By Daniel Davis Wood.
Towards the end of August, I received the news that Deirdre Shanahan had passed away unexpectedly whilst abroad. Deirdre was a talented and dedicated writer of fiction—short fiction in particular—with an impressive track record as well as great promise. Her début novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, was published by Bluemoose Books, and her story collection, Carrying Fire and Water, was published by Splice. Through my work for Splice, I had the great privilege of editing the latter book and speaking to Deirdre at length about her creative process. I was also fortunate to have been able to work with Deirdre on some of her more recent projects, and to have heard her read aloud from some of her most powerful stories at a book launch in London in 2020.
At the time of her death, Deirdre was confirming the edits on not one but two new stories: ‘The Hurrying Day’ and ‘Off Grid.’ As a pair, these stories were entrusted to me and intended for publication here at 3:AM Magazine. Although there’s no way of knowing whether Deirdre might have changed some minor elements of either story prior to signing off on the text, she and I shared the opinion that both stories were essentially ready to be released into the world. Now, with the blessing of Deirdre’s family, I’m grateful to be able to share them at last, even as I am saddened by the knowledge that they mark her final forays into fiction.
Readers who are encountering Deirdre’s work for the first time will find that the narrator of ‘Off Grid’ discloses an existential unease that many of her other characters share: “All the little bits of me are out of place.” All too often, the vulnerable men and women who populate Deirdre’s stories are splitting apart in multiple ways—splintering on the inside at the same time as they grow remote from the people around them—and yet in their distress they try, usually haphazardly, sometimes deliriously or deceptively, to hold together at least a few fragments of themselves. But while a swathe of contemporary realism might deal with similar subject matter and narrative situations, Deirdre’s work stands apart from the rest thanks to the pitilessness of her moral universe and the way it finds expression in language.
Consider, for example, the mechanics of sentences like “The twenty quid he’d borrowed still bit,” from ‘The Hurrying Day.’ Or, equally, consider this, from ‘Off Grid’: “Fern leaves spike as I wade through. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave.” While such sentences are typical of Deirdre’s imagistic prose, they do more than simply convey striking imagery. To begin with, they identify non-human entities (banknotes, leaves, grasses) and invest them with malice, or at least cold indifference, by hitching them to verbs that impart a sort of human intentionality: biting, spiking, weaving. Then, in addition, they elide or minimise the presence of the human subject that these non-human entities are acting against. Human pronouns have been dropped from these sentences, which would read as follows if they were complete: “The twenty quid he’d borrowed still bit [him]” and “Fern leaves spike [me] as I wade through. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave [around me].”
Sentences with similar mechanics can be found right throughout Deirdre’s oeuvre—in ‘Nine Days,’ in ‘Arayakushimae,’ in ‘Weights’ and in the dozen other stories in Carrying Fire and Water—and indeed they are a hallmark of Deirdre’s style. Their function, I think, is not just to depict and dramatise the splitting apart of her characters. It is to entrap those characters in a syntax that at once diminishes them and empowers other aspects of the world that don’t even possess sentience: flora and fabrics, minerals and earthenware, foodstuffs and features of the natural terrain. It is to lower the rank of people in a hierarchy of being, such that their material surroundings antagonise the distresses that they experience so acutely.
In her conversation with me for Splice, Deirdre said that she thought of her way of writing as an activity “involving similar skills to those of people who work with the materials of the plastic arts… shaping, paring as a sculptor works, carving and cutting off pieces while having to be sensitive to the form one is handling.” She added that what she tried to bring to bear on a piece of writing was “all I’ve studied—along with experience, observations, conjecture, imagination, dreams, memory, et cetera.” “I try to use all my senses, on and off the page,” she said, “putting myself in a place, working out what it feels like…” She was determined, in other words, to be a distinctly sensory writer, and I’d suggest that ‘The Hurrying Day’ and ‘Off Grid’ show off her command of sensory language as thoroughly as anything else she ever wrote. It’s this quality of her writing that I’m sure I’ll carry with me in my own memory, when I return to Deirdre’s fiction and reflect on her achievements. To develop such a command requires being very much alive to the world, and alive to the ways its phenomena might be channelled into words, and although Deirdre herself is sadly no longer with us, the literature she left us remains inscribed with the aliveness that makes it so distinctly hers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Davis Wood is a novelist and essayist based in Scotland. He is the author of Blood and Bone, which won the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize, and At the Edge of the Solid World, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is also the fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine and the founder of Splice, a small press and online review of contemporary fiction.
