Claire Keegan and the art of subtraction

In this 2010 edition of HoCoPoLItSo's The Writing LIfe, poet and musician Terence Winch talks with Claire Keegan, author of two short story collections, Walk the Blue Fields (2007) and Antarctica (1999), about the origin of her work, her influences and her background growing up on an Irish farm. Keegan started reading American literature when she arrived in America from Ireland at age 17.
Winch suggests that like Flannery O'Connor, Keegan works by subtraction, less in telling than in what isn't told. Keegan agrees. "There is only so much you say as a writer and then you must rely quite heavily on the reader and their own consciousness and their own mysteries and their own private lives to explore the mystery of what is not said within the given story. It's one of the glorious reasons why we read." Keegan ends the program by reading from "Foster," the story published in the Feb. 15, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, about a young girl sent to live with her mother's cousin for a summer.
For more information about HoCoPoLitSo (the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society) and the live and taped programs it presents, visit www.hocopolitso.org.