This week on The Prompt on RTÉ Radio 1, guest writer Belinda McKeon's writing prompt is 'shoes' - listen above.
Belinda is a novelist and playwright. Her novels are Solace (Picador, 2011) and Tender (2015). She is also Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Maynooth University.
Belinda asked writers to think of "three pairs of shoes your character (this may be you, if you are writing something other than fiction) has had in their life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood.
"For each pair, write a quick list of memories or aspects: physical features, where acquired, where worn, something which happened in that era. Then choose one list and develop it into a short piece of prose or a poem."
The following writers' work was shortlisted, and three pieces were selected blind from the shortlist for broadcast:
N Lynskey - Diamonds with Paul Simon
J Rafferty - Polishing (after Michael Longley)
S Keating - Treasure
S Carlson - Cricklewood
M Studer - Winged Soles
N Lenihan Nash - Her Shoes
R Leggett Bohan - Pair
Shortlisted writer Sara Keating talks about her inspiration for her story Treasure:
"Every time I read the word Shoes I kept thinking of the infamous 6 word short story: For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn. It is often referred to as the first piece of flash fiction, is often misattributed to Ernest Hemmingway, and actually has a pretty interesting life of its own, originating in real newspaper advertisements from the late 19th century...I always felt that it was, in fact, a very unsatisfying piece of storytelling. It offers a 6 word suggestion of a story, but none of the things I personally value in a piece of writing: no tone, atmosphere, literary style, and the plot is something determined by the reader rather than the story itself."
Instead, Sara’s piece gives a full sense of a pair of baby shoes:
"The little girl has known the boxes all her life, though she can only imagine her mother discovering the slippers carefully wrapped inside for the first time: soft leather moccasins, baby’s first shoes. The booties still live there, alongside her first clipped curls; plaster cast prints of her hands and feet; a plastic wristband, impossibly small, on which she is named just ‘baby girl’, an endearment her mother still whispers when she is tucking her in at bedtime. This cardboard casket the little girl calls ‘my treasure box.’"
Belinda says that this piece "is very much its own world… has so many threads… we’re locked into this every recurring present, particularly for this mother. I loved so many of the details and found them very moving... it’s very subtle."
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Listen to last week's episode of The Prompt, with guest writer Lucy Caldwell
For the poem Pair by Róisín Leggett Bohan, the author says "When I stumbled across Belinda McKeon’s glorious prompt, it unboxed a jolting memory. I thought of my mother and me, our comical and curious outings. The scene of kneeling on the hair-strewn floor of the hairdressers, holding my mother’s feet, reverberated like a rerun in my head."
Pair
Trips to the shopping centre, praying
to Parking Jesus so you wouldn’t have to walk
far. The shoe shop has shut down. Remember the last
pair? You were waiting at the hairdressers for a wash, cut
and blow-dry as I dashed back and forth to you, my arms
overflowing with shoes. How kind that manager was, entrusting
me with his wares…
Belinda McKeon tells The Prompt's host Zoë Comyns that ‘The speaker is trying to make sense of the change that has happened. It’s a portrayal of trying to hold on to something that’s gone."
Concerning his selected story Cricklewood, author Sean Carlson told us about his first draft:
"I wrote the opening of Cricklewood early one morning in Listowel, from a window seat at the coffee shop inside our local supermarket, where I often carve out writing time… I had no idea at the time about the characters or the setting or the narrative, only that I appreciated the sound of the first words I put on the page: "The stick of the shoe to the floor—" I liked such a relatable image serving as my own opening prompt. A week later, again at the coffee shop, I returned to what I'm hesitant to call even a "draft" of this piece of fiction. From there, I found the characters, their relationship, and the shape as a whole fell into place quite naturally, as I figured out the story one sentence at a time."
From Cricklewood: "The stick of the shoe to the floor, Leggy tried to say, but found himself drowned out by the din. He had bought loafers along the high road that morning after realizing his mistake, arriving for the occasion in runners — the disrespect, he could almost hear the voice of earlier dead. The leather lookalikes quickly scuffed, a nick against the steps outside the church, the muscle memory of dropping and lifting the pew kneeler without a sound, the splatter of an unseen puddle afterwards."
Belinda says that this story gives us so many "ways to understand the sediment of this brother-brother relationship… Through all of that detail, we feel that we know their relationship, what they were to each other."
The Prompt is available via the RTÉ Radio Player and wherever you get your podcasts - listen back here.
