GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2024/25
Ten questions with GBP Short Story Prize author Emer O’Hanlon
(1) HELLO EMER AND CONGRATULATIONS ON BEING LONGLISTED FOR THE GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE WITH YOUR STORY ‘THE SCHOOL RUN’. CAN YOU INTRODUCE IT TO OUR READERS, IN TWO OR THREE SENTENCES?
Thank you, and what a list to be part of! It’s such a privilege to have my work included in this longlist, as I’ve been a big fan of the prize for years — I’m always curious to see who’ll make it onto the list, not least because I end up discovering new favourites.
‘The School Run’: it’s about the school days of a group of teenage girls, told in the gaps between school and home, the liminal space of their commute on the train. While the girls each have their own stories, their own dramas unfolding, it’s the voice of the train and the specific community it creates that is, for me, the heart of the story.
(2) AND PLEASE TELL US A BIT MORE ABOUT ITS INSPIRATION AS WELL, AND THE PROCESS OF WRITING IT.
First credit has to go to the DART — the iconic green train that runs along the Dublin coast. I commuted to secondary school, a 40 minute journey each way, so a lot of my formative years were spent talking and thinking on the DART. I can’t say I loved the DART journeys at the time, but in retrospect I can see how a lot of me was shaped in the space: either through the conversations, debates and arguments I would have with school friends there, or the reading I did on the commute which shaped how I think and write still.
The story is also a love letter to the way that teenage girls express themselves. The language used in the story is obviously quite stylised (it’s not social realism) but I wanted to capture the way that teenagers can be cynical and earnest in the same sentence, harsh and unkind but also deeply naive. I love these girls, and I wanted them to be clever and funny and recognisable. But I also wanted the reader to never be able to forget how young they really are.
One thing that came out a strong throughline in the story was the girls’ obsession with pregnancy. I have no idea if this is a particularly Irish obsession, or even if teenage girls in Ireland now are obsessed to the same degree, but it felt to me like this was what we were always discussing. Pregnancy, abortion, the fear of it but also the fascination of the body transformation.
After I got the news about the longlist, I went out to the Blackrock/ Booterstown area where the story is set. It was a moody grey day, and I took a roll of film to capture photos or really illustrations to the story. I’ve included a few below to give a feel for the landscape of the story:
(3) I THINK IF I WERE ASKED TO DESCRIBE ‘THE SCHOOL RUN’ IT WOULD BE AS A POLYPHONIC COMING OF AGE STORY: A GROUP OF GIRLS TAKING IT IN TURNS (OR BEING PRESENTED IN TURNS) TO TALK ABOUT THEIR (MID-) TEENAGE YEARS, WHICH THEY SPENT TOGETHER. HOW DID THAT PARTICULAR STRUCTURE COME TO YOU — OR DID IT SIMPLY EMERGE AS A NATURAL CONSEQUENCE OF WHAT THE STORY WAS ABOUT?
It certainly didn’t emerge naturally! The first version of the story was a flash fiction, the section where Cara (among others, but mainly Cara) tells the story of a writer who once went to the school. From this flash piece grew a first person narrative, again quite short, about an unnamed narrator (who ended up becoming the Kate character) recounting her school days. I always liked the story but felt something didn’t click with it until I decided to introduce another character — Bríd — to give Kate someone to talk to. From there, it grew into something very different.
I struggled through different versions to find which viewpoint to best tell the story from. I like the structure of the current version, which is somewhat episodic and many girls get a moment in the spotlight — but it’s grounded through the main characters of Kate, Bríd and Maren.
Around the time I was working on the drafts, I was glued into Lili Anolik’s infamous ‘An Oral History of Bennington College’. Though I came to the subject through the podcast, it was seeing the transcript version of the Vanity Fair article which gave me a new way into ‘The School Run’, transformed it as a story really. Polyphonic is definitely a word I thought about a lot while working on it; but police report and oral histories are also interesting ways to view it, in my opinion.
(4) THE EVENTS THAT ARE RELATED IN THE SCHOOL RUN ARE IN THE PAST; THE GIRLS ARE LOOKING BACK, AND HAVE ALSO (LARGELY) GROWN APART. HOW IMPORTANT WAS IT TO YOU THAT THEY WERE LOOKING BACK?
The past tense and ‘looking back’ did emerge naturally — there was never a version of the story which was being told in the present tense. The visual landscape of the story is so deeply tied to that train journey. I’ve spent so much of my life on that DART route, and have had any number of wild thoughts and imaginings during it. It seems naively dramatic to say the following seriously, but when I was in school, I genuinely didn’t believe I was ever going to leave. I couldn’t imagine a life outside of school, and I always fixated on what my life would be like ‘after’. Thinking about the future felt as if I was tempting fate; I couldn’t believe there would ever be an ‘after’. I would play out doom scenarios in my head where I would finish my exams and immediately die in some tragic way.
To me, being a teenager, being in school (different experiences, but so interconnected) was both tedious and dramatic. It felt like it would last forever, but it does end. The girls in the story speak in a way which is often quite ominous and harsh, befitting of that mindset; but it was important to me that within the story, there was a perspective which made it clear that they all, in their own ways, ‘escaped’.
(5) OK! HOW ABOUT YOUR WRITING GENERALLY. HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN WRITING? DO YOU HAVE A DAILY ROUTINE? ARE YOU WORKING ON SOMETHING AT THE MOMENT?
I’ve been writing seriously since about 2018, when I really fell in love with short stories as a form. Learning to read a short story properly allowed me to view my own ideas through that lens, and to realise that sort stories suited me much better than other forms I was trying, such as novels or plays.
At the moment, I’m working on my short story collection. It’s called The Taupe Album, and includes The School Run as one of its stories. Incidentally, I’m also trying a(nother!) version of ‘The School Run’ reworked as an audio project. It’s a happy coincidence that the finished version of the story takes about the same time to perform as the DART journey on which it’s set.
Routine — ah, don’t mention the word to me! I struggle with routine, honestly. I work full-time at a job with variable hours and schedule, and I find it difficult to settle into a schedule for writing when everything around writing is changeable. Having said that, I’ve learned over the last few years that I work seasonally, so I’m trying to view my routine/productivity through that lens rather than in terms of daily/weekly productivity. Summer is for fun, winter is for hibernating; I tend to be most productive, writing wise, in spring and autumn.
(6) WHAT’S THE BEST WRITING TIP YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED, AND WHAT’S THE WORST?
Read what you’ve written out loud. I always find this horribly cringe-inducing, but it's non-negotiable. I’ve agonised for months over how to cut the length of a story that feels baggy, only to get it in an hour after reading it out loud. Just do it, even if you have to go to a beach/park/wherever to get the privacy to do so.
People say to read what you would like to write, and I think this is useful, especially when you’re trying to get a sense of yourself as an emerging writer and, in a more vulgar sense, where you might (or might not) fit into a current ‘market’. But these days, I am finding more useful to read things that are completely different to what I’m writing — it’s almost like a challenge to your brain, a reminder that different ways of writing and storytelling exist. It makes me feel more conscious of why I choose the words, sentence structure, plot devices that I do.
(7) HABITS, TOO. WHAT’S A BAD WRITING HABIT YOU HAVE – AND GIVE US ONE THAT’S PROVED FAIRLY USEFUL.
Without a doubt my worst habit is lack of routine. While it’s important to recognise ways in which people can find it difficult to fit writing around work, many writers prioritise this above everything else. I’m very guilty of taking the easier option — sleeping in rather than fitting in an extra hour of writing before work, or seeing friends in the evening rather than getting words on the page. You need to show up constantly and consistently to hone your writing, and the best writers are always the ones who have routine and discipline. Talent can only get you so far!
Having said that, I spend a lot of time thinking about my writing before putting words to the page. I’m not always planning out every detail of a plot, but I think a lot about voice and atmosphere, how I want a story to make a reader feel. By the time it comes to writing, I often feel as though I’m in a rush to get out everything I’m feeling — first drafts are always very intense for me, they feel like exorcisms of a kind. My first drafts are often littered with unfinished sentences, because I’m so feverish to get everything out there and to push the narrative on.
(8) ON TO OTHER WRITERS. NAME A FEW FAVOURITES. AND TELL US WHAT YOU’RE READING AT THE MOMENT.
I’ve been reading a lot of Iris Murdoch over the last few months. I read a lot of her work when I was a teenager, and at one point, she was very much the blueprint for the kind of novel I imagined I would want to write. I probably had quite a superficial liking for the novels before, and I’m finding them a lot richer this time, particularly as I have more understanding of the philosophical ideas she’s imparting in them. I’m learning a lot from the way she uses a cast of characters throughout a novel, in addition to the quite Greek way she deploys chance and action in service of the plot and character development.
As for favourites, my perennials are: Lydia Davis, Edward Gorey, Barabara Comyns, Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene, Penelope Gilliat. Short stories by mid-century American women always score highly with me!
(9) (AS I’M WRITING THIS, I’M REMINDED OF AS JEFFREY EUGENIDES’ THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. DID THIS OR ANY OTHER POLYPHONIC WORK INSPIRE YOU, IN TERMS OF ‘THE SCHOOL RUN’?)
Like many people, I’ve seen the film… It’s not a film I know that well, however, and it wasn’t a conscious reference point for this story. In terms of polyphonic work, The Rules of Attraction by Brett Easton Ellis really helped me to think of the story outside of a conventional structure. The Rules of Attraction features three alternating narrators with their names in the chapter headings. An earlier draft
Apart from this one, I feel a gap in my knowledge when it comes to polyphonic fiction — it’s difficult to talk about it without having read The Virgin Suicides, but perhaps more crucially The Waves. But there are always more books to add to the list.
I enjoy the playfulness of short stories which balance many, competing narrators; even though that’s not quite what you’re asking. ‘Jack in the Country’, a very short story by Lydia Davis, concerns a group of people narrating some gossip they’ve heard, only for it to be revealed at the end that they all think they’re talking about a different Jack, and the one the gossip concerns isn’t actually known to any of them. Mary Morrissey, also, in her latest collection has a brilliant story called ‘The Rakes of Mallow’; it’s narrated by two brothers, and two different versions of the story appear at the beginning and end of the collection.
Although working in a very different medium, I love the way Edward Gorey tells a story with multiple narrators and points of view, often so disjointed that the connection is meant to be intuited, or felt, rather than understood. ‘The Object Lesson’ and ‘The Vinegar Works’ are great examples of many small details building to a powerful whole.
Finally, if I may plug the work of a friend, Raffaella Sero has a haunting story called ‘Loveliness’ which leads the reader through a formative year in the life of a group of young women. They are possessed by the spirit of the house they live in, rather than the DART, and though the stories are very different, I think we are both attempting to express similar emotions. I think the polyphonic form is difficult to resist when writing about young women, because so much of growing up as a young woman is defined by whether or not you fit in, whether you will conform or rebel against the group.
(10) “THE HORROR OF THE BLANK PAGE.” DO YOU FEEL THAT HORROR? AND HOW WOULD YOU ADVISE OTHER WRITERS TO GET BEYOND IT?
I think you need to engage your brain a lot in order to train your writing. You can’t go from watching TV all day to writing a masterpiece, and it’s important to engage yourself in real thinking so that you’re coming to your writing at peak ‘fitness’, for want of a better word. You need to be sharp. For me, this means being less online. I can feel social media making my brain more sluggish, so I try to limit the amount of time I spend there . If I was really strict with myself, I should get rid of all of it, but it can be difficult to balance that against living in the modern world!
I love walking, and I’m also trying to do more thinking on walks where possible — so no podcasts, and little to no music. I’m amazed at how much more I think when I enforce this. You often end up solving writing problems this way, even passively. There’s something about giving yourself the time and space to think, combined with the physical drive of the walk, that is such a tonic.
But, again, there’s only so far walking can get you. I tend to think that overall Stephen King has it right. You just need to sit down and get your pages done.
EMER O’HANLON is a writer based in Dublin. Her work can be found in Irish and international publications, including Extra Teeth, the Irish Times, and An Capall Dorcha. In 2022, she was awarded the Stinging Fly / Felicity Bryan Associates Prize for Fiction.