{"id":5,"date":"2013-01-25T12:13:22","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T12:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/?page_id=5"},"modified":"2017-02-09T11:11:04","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T11:11:04","slug":"books","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/books\/","title":{"rendered":"Books"},"content":{"rendered":"<style><!-- div:first-letter { font-family:Kunstler Script; font-size:300%; color:#660000; } --><\/style>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.orionbooks.co.uk\/books\/detail.page?isbn=9780297870449\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-101 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/GHOST-MOTH-UK.jpg\" alt=\"ghost moth\" width=\"194\" height=\"300\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h1>On writing Ghost Moth:<\/h1>\n<h1>A conversation with Mich\u00e8le Forbes<\/h1>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: Set in Belfast Ghost Moth alternates between the 1940s and the period leading up to what came to be known in Northern Ireland as \u201cThe Troubles\u201d , the late 1960\u2019s. What interested you in these time periods<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A: Belfast in the late 1940\u2019s was a very different city to the one in which I grew up. I remember hearing stories about that time from my father. Although still recovering as a city in the aftermath of the Second World War Saturday nights would see the city bustling with crowds, with people queueing for cinema tickets and dancehalls, lively couples in busy caf\u00e9s, and families happy to stroll the streets and window-shop late into the evening. As a teenager growing up in Belfast in the 70\u2019s this seemed to me a strange and exotic thing, that a city could be vibrant, exciting, and safe.This contrast in how I experienced growing up in Belfast with the idea that a very different idea of the city could and had existed was important to me. As a writer I wanted to explore that difference. I knew I couldn\u2019t ignore the fact that by the end of the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland was on the brink of a civil war\u2014no writer writing about that time can but I also wanted the narrative to remain insular, to focus on a protected world of the child, the family, the home. I believed that even in the face of such impending political turmoil, smaller stories still had their place. That was a difficult tenet to hold on to. But I held onto it, and still do<\/p>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-211 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1024x24.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1140x29.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-700x16.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: You grew up in Northern Ireland and have an active life in the theater. How much of this story parallels your own background<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A: My mother was a hairdresser and had sung in amateur musical theater. My father was a fireman and had been interested in writing for theater. Both joined an amateur theater group and fell in love. In a similar vein I met my husband when I attended acting classes in Dublin having left Belfast to study English Literature at Trinity College. (Subsequently, I became an actress). Also my paternal grandfather had been Theater Manager of the Gaiety and the Empire Theaters in Belfast during the <span style=\"font-size: 15px;\">early 1920s. So theater was, as they say, \u201cin the blood\u201d and was a perfectly obvious choice for the<\/span> novel\u2019s backstory. I knew the territory and loved the artifice. This setting gave me room to give color literally, to my writing. It necessitated a heightened sense of language, it suggested sensuality, love betrayal\u2014drama.This world also brought me a little closer to my mother, who died of cancer when I was nine. I think even after talking as to how and why the book came about, Ghost Moth remains less about what I know and more about what I don\u2019t know. Writing does that. It takes you places you never expected.<\/p>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-211 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1024x24.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1140x29.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-700x16.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: What inspired you to write a novel?<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>A:In my work as an actor, I have read, re-read, assimilated, learnt, played with, interpreted, and delivered other people\u2019s words to a wide and international audience for a considerable number of years. The writers I have worked with during that time in rehearsal have all played their part in my love-affair with language and I continue to be enriched by the process of interpreting them. I know the worth of their words and how they can support and sustain an actor night after night and delight and move audiences. As an actor, then, it would seem that the most natural thing for me to have done, the most appropriate thing perhaps, would have been to write a play, not a novel. But that\u2019s not the way it turned out. Although I didn\u2019t question my motives at the time, my suspicions now are that it may have had something to do with me wanting to investigate the singular voice as opposed to the collaborative one. One of the great seductions of theater is the exchange of many creative energies and idea before the final offering is made. But I suspect somewhere, at some stage, I may have asked myself \u201cWhat would I sound like alone&#8221;.<\/div>\n<div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-211 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1024x24.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1140x29.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-700x16.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q:As a mother and an actor, was it hard to find the time to write?<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>A: It took me three years to write Ghost Moth. The writing happened in chunks, mostly, between acting jobs. Finer details were tidied up while waiting for my children at their swimming or basketball classes, or while waiting in the car when I picked them up from school. I wrote longhand mostly. When I didn\u2019t have my notebooks to hand I wrote on scraps of paper, on the back of shopping lists, or on doctor\u2019s prescriptions, or on my arm. I walked a lot. I wore a grey woolly hat when I walked and when I returned to my desk with what I thought was a good idea, I became superstitious about the hat and so I always wore it when I walked. Then I lost the hat<\/div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-211 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1024x24.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1140x29.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-700x16.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: John Banville praises you for not being \u201cafraid to address the so-called ordinary lives of real human beings.\u201d Was that your intention?<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>A: I knew in the writing of the novel I wanted to pay attention to life\u2019s detail, to champion the everyday, the ordinary\u2014to find the extraordinary in that. I knew I wanted to enjoy the words I was using, their musicality, their poetry, as I hoped the reader eventually would too. I knew I wanted a lyrical intensity to the language, something of the kind that I had enjoyed in other writers such as Isabelle Allende, Colm To\u00edb\u00edn, Irene N\u00e9mirovsky, Arundhati Roy (my short stories have tended to be more hard-edged and more rooted in the here-and-now). But the bigger themes of the novel were not apparent to me straight away. Only much further along in the process of writing the novel did it become in any way clear to me how much I was exploring the relationship between memory and need, the ambiguities which surround loss, and how the absence of a person in someone\u2019s life can become hugely present<\/div>\n<div><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-211 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1024x24.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-1140x29.jpg 1140w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-700x16.jpg 700w, https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: In a beautiful and tender scene from the novel, Katherine relates a tale about ghost moths to her daughter Elsa. Is this common folklore?<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>A: Halfway through my first draft I was watching a television program about Edward surrealist garden \u201cLas Pozas\u201d in Xilitla, Mexico. The story had it that Edward James arrived in the Mexican jungle with his friend and guide Plutarco Gastelum. They found some natural pools where Gastelum stripped off to swim and then lay sunbathing on the rocks. As he lay, a cloud of beautiful blue butterflies descended on him and covered his whole body. James took this as a sign that this was the place for him to create the surrealist garden he had always dreamt of.The image of this young man\u2019s body being covered in butterflies stayed with me. Later I came across the description of the ghost moth in a small encyclopedia of butterflies and moths\u2014a moth which is common to Ireland and Britain. The ghost moth is so called because the male of the species is pure white and hovers and dances in the dusk to attract females, a movement known as \u2018lekking\u2019. The Ghost Moth has no mouth parts with which to feed so its sole purpose in life is this nuptial dance. These two ideas fused for me into one and created a perfect combination of the earthly and the ephemeral. The idea that ghost-moths were actually the souls of the dead waiting to be caught was something I added myself<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: As an Irish writer, how did you come to first be published by New York-based Bellevue Literary <em id=\"__mceDel\"><span style=\"font-size: 15px;\">Press?<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A: It had never dawned on me to send my debut novel \u2018Ghost Moth\u2019 to America but in 2011 as part of The Dublin Writer\u2019s Festival I attended a workshop with American author Paul Harding. In the workshop Paul Harding had talked about the difficulties he had experienced in trying to get any commercial houses or agents interested in his debut novel \u2018Tinkers\u2019 until a friend of a friend handed it to Erika Goldman, editor at Bellevue Literary Press. \u2018Tinkers\u2019 was published by BLP and then went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That story was very heartening to me and it kept ringing in my head. So, after I\u2019d notched up some thirty eight rejections from agents in the UK and Ireland I thought it might just be time to send my debut novel sailing off across the Atlantic. A short time later Bellevue Literary Press offered to publish it<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/stars1-300x7.jpg\" alt=\"stars\" width=\"300\" height=\"7\" \/><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>Q: What kinds of questions do you hope Ghost Moth will raise among its readers<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div>A: Do secrets hurt or protect? Do women still sacrifice their dreams for family or is that a thing of the past? How do people cope in a prejudiced society? How do people cope in a violent society? How can we more fully understand the process of dying? Would this understanding help us allay our fears of death? Should we let the dead go? How should we live a good life? How do we prepare our children for the difficulties in life? How do we live meaningfully with ambiguity? In life, how do we pay better attention? Is love enough to heal<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On writing Ghost Moth: A conversation with Mich\u00e8le Forbes &nbsp; Q: Set in Belfast Ghost Moth alternates between the 1940s and the period leading up to what came to be known in Northern Ireland as \u201cThe Troubles\u201d , the late 1960\u2019s. What interested you in these time periods &nbsp; A: &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"template-no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":817,"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5\/revisions\/817"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.micheleforbesauthor.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}