THE INSPIRE INTERVIEW: Young Moynalvey writer Oisin Fagan

Driving to Scut Fagan’s watering hole in Moynalvey to meet writer Oisin Fagan, one was watching out for dead bodies falling from the sky, squadrons of zombies in wheelchairs, or larger than life swans on the attack.
However, the journey was completed safely without meeting any of the strange beings that inhabit the Meath countryside of the young writer’s debut collection of stories, 'Hostages', which has drawn widespread attention to the work of the 25-year old.
Colin Barrett, winner of the Guardian First book Award, says that: “Oisin Fagan announces himself as the best new young writer in Ireland with this ceaselessly audacious, wildly inventive collection of stories. Darkly funny, dazzlingly smart, and ablaze with love and ferocity, the stories in Hostages dynamite the boundaries of the contemporary short story and sets a new challenge to those working in the form.
“Several of these stories are, to invoke the modern oxymoron, instant classics.”
High praise indeed, from the author of ‘First Skins’. But unaffected by the hype, Oisin lives a quiet life with his family in Moynalvey, having arrived in Ireland a quarter of a century ago as a month-old baby from America, where he was born in Ohio to local woman Honor Fagan and Mayo native Martin O’Neill. Schooling in Kiltale NS was followed by secondary education in Scoil Dara in Kilcock, which features prominently in ‘Being Born’ the opening story in Hostages.
“It was a great school, and the teachers were very encouraging,”Oisin says. “I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if it wasn’t for the education there.”
He says he was a ‘swot’ at school, always did his work, but that he had some personal problems at the time and was always backed up by the teachers. “It was a positive experience.”
One might not get that impression from reading ‘Being Born’, which sees yokes (and not of eggs), bombs, student revolts, assassinations, and waterboarding rampant in the Kilcock school, the name of which Oisin hasn’t fictionalised.
“I did reach out to them in an email,” he says, using a term much favoured in modern-day PR speak. “But heard nothing back.”
But in his acknowledgements he does say: “All apologies to Scoil Dara, and all dues to PJ Gannon, who is the most wonderful educator I have ever come across, in a life that has been full of wonderful educators.” (Summerhill man PJ Gannon is the former principal of Scoil Dara).
While Oisin had dabbled in writing as a youngster of 11 or 12, “Star Trek stuff”, and read a lot, it wasn’t until he was 19 that he began to take it seriously. School, football, and girls took over in between, before he went to Trinity College to study English and French literature.
“There was no long term plan at the end of it,” he says. “I just knew you were allowed study literature, and I wanted to study it. As well as English and French literature, we were also studying Irish work.”
After his first year in college, he began to write a lot. He had a piece published in new writers magazine, The Stinging Fly, about six years ago.
“That was when I knew I could do it,” he says.
But he wrote for about two or three years then, and was getting nowhere.
“Then I completely changed tack,” he says. “I began to wonder what I was doing. I left college for a year or two. Went working in a bar in town. Had a bout of writing that didn’t work out.”
He moved home for a year, and returned to college. He knew he wanted to write “that book”.
All his surviving grandparents died within a year, and he decided he wanted to write about where they were from. “Where I’m from .”
Hostages is dedicated to his grandparents, Julia and Oliver Fagan, and he got great support from his family at home for his work.
Oisin started studying local history, researching Meath in the National Library. Margaret Conway’s works on the history of Meath proved very valuable. The bookshop on Tara was an inspiration, and historian Conway can number herself among Balzac, Stendhal, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and Philip K Dick as key influences.
“My work could be described as mythology meets sci-fi,” Oisin says. He didn’t want to look at history with a depressing or boring view, but tried to inject fun into it for the fictional work. Trim, Dunsany, Batterjohn, Moynalvey, Kilcock, are all namechecked. The local paper, the Chronicle, also gets a mention, in a sign of the times on an app rather than in print.
Oisin says his work takes things that happens in his mother’s native Meath (where his grandfather has family links with the former owners of the aforementioned Fagan’s pub), his father’s native Mayo, and his stepfather’s native Argentina, and puts them all in Moynalvey. “That’s why there are bodies falling from the sky – the military junta in Argentina ‘disappeared’ people and dumped them out of planes,” he says.
“I finished my degree and was working on a few stories that weren’t working, but was running out of money so needed to go back to work,” Oisin explains. “But I was annoyed at not having used my free time productively, and two days before I went back to work, I sat down and wrote ‘Costellos’, writing it in a day and a half.
“It’s fitting 800 years of history into eight or nine pages,” he adds, based on an idea from a relative of his mother in Chicago, who had done the family tree.
Two further stories followed over the next three to four months, and the rest fell in place around them. He spent six months writing the book, and another year editing it with the publishers. “Which was just as much fun.” He was lucky that he was known in the publishing houses, as he had been published in New Island’s short story anthologies, ‘Young Irelanders’ and ‘New Planet Cabaret’, and in The Stinging Fly.
During the editing process he added in another story, ‘No Diamonds’, influenced by a visit to Michael Slavin’s bookshop on Tara, and his ‘Book of Tara’.
He says in his acknowledgements: “No Diamonds shares its dedication with the homeless children who are growing up in this country, either in emergency accommodation or in the inhumane system of Direct Provision. If the future is worth anything, it will belong to them.”
Describing himself as an ‘activist’, Oisin was involved in the recent Home Sweet Home activities at Apollo House, and works with the Irish Housing Network. He was happy that the Apollo House occupation resulted in six-month beds for homeless people, which had not been available beforehand. He was also involved in last year’s Irish Water protests.
Jokingly referring to himself as a member of the ‘looney left’, he says that a lot of political change needs to happen in this country.
“I feel people’s hearts and minds need to change it,” he says, adding that homes, health care, and education needs to be affordable to all.”
As for his birthplace, the US, he says they missed their chance with candidate for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Saunders.
“There’ll be a rough ride for the next four years.”
Oisin is currently working on two books, a novel, and a collection of long short stories. Earlier this year, he won the inaugural Penny Dreadful Novella Prize for ‘The Hierophants’, centring around a disgraced, drunken, former academic and author’s tumbling descent into the murky Joycean underworld of modern Irish literary academia.
“Flagrant and delirious, like a Flann O’Brien armed to the teeth and bent on vengeance, The Hierophants explodes with violence and comic absurdity,” said another young Dublin writer, Rob Doyle, of The Hierophants.
Expect much more of this to come from Oisin Fagan.

 

(First appeared in Meath Chronicle's Inspire magazine, March 2017)