![]() ![]() ![]() There were two story lines sort of twisted together, and I had a lot of trouble. The last one that I wrote for the collection was really difficult to write. And then something started to happen with my short stories. ![]() LOUISE KENNEDY: I had the makings of a short story collection, maybe 10 or 12 stories that seemed to fit together. Shondaland talked with Kennedy about writing as a way of coping with a cancer diagnosis (she’s now in remission!), her decades in the restaurant industry before that, and the political nature of love in a divided culture. Kennedy had an unlikely start to writing, as she snuck sentences in while running her restaurant, but after winning a few literary awards and eventually publishing her first short story collection ( The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac) when she was 54, it became abundantly clear that she had a talent for the written word. As Cushla begins to care for a troubled student, Davy McGeown, and starts a torrid affair with Michael Agnew, a charismatic Protestant regular at her bar, her relatively peaceful life is shaken. She also helps out at her family’s bar and cleans up after her mother’s alcoholic binges. She teaches primary school students, helping them navigate the chaos of their lives by talking them through the daily news. Cushla, our main character, lives a simple life at the beginning of the novel. In Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, a new novel about a Catholic teacher living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, no love goes unpunished. ![]()
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