Belinda McKeon's new story for RTÉ Radio 1’s Spoken Stories is voiced by Charlene McKenna - listen to Tacugama above.
Charlene McKenna’s voice immediately came to mind when I read the first draft of Belinda McKeon’s story Tacugama, so I was more delighted than surprised to see the pair of them heads bent in together when in studio for the recording, so naturally and animatedly discussing the birthing of a calf, something that occurs in the story.
Tacugama hovers around two sisters. Kate is a poet and Claire is a trailblazing vet. Kate would have it that they always kind of loathed one another. Reared on a farm, these days they live on either side of the Atlantic, both elsewhere from where they grew up. Their father had a stroke, and now their mother is on a long-planned carer’s weekend away. But the business of the farm doesn’t stand still, nor do relations between the sisters as they confront what happens next.
For this series, twelve writers were commissioned to write a story from a consideration of Creatures of the Earth, the title of a story (and a short story collection) by John McGahern.
For Belinda McKeon, the story in McGahern's collection that caught her attention was Sierra Leone. It is a story, as she says, "set on the night of the Cuban Missiles Crisis but set in Dublin where two people come together with the fear of being obliterated by a nuclear bomb. That story really affected me when I first read it twenty-five years ago. I thought it was so profound - and it is profound. When I went back to it this time, I read it completely differently. It is still relevant, but what I found when I looked back at the story were those themes of the obligation to go home, the pull of home and the difference between the pull of home and the freedom to go away, to escape.
"Thinking of Sierra Leone then brought me to the real story of a chimpanzee reserve in that country, and noodling around with the idea gave me a character who is a vet who has a sister who is a poet… Both feeling that very McGahern-esque feeling of the pull of the family farm, but in different ways.
"I also wanted to write about the process of a cow birthing a calf, or maybe I didn’t want to write about that, but once it showed up, I realized I really wanted to write about it – to name the parts, name the process and not be allusive or euphemistic about the physical experience that the animal is going through and that the woman is guiding the animal through".
Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth, Sundays at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1 or wherever you get your podcasts - listen to more from Spoken Stories here.
