{"id":117955,"date":"2026-09-09T09:30:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T08:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=117955"},"modified":"2026-09-09T15:34:33","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T14:34:33","slug":"in-memoriam-deirdre-shanahan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/in-memoriam-deirdre-shanahan\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam, Deirdre Shanahan"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Daniel Davis Wood<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u2014short fiction in particular\u2014with an impressive track record as well as great promise. Her d\u00e9but novel, <\/span>Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind<\/span><\/i><\/a>, was published by Bluemoose Books, and her story collection, <\/span>Carrying Fire and Water<\/span><\/i><\/a>, 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the time of her death, Deirdre was confirming the edits on not one but two new stories: \u2018The Hurrying Day<\/a>\u2019 and \u2018Off Grid<\/a>.\u2019 As a pair, these stories were entrusted to me and intended for publication here at <\/span>3:AM Magazine<\/span><\/i>. Although there\u2019s 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\u2019s family, I\u2019m 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Readers who are encountering Deirdre\u2019s work for the first time will find that the narrator of \u2018Off Grid\u2019 discloses an existential unease that many of her other characters share: \u201cAll the little bits of me are out of place.\u201d All too often, the vulnerable men and women who populate Deirdre\u2019s stories are splitting apart in multiple ways\u2014splintering on the inside at the same time as they grow remote from the people around them\u2014and 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\u2019s work stands apart from the rest thanks to the pitilessness of her moral universe and the way it finds expression in language.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consider, for example, the mechanics of sentences like \u201cThe twenty quid he\u2019d borrowed still bit,\u201d from \u2018The Hurrying Day.\u2019 Or, equally, consider this, from \u2018Off Grid\u2019: \u201cFern leaves spike as I wade through. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave.\u201d While such sentences are typical of Deirdre\u2019s 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 <\/span>intentionality<\/span><\/i>: 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: \u201cThe twenty quid he\u2019d borrowed still bit <\/span>[him]<\/b>\u201d and \u201cFern leaves spike <\/span>[me]<\/b> as I wade through. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave <\/span>[around me]<\/b>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sentences with similar mechanics can be found right throughout Deirdre\u2019s oeuvre\u2014in \u2018<\/span>Nine Days<\/span><\/a>,\u2019 in \u2018<\/span>Arayakushimae<\/span><\/a>,\u2019 in \u2018<\/span>Weights<\/span><\/a>\u2019 and in the dozen other stories in <\/span>Carrying Fire and Water<\/span><\/i>\u2014and indeed they are a hallmark of Deirdre\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

In her <\/span>conversation with me<\/span><\/a> for Splice, Deirdre said that she thought of her way of writing as an activity \u201cinvolving similar skills to those of people who work with the materials of the plastic arts\u2026 shaping, paring as a sculptor works, carving and cutting off pieces while having to be sensitive to the form one is handling.\u201d She added that what she tried to bring to bear on a piece of writing was \u201call I\u2019ve studied\u2014along with experience, observations, conjecture, imagination, dreams, memory, <\/span>et cetera<\/span><\/i>.\u201d \u201cI try to use <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> my senses, on and off the page,\u201d she said, \u201cputting myself in a place, working out what it feels like\u2026\u201d She was determined, in other words, to be a distinctly <\/span>sensory<\/span><\/i> writer, and I\u2019d suggest that \u2018The Hurrying Day\u2019 and \u2018Off Grid\u2019 show off her command of sensory language as thoroughly as anything else she ever wrote. It\u2019s this quality of her writing that I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll carry with me in my own memory, when I return to Deirdre\u2019s 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 <\/span>hers<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nDaniel Davis Wood<\/strong> is a novelist and essayist based in Scotland. He is the author of Blood and Bone<\/em>, which won the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize, and At the Edge of the Solid World<\/em>, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is also the fiction editor at 3:AM Magazine<\/em> and the founder of Splice<\/a>, a small press and online review of contemporary fiction.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2014short fiction in particular\u2014with an impressive track record as well as great promise. At the time of her death, Deirdre was confirming the edits on not one but two new stories intended for publication here at 3:AM Magazine<\/em>. With the blessing of Deirdre\u2019s family, I\u2019m grateful to be able to share these stories, even as I am saddened by the knowledge that they mark her final forays into fiction.<\/p>\n

An editorial note by Daniel Davis Wood<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44448,"featured_media":117956,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-117955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44448"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117955"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117959,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117955\/revisions\/117959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}