who is famous in Ireland but not famous enough outside Ireland. Sonya Kelly is a wonderful (and comic) playwright.
The anthology Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, is marvelous, and contains selections by Sarah Clancy and Colette Bryce who are two of my favourite poets. The performance poet FeliSpeaks is electrifying – check her out on-line and join the long line of fans. For those who want to hear exquisite queer poetry in the Irish language Cathal Ó Searchaigh and Julie Field/Julie Goo are on YouTube. I have just finished reading two Irish queer novels, published recently, Eamon Somers’ Dolly Considine’s Hotel and Elysian by Ni Chorra and can highly recommend both.
Slant was explicitly informed by Schulman’s history of NY ACT-UP Let the Record Show, which is based on her monumental collection of oral histories and I also drew on Anne Maguire’s beautiful Rock the Sham: The Irish Lesbian & Gay Organization’s Battle to March in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Reading Slant, I laughed and cried – I couldn’t quite make sense of how I was feeling – I really cried, you know, laughing and crying at the same time. When I think about your book, it feels like I’m reflecting on my own memories somehow, rooted in nostalgia as well as a lot of hurt and pain. What was it like to write Slant? What were some of the challenges you faced?
I wanted Slant to hit the reader like Joni Mitchell’s Blue album – in other words, I wanted the reader to be swept up in something that seems simple and straightforward but has them spinning, before they quite realise it, along that faultline of union/loss, grief & joy.
I studied Latin in secondary school and was introduced to the complexities of how to understand Vergil’s phrase Sunt lacrimae rerum, (one of the three things I planned to have as a tattoo though I have, as yet, no tattoos!). Seamus Heaney eventually translated it best as ‘there are tears at the heart of things.’ So, there are tears of happiness, and tears of sadness and both sets of weeping recognise love found and lost. All comedy, like tragedy, involves human pain, our clinging to each other, our often-deluded striving for safety. The art that most engages me takes me to intersections where I experience that ambivalent charge of attraction and aversion and I wanted to create in Slant nothing less than that double-barrel shot.
Of course, I faced lots of challenges in trying to create that register. Lots of technical writing challenges – getting characters off chairs and to bed was sometimes was very difficult! I also had to learn how to modulate between a forensic, analytic, scalpel like approach to choosing which words to cut and include and that other weird ‘flow state’ of consciousness where I let myself be carried by a rush of rhapsodic emotion and writing. It wasn’t easy – and the roller coaster took years to ride before Slant was finally robust enough to put in your hands.
Tell us more about the title of your book – Slant. My understanding is that it’s a nod to a line from an Emily Dickinson poem, which features at the start of your book: “tell the truth but tell it slant.” What kind of role did Emily Dickinson play in your writing?
Beyond providing inspiration for the title and a wonderful poem that Ro and Jenny recite in parts which bonds them as friends, Emily D. does not figure hugely. We need to thank the various editors of Slant, such as the commissioning editor, Aoife K. Walsh, the superb Rachel Pierce, and the copy-editor, Susan McKeever, for finally and gently getting me to relinquish the copious amounts of intertextual references to many other works – just glimmers of which remain – little flecks of mica for the literary nerds.
What kind of advice would you give to someone like the narrator of your book, Ro McCarthy – to the queer readers of your book, to those figuring things out?
Find honourable, good people to be your friends – take some time in making sure that they are deserving of your trust and once you have found them - keep them.
Find some good questions to keep asking yourself for your lifetime and carefully plan for regular reflective time to ponder these questions to best orient your life. Questions such as what is happiness? What is love? What does it mean to love someone? What is a good life?
Find what works to restore your energies, and take the business of relaxation and renewal of your precious Queer selfing, very seriously.
For me, a few external things left indelible marks while reading Slant – the Posie Parker counter protest that took place in Auckland, New Zealand, where I’m from. A trans woman who was attacked in Cork just at the time when I arrived there. The protests that have been popping up in Ireland against the presence of queer books in libraries, to name a few, as well as the teacher Enoch Burke who was suspended for his refusal to recognise and acknowledge a trans student in class. And just last week I heard about a schoolboy from Navan who was brutally attacked for being gay. Prior to reading your book I wasn’t aware of queer experiences within Ireland. I’ve said that Slant reminds me of how far we have come in terms of rights and equality for queer people and then I’m also reminded that things fall back on each other, like history repeating itself – almost like one step forward is one step back, and I’m reminded of the fight we are up against. I’m not sure if I’m correct for thinking this and I wonder what you might have to say – do you share this feeling? How do you think today compares to the history your book takes us to?
We now have more straight allies in certain parts of the world but homo/trans/queer phobia, weaponized by sexism and misogyny (and intersecting with racism and ableism) remain predominant and powerful forces. These forces continue to blight and constrain our lives.
The cover of your book is striking – it’s awesome. What is the story behind the image? Why that image?
The cover is based on a beautiful photo by Chloe Sherman of a group of five friends in The Bearded Lady Café in San Francisco in the early ‘90s. They are on their way to the Folsom Street Fair. Sherman’s photographs of queer female and trans lives in the early ‘90s are frankly magical (and she will have a book of those images published later this year).
I wanted an image of 80s/90s dykes and their queer friends at play for the cover. I tried to source an Irish image but couldn’t get one but as the book is also set in the USA, and as our Queer culture is nothing if not international, it seemed apt to ask Sherman to lend her image.
I loved the Bearded Lady Café when I lived in San Fran in the mid’ 90s, such spaces are so rare in the world, and allow such spectacular human flowerings, we owe Sherman a debt that she was able to capture that beauty.
I read another debut novel not so long after Slant called Wild Geese, by Soula Emmanuel, which is being called the ‘first trans Irish novel.’ It’s about a trans woman who upon emigrating begins her transition, starts over, and reinvents herself. Though the past resurfaces when her ex shows up at her door. The book reminded me of Slant, in a way, of Ro McCarthy – of her emigrating and returning to Ireland. Wild Geese and Slant are marked by their ‘Irishness’ as well as queerness and emigration. Perhaps this is an innocent observation but I wonder what you might have to add to this – about how these three intersect – being Irish and queer, emigrating and being at home?
Irishness IS a transnational identity – like Queerness! We have had generations of diaspora, not just to the USA but all over the globe (such as Australia in more recent decades) and this diaspora continues to remain connected to and influences Irish people ‘at home’ on the island. (For instance, Irish traditional music had a profound cultural revival from a state of near extinction when old 78 RPM records of American-based Irish musicians were imported.)
The neocolonial state of Ireland which entailed decades of economic subservience to the former colonial power, on-going poverty, anxious theocratic, patriarchal rule, and violent conflict was not a congenial home for many Irish people and young people left in droves. It may be argued that anyone with a libido in 20thC. Ireland was oppressed politically and socially. Yet many who left found that the pull of the culture and the landscape was strong and while migration continues, there is also many who return back to the island of Ireland, enriched by their experiences ‘abroad.’
We have had mass inward migration from all parts for just over the past twenty years and about 12% of the population were not born in Ireland, yet there is, as yet, no anti-immigration party or strong discourse against migrants. It seems to me that is no secure sense of a ‘pure’ Irish culture, there is no dominant sense of a supremacy over other ethnicities, Irish people are mongrel, hybrid and open to penetration (sounds Queer to me).
There is a gothic sense in Irish culture where traumatic pasts continue to be triggered in the mundane every-day and the future is not something we are marching forward to confidently conquer but we are approaching warily: a congenial climate for a Queer disposition.
I ask this because I’d love to read more from you – can we expect another novel? Are you working on anything else?
I have lots of short stories written and a novella called Close/Close – but it needs revision and I will play with that but it is on a back burner as I am keen to complete a biographical study of Edmund Burke (1792-1797) – an academic work.
Thank you for such juicy questions!
Fall Down a Katherine O’Donnell Hole
‘I wanted younger lesbians, gays, queers, trans and non-binary people to know the history ... I was told I would never get a job’
“Activist Orla Egan reflects on Katherine O'Donnell's beautiful new queer Irish novel Slant” - here.
Read a review of Slant on Totally Dublin - here.
After a glorious summer of bohemian camaraderie, their carefree life takes a heart-wrenching turn, as some of Ro’s friends become ill with AIDS. The frequency of deaths among her friends leaves Ro numb, traumatised and despondent: ‘Legions died while my comrades and I tried to shatter the willful ignorance that buttressed the powerful.’ Consequently, Ro breathlessly campaigns for ACT UP, regularly travelling to Washington DC and New York. She is unrelenting in her commitment to her friends and battles through the ‘cruelty, rage, secrecy, lament, wildness, strength, suffering.’