Interview with Frank McGuinness

Before I went to DC I interviewed the award winning Irish playwright Frank McGuinness.

What were you doing when you were 20?
I was studying English at UCD and that was my big passion at the time. I had a very good second year in College. It was a great liberating year because I was so homesick in my first year. Second year I met a lot more people, I was more sure in what I was doing, I had become enamoured with the city so I was a happy guy at 20, very happy.

How did your university course impact on your career?
There was an enormous opportunity to read and to tackle big authors like Chaucer, Wordsworth, Milton and Pope. Without knowing it at the time, when you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in difficult subjects you carry a good working memory of them with you and that’s very, very important. But one of the main things about university was that it introduced me to people from beyond the Derry-Donegal hinterland.

Who has been the most influential person in your life and why?
My mother unquestionably. She was a very, very powerful person, a very funny person, a very intelligent person. She worked in a shirt factory. She really was an enormous positive force for me and it’s from her I think that I got a fierce determination to do well because she would have loved the opportunity that I got.

What do you value most in life?
I value my relationship with my partner Philip. Life for gay people has got better in this country but it still is a struggle, particularly for younger gay men and lesbians, and we’ve been together thirty years this month in May and it’s lasted. It’s had its ups and its downs like any thirty-year relationship but if you asked me what I’m proud of most that is it: that we are still together.

Did you always want to write and how did you transform that dream into a reality?
I did always want to write but I think the only hard way of being a writer is work and I had to sit down and really write and rewrite and put my mind to it and slog and really, really try to get better and better and better and I still do that.

Do you have a particular writing process?
I write longhand in a little red copybook. If I get past page twenty with that it means the play will be finished. I can’t write without a title. I’ve no fixed time for work but I would certainly do a fair amount in the week and I do a fair amount of reading and thinking.

Was there a particular moment when you thought: “I’m a proper writer” now?
That day was when I was 20 or 21 and I got a letter from David Marcus from The Irish Press saying the first poems were going to be published. And then of course there was the day that The Factory Girls my first play was accepted for the Abbey.

How important is your nationality to your work?
Well it’s just a hard fact. My background is Irish, I write about Ireland and make no apologies about it. It’s a complex society we live in, perhaps even more complex now that the North has a semblance of peace without the savage, brutal war happening. I’m intrigued by this country. I am intrigued by the cultures of this island.

What writers should an aspiring writer read?
You can do worse than read Jane Austen for plotting and for subtlety of characterisation. In Irish writing I think that Heaney is still a great voice, so many people imitate him that’s the only thing, and the same with Muldoon. So, in poetry, I think you should read all of W.H. Auden because I think he’s a benevolent influence on Irish people because he is, without being facetious, so English and yet American, American and yet English. You’ve got this wonderful confusion in him that’s very good for Irish people to have. I think you should certainly have a good working knowledge of Lorca and Ibsen, the Europeans, and among Irish writers you should be ashamed of yourself if you’re a playwright and you don’t know the whole of Synge - in terms of stagecraft and how you can push things in plays Synge is the master.

What advice would you give to a young university graduate?
Well I really regret not travelling after I did my primary degree. I think it’s very good to take the opportunities offered to you to go abroad - even if it’s only to Blackpool. Do something with it: go away and leave your self and your family behind you. What I did do was to believe that everything was going to be alright in terms of making a career out of my Arts background. And I think that requires stamina and it requires a big degree of faith in yourself. So I think you’ve got to follow your head as well as your heart, believe in your luck and you also sometimes have to make your own luck.