We have an Oscar Wilde Centre student with us this week! We welcome her into our alumni arms! We had many questions; mostly about our former lecturers, but remained professional and decided to ask her questions about her recent story "The Same Trees". Ally Keegan explores Sophia Blush's writing style, as well as the idea behind her fresh characters.
What ideas were in your head when you first thought about this story? Did you have an idea of how it would go or did you discover as you went along?
“The Same Trees” started out with my simply writing about a party I myself had been to, though I don’t think much of that initial prose made it into the final version. As I was writing, however, I started to think about the psychologies that I wanted to explore throughout the story. I was interested in digging deeply into the relationship dynamics that play out throughout, as well as the more broad questioning of meaning as exemplified by the references to Camus. That said, I definitely discovered the story as I went along. As I wrote, what happened at the party was clear in my head, but I had no idea what would happen after. Camus helped a lot when thinking of the ending, and once I had the first scene and the ending figured out, it was just a matter of filling in the rest of the story.
While reading this story, I found myself drawn to Mia. There’s something very true in both her desires to please others at the expense of her own agency and her frustration with that part of herself, even as she believes that it cannot be changed. Would you like to explain how you came to this character?
Mia was definitely born out of a version of myself at my most anxious. At the same time, I knew that I wanted to use her character to explore that anxious feeling that your actions might have a massive, rippling effect. With that in mind, Mia slowly morphed into a unique individual with her own past and her own stories. I amped up the dread and the anxiety, gave her her own background, and eventually found Mia, the final version of whom contains only traces of myself.
I noticed a lot of small moments that seem so simple but that you draw attention to with how you focus on them – for example, when Charlie fills Mia’s bottle with water. As a writer, how do you find moments like that in your stories and home in on them?
I think that practicing observation in your day-to-day life is one of the most important tools that a writer can have. Whether they happened to me or I simply saw them happen, many of the most interesting details and dialogue in my stories are real, or at least started as something real. I am trying to be better about writing down moments like these when I observe them because they truly are the parts that readers respond to the most.
I’m interested by the decision to omit quotation marks for dialogue, a decision that many other authors that I love have also taken. Could you elaborate on what led you to this choice yourself?
I started writing “The Same Trees” without quotation marks because I had recently discovered that it was an option, that there were other authors out there in the world not using them. I ended up really liking the way that the dialogue looked on the page without quotation marks, so that was part of it. But I especially liked the way that the dialogue, especially the dialogue that is embedded into some of the paragraphs, could double both as speech and as part of the prose. I think that the slight blurring between what a specific character might be saying and what the narration is saying adds to the message of the story.
Sophia Blush
Sophia Blush is an emerging writer. She is currently pursuing an M.Phil. in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. She also attended Vassar College, where she won the Beatrice Daw Prize for Poetry.
Ally Keegan
She studied English at University College Cork before going on to do a masters in Creative Writing in Trinity College Dublin. Ally primarily writes short stories but has ideas of a novel for the hopefully-not-too-distant future. As well as reading and writing, she enjoys listening to music, rewatching the same four TV shows and drinking way too much tea and coffee.
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