Earlier this year I was fortunate to be interviewed by Carole Burns, award-winning American writer, journalist, and associate professor of English at the University of Southampton living in the UK. Her books include Off the Page (Norton), The Missing Woman (Parthian Books), and her compelling debut novel, The Same Country (Legend Press).
Carole Burns: In the midst of your English childhood, you spent a couple of years living in the Catskills area of New York State, where Birdeye is set. How much did that inspire Birdeye, and in what ways?
Judith Heneghan: Ah, I might say it was the breathtaking scenery that inspired me, but we have mountains and lakes in the UK, too. I think it was more to do with freedom: the way my dad took to wearing jeans while we were there, and we called our parents’ friends by their first names and cruised around Woodstock in a vast blue station wagon. Also, I was eight years old, so cinnamon-flavoured gum and watermelon Kool Aid were the height of sophistication.
Once we returned to the UK, the Catskills became a series of bright, colourful memories, until I went to university and took a course on American Utopias. Now I could align the freedom I’d experienced with the realization that for centuries upstate New York has been a place where people went to re-invent themselves, to escape and make new, from eighteenth-century religious sects such as the Shakers and early experiments in communitarianism to the Borscht Belt dreamers and the Peace and Love generation. I began to imagine a commune that grew out of the social upheaval of the early 1970s, but which was still there, nearly fifty years later, tucked away in a quiet Catskills valley above a river. What might freedom and radical choices look like now, to a handful of older hippies who hadn’t sold out and moved to the suburbs? Birdeye explores this.
Burns: But it’s also about a particular character, Liv – how did she come into being?
Heneghan: Thinking about how a character first appears in one’s head can be tricky as it requires stripping out all the layers that are added over the period of writing. However, I do remember wanting to write about an older woman who has lived a lot, seen a lot, but who has always tried to live by certain principles: welcoming strangers, listening attentively, resisting fear and small-mindedness. I wanted to write about love.
But characters need obstacles and challenges and sometimes catastrophe if they are to become stories, so Liv is flawed. In looking out, she doesn’t always see the shifting realities of those she holds close – her two oldest friends, and her own daughter, who has complex needs. When her inadequacies start to surface, her life’s work is under attack.
I’ve been lucky enough in my own life to be inspired by some extraordinary women – strong, complicated people, quietly subversive. As soon as I placed Liv at the long kitchen table in the Birdeye house or saw her hiking with her dog through the woods I knew she was rooted to that place, but also that I couldn’t make her American by birth, because like so many who come to the Catskills she has chosen to be there. As a Brit myself, it felt more natural to make her English-born, someone who is desperate to leave her own narrow life behind and escape, aged 18, on a camp counsellor’s visa in the summer of 1969. This backstory was gifted to me by a Winchester artist called Daphne Vaughan who told me all about the camp where she worked and how she hitched a ride one weekend to a festival that became known as Woodstock. Daphne isn’t Liv, though – she went home, afterwards!
Burns: So you began to create complications for her. Some of that thinking, as a novelist, is conscious. What surprised you when writing Birdeye?
Heneghan: That’s a great question. Introducing the stranger, Conor, on the first page was definitely a conscious act, but I had no idea who he was or what he wanted. Then he presses the record button on his phone, and I don’t want him to be a journalist. So, I need to figure him out.
I find surprises helpful, as a writer. I don’t plan much – maybe just a scene or two ahead – but some of the dialogue, in particular, took me in unexpected directions. What also surprises me (perhaps entertain is a better word) is how the characters who circle Liv – the young interloper, a sick dog, the friend Liv doesn’t pay enough attention to – start to relate to each other quite independently of her. Novel-writing seems to be a curious mix of looking for shapes and patterns, but also accepting chaos, disruption and ‘acting out of character’. When the latter occurs, I’ll be forensic in searching for motivation. We need to believe the surprise, don’t we – whether writer or reader?
Burns: Both your novels so far are set in exotic locales – Kyiv with Snegurochka, and now the Catskills. Why? What’s wrong with England, where you’ve lived most of your life, as a setting? (I’m joking of course. Mostly.) Or rather, why do you suppose you are drawn to faraway places?
Heneghan: About twenty-five years ago I began to write Stonecipher – my one and only novel for children. I was living in Moscow at the time, it was the middle of winter, and I was homesick, so I set the story in Winchester, my hometown. I’ve realized since then that everything I write is about ‘home’ and ‘away’ in some form. Rachel in Snegurochka and Liv in Birdeye are both British by birth, and they view Kyiv and upstate New York through this lens, especially when Liv, for example, rejects England. The Catskills, for her, is what her childhood home was not.
I also find, as a novelist, that if I write about places to which I feel connected, but where I am, essentially, an outsider, then I can sustain the act of observing. This was particularly the case in Kyiv, where I didn’t speak Russian or Ukrainian. My eye is sharper, maybe. At the moment I am trying to write a novel set partly in the south of England. It is ‘my’ place, and if I’m honest, I’m a little lost.
Burns: Did you get to visit the Catskills again when writing Birdeye?
Heneghan: Yes indeed – three times. There is so much you can do or find online these days, but nothing beats being somewhere for those chance encounters and unexpected juxtapositions – surprises, again. I overheard a snatch of dialogue in a diner one day from an elderly woman saying she had two vests on, and from this sprang Liv’s friend Dolores. I attended a Town Board meeting which I could have downloaded from YouTube but then I wouldn’t have seen what it looked like from the back of the room – the way people fidgeted and whispered. Like any writer I go into a hyper-alert mode when I travel for research, and this included photographing every community noticeboard with their notices about stray dogs and opioid recovery and flood mitigation. Also, the Catskills area has a vibe, and a vibe is something you feel. I had to be there.
Burns: What do you think you wanted Birdeye to do most?
Heneghan: Oh, that’s a good one. Can I mention two things? I wanted to show a complex older woman who is, essentially, an optimist about human nature. This almost breaks her, but she is never anything but herself. I have also tried to portray a character with a profound learning disability without patronizing or granting ‘savant’ status. This is Liv’s daughter, Rose, shown through her mother’s eyes. By these means I hoped to explore some of the less visible but most intimate human interactions, but I’m guessing that’s why many of us write.
For more information about Carole Burns’ books, including The Same Country, do visit her website or subscribe to her Substack ‘On and Off the Page’ where this interview first appeared.