Elisabeth Sheffield, Ire Land, Spuyten Duyvil , 2021
Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land is an exquisite construction––as sly as Nabokov, as tender as Beckett, deeply intelligent and run through with heart and dark hilarity and great waves of rage and beauty. It possesses an undeniable cumulative power and a level of invention that is both thrilling and poignant.- Carole Maso
Elisabeth Sheffield translates the merely geographical into the intensely psychological here, transforming Ireland into Ire Land, which is to say the land of wrath, in which the parenthetical faery tale of the title in part points to the theoretical shenanigans of a certain sort of easy, essentialist, ageist feminism we found in the sixties, seventies, and eighties particularly, and post-structuralism generally. Both prose and thought throughout are ever sparky and surprising, even as they are shot through with a piercing recognition of and negotiation with growing older as a woman in ways that complicate the youthful utopian riot-grrrl clichés — the distance between, say, granny hair worn as a fashion statement by twenty somethings and the bewildering real deal of continuous cellular undoing. The result is ever smart, crisp, astute, revealing, ironic, and richly (sometimes downright brutally) honest, mischievous in form, heart-hammering in its Beckettian comic vision, and impressive in its Nabokovian command over textual and paratextual material shot through with a meticulous knowledge, understanding, and intellectual bite. - Lance Olsen
Ire Land confronts the unholy trinity of gender, violence, and literary representation as Elisabeth Sheffield dares to reveal an ageing female with a deliciously disastrous life in protagonist Sandra Dorn. An unorthodox homage to Samuel Beckett’s Molloy reborn as woman, Sandra is a conundrum, unapologetically human, outrageous, and absurd. At a time when society expects her to fall into the cliché of a harmless older woman, Sandra is wonderfully complex, ingeniously flawed, yet so difficult that society doesn’t know what to do with her. For these very reasons, she is all the more present for having disappeared. The reader searches for Sandra in emails, in the marginalia of her mysterious editor, in her abandoned children and estranged siblings, and in her cagey colleagues to find a fully complex woman both known and unknowable. Refusing to fall into neatly gendered traps of narrative and linguistic cliché, Ire Land frees the reader from the cultural violence of language with dazzling insight and dark humor. - Aimee Parkison
Elisabeth Sheffield uses exquisite language and control over a palimpsest of mixed genres in Ire Land (a Faery Tale). She vacuum-seals a layered plot into a fantasy world of comfortable relationships within a morality-play type story that hints at, then rejects any expected outcome for the main character, Sandra Dorn. Sheffield builds a world where fantasy and reality challenge each other for space in every aspect of Dorn’s truly lived life. But finding Dorn does not end with learning how she lived her life but by discovering the intent of the curator of her story.
We meet Sandra Dorn in a series of emails. She writes updates and ruminations on her life, then sends them to madmaeve17, a member of an unnamed support group. The comfortable nature of using the epistolary genre led me to trust I was reading the truth because after all, it is the actual words of Sandra Dorn. But Sheffield immediately questions this comfort and asks a question—What is accepted as truth? This isn’t a new question. The letters in the early American novel The Coquette by Hannah W. Foster are not real, the form was used to teach a moral lesson in an accessible form. There are also questions about how the curator of Emily Dickenson’s poetry affected the truthfulness of the author’s original intent. But Sheffield does not hint at the presence of a curator, but at the reasons for needing one. The first chapter of Ire Land (a Faery Tale) is a letter from Malachi McLaughlin, a coworker of Sandra Dorn, to Dorn’s child Kew. The letter describes a selection of Dorn’s last emails that are
…cut, pasted, and reorganized—tidied up, so to speak—to provide you with
an account of the last nine months of Sandra Dorn’s life, in her own words.
To be sure I also inserted a few editorial annotations of my own., here and
there, but only for the sake of clarification and occasional, ahem, amendment.
The emails are in Dorn’s words, and the curator is honest about the editing that took place. But Sheffield asks us to question whose intent (after all the tidying up) is being served in the packet.
Sheffield also explores the issue of the trusting the veracity of truth of Dorn’s memories. Dorn bluntly discusses her choices, failures, and successes, in her emails to madmaeve17, but there are quite a few convenient times she forgets names, places, and timelines of major events in her past. We wonder about Dorn’s intent. Is she a trustworthy narrator of her past? But do any of these hazy details matter? By inserting the editor’s annotations Sheffield reminds us that Dorn isn’t controlling who is reading or what is being read. McLaughlin may have included passages that reflect Dorn’s confusion to create a semblance of truth of her words, but I asked myself again—whose truth am I reading? Was there a reason McLaughlin needs to create doubt about Dorn?
The subject of Dorn’s memories stayed with me after I finished the book. Is she unreliable? Or does the curator of these emails create an unreliable narrator? I kept returning to the action of “tidying up” the emails before Kew was able to read them. Not what was left out, but why? Author Atika Qasim writes about the mistake of trying to solve problems without listening to what the marginalized need in the Philosophy Today article “The Not So Benign World of Photography.” She calls it a
defining mind-set … we possess the power to change the world, and therefore.
it’s a moral responsibility on our behalf to look after … those who cannot look
after themselves. We assume the subaltern cannot speak, we must do so on their
behalf … Reality, however, is very different.
Qasim discusses how the marginalized are more than capable of speaking, and screaming, for themselves, and how it’s become our choice not to listen. Problems do not disappear through the mind-set of misplaced benevolence. The person/s disappears instead. The idea of a structure of misplaced benevolence connected me to the threads of Sandra Dorn’s life.
For all her honesty and brashness, Dorn is a victim of this mind-set. When she moves to Ireland with her boyfriend Kev they marry and have a child. As they spend more time together, they begin to disappear: “… it was clear he was no longer my kinky, stink chasing Kev-boy, but an upstanding Daddy-man.” Kev is devastated motherhood doesn’t have the same effect on her: “I made you my wife and brought you home to my family only to learn you’re not a woman but an animal—you’ve no sense of decency a’tall.” When Boyfriend Kev disappears and tries to become Daddy-man Kevin, Dorn resists. Sheffield does not make this easy on us—it’s unexpected and uncomfortable to read.
The plot becomes easier to follow when Sandra Dorn accepts help from family or friends. The chapters that seem ‘easier’ to read are the times Dorn is separated from her own words and forced to try and live a false life. Her benefactor’s well-intentioned aid is useless to her. On one level her unruly behavior is her fault because she is responsible for her actions. It would be simpler and more comfortable to read this story as a judgement on how not to live a life. But who does that serve? Sheffield’s storytelling style points out how we are also guilty of misplaced benevolence. It’s uncomfortable when Sandra Dorn uses her own words because the plot seems disjointed and confusing. I lose trust in her and I want to control her narrative. Sheffield isn’t interested in the in the comfort of an easy read. She trusts her character and gives her the tools and vocabulary to successfully tell the truth of the story.
The mastery of Sheffield’s writing is—the more I thought I learned about Sandra Dorn, the less real she becomes. I learned to stop reading about her, and to try to listen to her. Even as Dorn disappears under the weight of her heavily edited words, Sheffield makes sure we hear her scream. - Noreen Hernandez
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2021/07/29/sheffield/
Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land (A Faery Tale)’s energy and strangeness, which grow with every page, begins immediately with an odd letter to protagonist Sandra Dorn’s daughter, Kew, from the Director of Queer Studies at Queen’s University Belfast, where Sandra had miraculously landed a temporary lecturing gig after some unspecified meltdown at her previous job.
Her boss, Malachi McLaughlin, for some reason writes the letter from Dorn’s room, which he’s apparently occupying at that moment and hoping to rent if a deal can be struck with the landlord. Along with the letter is a packet containing Sandra’s email correspondence with someone in Belfast, which mark the supposed “last nine months” of her life. Of course, this is according to Malachi, who writes how he “recovered [them] from her laptop, which I cut, pasted and reorganized—tidied up, so to speak—to provide you with an account…” So, right away, the paranoid reader suspects some kind of trick.
Who’s really writing this letter and why?
It’s Dorn’s supposed missives to the mysterious Madmaeve that grease one’s suspension of disbelief while tweaking one’s paranoia, which drive the narrative of Ire Land forward from there. Dorn’s tone is combative, its erudite content punctuated by McLaughlin’s marginal comments, which grow increasingly peculiar as the pages turn. Everything grows weirder, and the apparent motivation of this growing strangeness is the desire to erase boundaries between time and space, death and sensuality, male and female and, perhaps most importantly, enchantment and disenchantment. Dorn wants to escape the insufferable, humiliating descent of her bloated, “manky” body, revivifying her youthful joie de vivre in the process.
Sheffield, by placing Dorn’s narrative in the liminal space seaming binaries of mind-body, human-nature, young-old, male-female and quick-dead together, sends the reader off on a slipstream of animal-“fucki,” Earth spirit-projecting a phase space trajectory of whitewater faery rage. Dorn allegedly writes the action, or cognition, of exploding dualities, conveying how such explosions feel from the inside-out while breaking cultural norms, upending habits, failing to function in functioning society…something “the troubles” of men never stop trying to fix, placing their efforts on the habit side of patriarchal colonialism and oppression, which, of course requires novelty, among many other things, to combat and otherwise contend with.
As the uncanny reaction to such authority, the trickster subverts social norms by mucking up what separates human from beast, and, by their antics, become a catalyst disrupting routine to re-fashion it in the new way the tricked are perceiving things; this while remaining unaffected their self. That’s the essence of the trickster. The tricked, by experiencing their implosion of self as the trick’s effect, which also in turn explodes the traditional male/female binaries and mind/body dualities, etc., which would otherwise calm them back into their habits, are made irrelevant to their newfound situation. There’s no going back, unless you’re somehow tricked into believing Santa Claus is real. And that’s quite a trick. Requiring something of a literary shaman to re-enchant the jaded, aging reader back to a childlike openness, thus increasing one’s possibilities.
Sheffield works Dorn’s magical/alchemical transformation via the protagonist’s obsessive mixing of biology and ego, with body and identity decaying unto disappearance without any diminishment in Sandra’s lucidity. Here we feel the trickster [is it Dorn or Malachi?] struggling to re-enchant a disenchanted body, to metamorphose via animal-fungal magic into a new embodied action or new reality.
First, let’s consider how disenchantment begins, how Dorn [or Malachi] attacks that which she perceives oppressing her. Sandra writes of another woman, same generation as she with whom she has history, who has replaced her in her regular circle of friends following Dorn’s mysterious fall from academic grace:
[She was a] an English performance artist whose act in those days involved the vaginal incubation of blood sausages, which were then externally minced, inserted with toothpicks and served to audience members from a white plastic tray. Marian was against meat, which she described as part of the global phallocarnacy…
Later, when describing the smell of a young lover’s socks:
Andy mumbled an apology for the manky odor. That was one of Kevin’s words, the one he used to describe me when I was menstruating, though that was an inside thing, seeping out. My manky smell had once turned Kevin on, by the way, which was one of the things I liked about him, back in New York. His enthusiasm for crossing erotic borders and boundaries. That was all gone in Belfast…I had assumed the personal was a reflection of the political.
And finally, after waking from the experience of possibly growing fur:
I thought about my hallucinatory dream [getting fur] the night before, as well as the body I was standing in right then and for a moment felt the accumulated caprice of the latter—that it was finally, a series of biological gaffes and material incompetencies hardened into a joke that was no longer funny.
Now striving after re-enchantment, Dorn writes of the “association of mushrooms…with faery rings…changeling illegitimacies and other elfin excesses…mushrooms… are all…penises…are mushrooms plants or animals?…They are neither, even though they share characteristics of both. The fucki are a kingdom unto themselves…held together by some subterranean mycelium.”
Next, Sandra, feeling like she’s starting to grow hidden fur, stars in a film, orally milking a cow, which accelerates her transformation as the heifer drowns her gut pouch. Her slow transition from aging woman to young rabbit accelerates until she’s accidentally shot in the thigh by her brother. The humans, as is their wont, don’t seem to recognize her transformation, or choose not to speak of it to her face.
Sandra’s performance, witnessed by multiple people and caught on film, borders on bestiality: “I sucked as hard as I could, but still nothing came.”
This taboo-breaking border transgression is, seemingly, the transformational mechanism triggering the woman-to-rabbit metamorphosis, at least in Sandra’s mind:
[F]inally I tore my lips away, wiping my mouth with my paw….piss gushed down between my legs. And then I bolted…the wind rippling my pelt…exulting in the power of my long strong legs flipping them all off with my white flap of a tail even as my newly sharp ears and nose told me I hadn’t lost them yet…
Ire Land tricks by functioning as a “pattern-making kit,” which is how Sheffield describes Hellen Keller Really Lived, her third novel, in an interview with Bookslut. Consider the arrangement of scales forming the text’s reality. The largest scale is the external, namely Sheffield and us, the readers. The reader takes Kew’s place, receiving the text. Sheffield’s spot is assumed by Malachi. The next scale in is that of Sandra and Madmaeve, where Madmaeve functions as reader and Sandra, writer. If, at any time, Madmaeve the reader becomes Malachi the editor and possible writer, the whole fractal pattern inverts, and the scales try turning inside-out, putting the reader in Sandra’s position as the object the subject’s ultimately working on…and a transformation, even metamorphosis, occurs in which the disenchanted writer-reader becomes the enchanted reader-writer. It’s as if faery and ire lands are entangled, whatever happens one place happens in an inverted, or mirror, form simultaneously in the other.
Being the text’s object, and thus reading it as Kew, one might wonder who Malachi is, how they function, and what they’re doing in your missing mother’s room. One margin note indicates that McLaughlin’s quite familiar with Dorn and Kew, giving her [us] historical family background with intimate detail: “By the time you were born, your mother…had become a pain in the neck,” and so you can’t help but question the veracity of the text as presented by this mysterious character. Just how much “editing” did Malachi do? What’s their stake in this communication? You might also speculate about Madmaeve’s identity, as no details are ever given beyond their being a radical feminist blogger.
So, early on, you can’t help but feel a trick is brewing. Outlining the nature of that trick is what’s so much fun about Sheffield’s amazing navigation of liminal space, that seam weaving human into inhuman and vice versa, so each coalesces with the other to the point of indistinguishability, so the capacity to identify differences between faery land and ire land, man and woman, human and inhuman is extinguished.
The sense of being conned or tricked by what you’re reading only grows as you learn Sandra was apparently invited to guest lecture at Queen’s University Belfast by Jeanine Malarkey, professor of sociology and Director of the Queer Studies Program. You begin suspecting how Malachi, Madmaeve and Malarkey might all be the same shapeshifting trickster, functioning from the same space. Toward the end, an old woman Dorn dreams of in her dream class—is she Madmaeve? Malachi? Malarkey?—comments on her lecture, addressing the students:
The point is that you have no real self of yer own, boyo. And we Irish have always known this, have we not? For t’is in practically all the old tales, in the warp-spasm and in the Celtic phenomenon of shape-shifting, taken for granted by our ancestors the same way we now take for granted electricity or the internet. A hawk to-day, a boar yesterday, wonderful instability. But t’is a world view that does yer head in and that is why we’ve always fought each other so. If I can kill you, and live, then surely I’m me self and not you.
Elisabeth Sheffield’s Ire Land (A Faery Tale) is as complicated in the end as it feels in the beginning. You might as well put up your dukes and fight when angry, fuck when charmed…never remembering a face to credit or blame…as consciousness “drains away in the end, whether we slit our wrists or not.” - Chuck Richardson
Sandra Dorn is dead. The only thing that could possibly explain how her passing came about is a series of emails she’d written to an online friend. The emails document the last nine months of Sandra’s life, revealing the ups and downs of an older woman who refuses to become a stereotypical old lady. Throughout her emails, Sandra reveals the struggles with her past, her identity, the desires that once fueled her, and the difference between reality and the fabrication of events within her mind.
Ire Land (a Faery Tale) is the fourth novel by Elisabeth Sheffield. It is an epistolary novel, told through email, chronicling the wild experiences of the last months of Sandra Dorn’s life. The reader is taken on Sandra’s journey through the eyes of her estranged daughter, McKew “Kew” Kambi. Kew was given the manuscript by an editor, four months after her mother’s passing. The editor will occasionally make interjections in the story by providing information that Sandra excluded, either purposefully or unintentionally. These interjections are often things that Kew wouldn’t know, due to her estrangement from her mother. The novel is comprised of lengthy emails Sandra sent to an online friend whose responses are not as invested as one would hope. To combat her sense of obsoletion and crippling loneliness, Sandra pours her heart into these emails. She shares, in excruciating detail and depth, her innermost thoughts, feelings, and details of her trials and tribulations. However, as the reader progresses through Sandra’s tale, the emails reveal that her perception of reality may not be entirely accurate.
Sheffield does an excellent job of blurring the lines between Sandra’s thoughts and opinions, and the reality she faces, as the emails progress closer and closer to Sandra’s death. Sheffield does not separate the dialogue from the events that surround them, further obscuring a clear separation between fact and fabrication. The “fairy tale” element of the story is heightened by Sandra’s loose grip on reality, creating a closing narrative that is just as complex and muddled as the rest of her life. Did the events of her last few emails actually happen, or was Sandra so absorbed in her own mind and opinions that she misinterpreted the world around her?
This loose grip on reality is further cemented by Sandra’s strong voice. Sheffield has a clear and consistent style that brings her protagonist to life. Throughout the novel, the reader can clearly understand that Sandra is trying to fight off irrelevancy. There’s a sense of desperation in the emails, along with a sense of gratitude. Sandra doesn’t really have any close connections, either with family or friends, and she only seems bothered by that now that she has fallen on hard times. Her only “true” connection is her email friend; the one who replies to Sandra with one sentence responses. Despite the lack of reciprocation, Sandra clings to her internet friend, sending her emails whenever she has the time, with a sense of joy and appreciation that she may not be completely alone. This loneliness permeates the story, with Sandra clinging to the life she once had, while combating her current state.
Sandra fights her fears of uselessness on a harrowing emotional and physical journey. Her emails correlate with the space she’s in, with the exception of one email that relates to her past. Her journey takes her from Colorado, to Washington State, New York, and Ireland (past and present). Each stop presents Sandra with a confrontation of who she once was, in contrast to the person she has become. In each location, Sandra reacquaints herself with family members, meeting their partners and friends. With each person she interacts with, Sandra is reminded of what she once had, and all she lost along the way. They represent the lives she could have had, and the world from which she is now an outcast. Sandra flits from location to location, searching for something to fulfill her, but she’s foiled at every turn. No matter who she is with, or how good things seem to be going for her, Sandra still feels empty. Her physical journey is directly tied to her emotional and mental journey, thoughts and emotions blurring with events and people. The direct correlation between location and mental state aids in her senses being distorted. Sandra’s narrative is complicated as she further proves that her grip on reality is not as solid as she believes it to be.
Sheffield does an excellent job of presenting a broken and struggling character trying to fight off an impending doom. Sandra’s story is tragic, though she doesn’t see it that way, which is masterfully portrayed in Ire Land (a Faery Tale). The consistent struggle Sandra faces is presented in a realistic and compelling way throughout the novel. Her inability to distinguish her imagination from reality plays into the downfall she’s desperately trying to escape. The world of fantasy is balanced and blended with the ordinary in a way that deepens the characterization of the protagonist, while maintaining the promise of the story being a “faery tale.” - Callie Richards https://callmebrackets.net/ire-land/
Elisabeth Sheffield is the sort of writer most writers only hope to become: a ventriloquist offering up voice after voice. Each of her voices expands and complicates her readers’ view of her fictional world. Together her voices suggest the impossibility of ever fully seeing either fictional or real world.
But hers are not Beckettian voices whispering into the void about the void. They belong to characters travelling from place to place, often from country to country, in search of love and respite and one last victory over their perceived enemies. They take part in a lush world in which women can shapeshift into hares, and fairies can carry them off.
In the following interview, she discusses her many voices as well as the origins and development of her latest novel, the wonderful Ire Land (A Faery Tale). I appreciate both her time and her generosity.
Marcus Pactor: Ire Land’s Sandra Dorn strikes me as a singularly memorable crone figure, a kind of urbanized Baby Yaga who curses babies one second and recounts the art scene in 70s New York the next. But I cannot remember ever reading about a crone figure, no matter how interesting, which served as a protagonist. Did you have any models in mind when you conceived Sandra, and what difficulties did you face while making a traditionally supporting figure into your star?
Elisabeth Sheffield: Thank you for these questions! I think my fiction has been creeping toward the crone for decades now (as is my biological body). The first story I wrote as a young adult was written from the perspective of a teenage boy whose sixtyish unmarried aunt lives with his family. He’s barely aware of her even as she is similarly disenfranchised in matters of familial affection and privilege, similarly unmoored and adrift. He bobs along, oblivious to her, even as she floats along in the dark beside him. It was Harold and Maude (a movie that made a big impression on me as an adolescent), without desire or any sort of real conflict. Unsurprisingly, it was never published. In my first novel, Gone, there’s a similar dynamic. Though in this case both the younger (thirtyish Stella) and older (late fiftyish Juju) perspectives are equally developed, neither is aware of the other’s presence in the novel, and their narratives do not intersect. But Juju was a young woman’s/writer’s crone (not even sixty!), whose sexual and emotional development is frozen in time, if not arrested, by her fixation on Stella’s long gone mother. So Sandra Dorn is perhaps an attempt to rectify that, by creating a crone whose desiring body has been marked and complicated by decades of experience.
In regard to your question about difficulties I faced making Sandra the main character, I didn’t see obstacles so much as a challenge. Beckett’s Malone is an old man with a weak and disobliging body, and yet he fills the stage. So why couldn’t an old woman? It was more a matter of creating an interesting and compelling voice (it doesn’t matter what a character “looks like” on the page). But I suppose I was working against certain expectations and beliefs about old people as characters, and old women in particular, specifically that at this point there’s nothing to do but sit around and reminisce, nothing left to fight or struggle against, because all the important battles have been fought, and death conquers all. I think this was part of what limited my characterization of Juju in Gone (my own ingrained belief that the interesting, “sexy” part of her life must be over. Then again, it had to be, to fit with the novel’s theme of things that had been irretrievably lost). So I gave Sandra real problems (a big one being the loss of her home and income) and a desiring if dessicating body with a long, desire driven history. Then I juiced it all up with animal brio. Her transformation into a hare, whether imagined or not, is her super power. As for models, I think Maude in Harold and Maude was one, though it’s been forty years since I last saw it, along with the Wife of Bath. And definitely Dubravka Ugresic’s Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, which I read around the time this novel was conceived.
MP: The novel contains at least two allusions to legends of the Irish hero Oisin. The filmed “hunt” for Sandra recalls Oisin’s hunt for the were-hare, while all of Sandra’s recollections suggest that, for her, America has been a Tir na nOg gone wrong. Did you have these legends in mind before you began writing, or did they come to you in the course of your work? How much do you plan and how much do you learn as you write?
ES: Yes, the were-hare is borrowed from Irish legend, and also an Antrim folk tale about a milk stealing coney. And there is also a lot of faery lore woven in here, including fairly obvious allusions to the ancient Irish queen Medb, later the fairy queen Mab, Anglicized as “Maeve,” as well as less obvious nods to the concept of some looming other world/Tir na nOg. I’m gratified that you noticed. But I did not in fact have any of it in mind when I first conceived the project. Originally I was thinking about violence—both literal violence and more abstract kinds, specifically the violence language and culture do to bodies, and how these forces make some kinds of bodies invisible, or at least unviable as objects/subjects of interest (or protagonists).
But I knew from the beginning that I wanted at least part of the book to be set in Northern Ireland, so I applied for a Fulbright, which got me to Queen’s University in Belfast. Near the end of the five months I spent in Belfast, we drove to see the Hill of Tara, an ancient ceremonial and burial site that C.S. Lewis (who was born in Belfast) supposedly drew upon for the sacrifice of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I thought I might use Tara in my book somehow, if only in contrast with urban spaces of Belfast. So while my family wandered the grounds, I sat on a knoll recording impressions and sensory details in a little red notebook, including a description of the flock of huge black ravens that had alighted on a swathe of grass nearby, disconcertingly close and loud.
When I was finished writing, I joined everyone in the gift shop, which was about to close. Quickly scanning the books, I picked up a couple, including one titled Irish Superstitions. As my partner drove us back to Belfast along the coast road, I leafed through it, coming upon the following: “The ancient Celts considered the raven to be a significant bird of augury…It is generally seen in negative terms. For example, the appearance of a raven while new work is being undertaken signifies that the work will not be a success…” Shortly afterwards, I discovered that the notebook I’d been writing in, which also contained all the notes and observations I’d made during my time in Belfast, and which I’d hoped to eventually work into Ire Land, was missing. The next morning, I called the Hill of Tara gift shop but no one, said the young woman who answered, had seen anything “resemblin’ a wee red notebook.” Someone, or something, I then decided, didn’t want me to write this novel, and the paranoia lingered for weeks. I even thought about giving up on the cursed project entirely, having soured on both the narrative voice and the story. But eventually, back in the arid light of Colorado, the spell, or whatever it was, broke. I decided to make the na daoine maithe, the “good people” who’d stolen my notes, part of the story. Because what is paranoia but a fantasy of “outside” beaks, tapping away at the brittle shell of self? Or to quote Ire Land’s crone protagonist, “when you know, deep down, that no eyes are upon you, you invent them.”
So yes, there was some planning, but also a lot of learning and researching along the way, prompted perhaps, by faeries or fate (as fae is from the Latin fata, “the fates,” plural of fatum, that which is ordained or destined). And I’m only half joking about the faeries.
MP: I love the way your novels incorporate one or another sort of additional layer of commentary on their events. In Fort Da, Rosemarie Ramee interrupts her own report to discuss its nature and difficulty; In Helen Keller Really Lived, Timor’s insults and reports on the lives of the dead are juxtaposed with Selena’s crime novel; and in Ire Land, Malachi McLaughlin’s sidebars become increasingly, wonderfully, terrifyingly unhinged. Taken together, these commentaries are clearly an essential aspect of your work. When did you first develop this aspect, and how do you ensure that each novel’s particular sort of commentary is distinct and interesting in and of itself?
ES: Each layer of commentary is an additional voice. Voice is a long standing interest of mine, an interest nurtured perhaps by Raymond Federman, who was one of my first writing teachers, and who got me hooked on other “voicey” writers such as Marianne Hauser and John Hawkes. I remember him saying that he’d once thrown out a manuscript because the voice wasn’t right, and started again. This made a big impression on me. I’m also interested in a language and perspective that doesn’t efface itself in service of “story,” or what Jaimey Gordon calls the “Big I,” and at the same time, the disclosure/confession that hides as it reveals. An egoistic bid for attention entwined with fear, a wanting to communicate (and commune) as well as a self preserving need to hold back. So I think of those additional layers of commentary/voices as the friend (or frenemy) just beyond reach. Each speaks to the desire of the primary voice to break out of its solipsism, and also to its dread of what might be on the other side of the bars (loss of face, loss of self).
I did think, when the second voice in Ire Land, i.e. the voice of the “editor” in the marginalia, emerged, oh no, not again, here I am once again writing a story with two non-interacting narrators, like two toddlers playing side by side (a doubleness that was in that early story about the boy and his aging aunt mentioned above, though I wrote it in third person, not first). At the same time, I hope that this voice is sufficiently distinct from the “commentary” voices of my previous novels because it arises out of and speaks to the singular egoism of the primary voice. Or to put it another way, everyone creates (or at least inspires) her own particular hell, and Sandra Dorn’s Tir na nOg is tailored just for her.
MP: At the same time, such commentary distances readers from whatever they might want to call “the real story.” You also distance the reader in your arrangement of dialogue. Rather than use conventional quotation marks and dialogue tags, narrators like Sandra mediate all conversations, so readers can doubt whether they are receiving an accurate record of characters’ speech. What uses or advantages or pleasures have you found in these (and perhaps other) forms of distancing?
ES: I think these forms of distancing are intrinsic to the kinds of voices I create—voices that both reveal and conceal, that both seem to proclaim “I’m telling you everything,” and at the same time hide their fear of open borders and breached boundaries. But I’m also interested in these distancing elements as plot devices and sources of tension. I’m partial to unreliable and/or biased narrators, and do find pleasure both as a reader and a writer, in the tease. Of course the withholding that unreliable narrators do is just another form of what all story telling does, to keep the reader wanting to see what cannot yet be seen. Roland Barthes, I think, says something somewhere about how narrative is a kind of burlesque—a veiling and unveiling and veiling again. I consider the commentary in my novels as well as other elements that obscure “the real story,” (e.g. the marginalia of Ire Land, the “revenant files” of Helen Keller Really Lived, etc.), as part of the plot structure. Who wants to watch a strip show where the dancers simply walk out naked?
MP: Many canonical feminist novels feature young women either breaking free or struggling to break free of patriarchal constraints. Your novels feature women (and sometimes men) who have no apparent constraints on their sexual freedom. Instead they struggle with the consequences of their sex acts. Their endings suggest that assertions of sexual freedom are bound to fail. Am I reading this pessimism correctly? How do you see your work in relation to mainstream feminist literature?
ES: My characters do seem to go for it. But I’m not sure I agree that there are no apparent constraints, particularly in the cases of RR in Fort Da, and Stella Vanderzee in Helen Keller Really Lived. Both characters at some level put the brakes on themselves, whether they realize they are doing this or not. Stella, for instance, stayed in her relationship with Timor, long after the sex was over, and one of the novel’s questions is why she did that: was it out of real love, economic necessity, emotional inertia? And while the young version of Sandra Dorn clearly lacks ethical as well as sexual inhibitions and is willing to use anyone and anything for her own gratification (as in the first “Belfast” section), I did mean for the older version to have regrets in the present of the novel that would likely get in the way of sex with the “objects” of her desire, even if her desire was reciprocated (aside from the farmer professor, her geriatric peer, who briefly becomes her lover near the end). Maybe that’s an example of what you mean when you say that these characters “struggle with the consequences of their sex acts.” At the same time, her desire for the mind blowing fuck, the experience of ecstasy (in the full sense of the Greek root, ekistani—to stand outside the self) never leaves her, and in my own reading of the final pages of the book her desire is fulfilled. Or to quote Susan Sontag, “It’s toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest ends.” I don’t consider the end of Sandra’s journey to be a failure, even if it ends with death (or in Tir na nOg), because I think she’s about to get what she’s always wanted, without hurting anyone else. It’s a faery tale come true.
As for how I see my work in relation to mainstream feminist literature, I think that’s hard to answer due not only to certain differences in focus, but also in form. I’m interested not just in actual material constraints and problems (e.g. things like lower pay or the physical exploitation of women’s bodies, as happens via the reproductive clinic in HKRL) but also in exploring the more abstract but equally powerful constraints of language and culture, which I think requires more than the toolkit of conventional realism. I’m also interested in sexuality not just in relation to choice (to engage in this kind of sex or that, with this person or that), or rights (including reproductive), but also as something that remains, to quote Sontag again, “one of the demonic forces in human consciousness.”
“A Veiling and Unveiling and Veiling Again”: An Interview with Elisabeth Sheffieldby Marcus Pactor
An essay from Elisabeth Sheffield on her new novel Ire land, available to order from publisher Spuyten Duyvil:
Ireland came, of course, before Ire Land. But not as an actual island destination, entailing an airline ticket and a passport (though I did end up going to Belfast). Rather, I first got there through Joyce, particularly via Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and later through Beckett’s trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. The literary terra of Ire Land in fact begins with a jar of soil pilfered from Beckett: “I am in your mother’s room, though it is not I who live here now.” Then again, when I wrote what is now the first line of the novel, which was actually composed somewhat after the original beginning (Sandra’s Dorn’s opening message to Madmaeve17), I wasn’t exactly sure what, with this appropriation of an appropriation, I was laying claim to…
Or to put it another way, I knew where I was, sort of, but not why. When I started envisioning the territory of this novel, circa 2013, I was thinking about violence. Literal violence, as in the Sandy Hook and Aurora theater shootings, of a sort that always seemed to be perpetrated by white males. I was also thinking about anger, the simmering grievances and resentments in the various pockets of American culture, and the links between anger and violence. Though it would be a few years before the “deplorables” insured Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and another seven or so before they laid siege to congress with handguns, baseball bats, truncheons, flagpoles and Viking spears, it seemed to me that some new (or reawakened), potentially explosive force was stirring in the inequalities of the economic recovery and the factionalism of identity politics. Poor and not so poor white people were starting to feel corralled and cut off from opportunity in a way that they had not before. So it was a deliberate choice to give my main character, Sandra Dorn, a pasty white working class background, and to have her pull herself up the socio-economic ladder with an advanced education (something that it is much harder to do now than it was back in the 1970s and 1980s for anyone without influence or affluence), only to tumble back down again—due in part to self-destructive choices, but also due to larger political and financial forces undermining the prosperity of working and middle class Americans everywhere.
But in addition to being white and (formerly) middle class, Sandra Dorn is also a woman, and an old woman at that. And besides actual physical, historically recordable violence, I was also thinking about a less explicit kind of violence—the violence that language does to bodies as it captures them for our understanding. As I wrote, I found myself focusing almost exclusively on the latter kind of violence, not least because I think it feeds the former: conceptual categories (e.g., “black,” “white,” “deplorable,” “little old lady”) confine and constrict, and bodies push back. This second kind of violence plays out via the dramatic events of the novel, in Sandra Dorn’s actions and interactions with other characters. I have also attempted to make it play out through form, in the tension between the central text, composed of Sandra’s recovered correspondence, and the marginalia of her mysterious editor. Increasingly, the latter butts up against and distorts the boundaries of the former, and the comprehensible, initially realist body of the narration slowly breaks down, undergoing, at the end, a kind of textual warp-spasm.
Which brings me back to Beckett, and the “Ire Land” that preceded mine. Revisiting the trilogy after I began writing Ire Land, teaching a course on Joyce and Beckett to undergraduates at Queen’s University Belfast, “it was then that the sound of a gong, struck with violence” (Molloy), struck me, for the first time. The trilogy is rife with violence, beatings, poundings and stompings, one of the more graphic being Mahood’s “stamping under foot the unrecognizable remains of [his] family, here a face, there a stomach, as the case might be…” (Unnamable). And with that violence, there’s also rage—rage at being bound up in a body, rage at the inadequacy of language, even as language serves all too well to bind. Hence “I would gladly give myself the shape, if not the consistency, of an egg…a big talking ball, talking about things that do not exist, or things that exist perhaps, impossible to know, beside the point” (Unnamable). I realized that what I wanted to do (and was in fact already doing) was to take that rage and put it in a female body/egg, to see how it would crack…
And then there are the fairies. Because Sandra Dorn is cracking (up), and maybe I was too. Near the end of the five months I spent in Belfast, we drive to see the Hill of Tara, an ancient site steeped in sacred myth and magic. I’d read that C.S. Lewis (who was born in Belfast) had drawn on Tara for the sacrifice of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of my favorite books when I was young. As my partner and two kids wandered the grounds, I sat on a knoll for at least half an hour, recording impressions and sensory details in a little red notebook, including a description of the flock of huge black ravens that had alighted on a swathe of grass nearby, disconcertingly close and loud. When I was finished writing, I joined my family in the gift shop, which was about to close. Quickly scanning the books, I picked up a couple, including one titled Irish Superstitions. As my partner drove us back along the coast road, I leafed through it, coming upon the following: “The ancient Celts considered the raven to be a significant bird of augury…It is generally seen in negative terms. For example, the appearance of a raven while new work is being undertaken signifies that the work will not be a success…” Shortly afterwards, I discovered that the notebook I’d been writing in, which also contained all the notes and observations I’d made during my time in Belfast, and which I’d hoped to eventually work into Ire Land, was missing. The next morning, I called the Hill of Tara gift shop (for surely I’d put it down when I was looking at the books), to no avail: no one, the young woman who answered had seen anything “resemblin’ a wee red notebook.” Someone, or something, didn’t want me to write this novel, and the paranoia lingered for weeks. I even thought about giving up on the “cursed” project entirely, having soured on both on the narrative voice and the story. But eventually, back in the arid light of Colorado, the spell, or whatever it was, broke. I decided to make the na daoine maithe, the “good people” who’d stolen my notes, part of the story. Because what is paranoia but a fantasy of “outside” beaks, tapping away at the brittle shell of self? Or to quote Sandra Dorn, “when you know, deep down, that no eyes are upon you, you invent them.”
https://cagibilit.com/book-passage-elisabeth-sheffield/
Elisabeth Sheffield, Fort Da: A Report, FC2,
2009.
read it at Google Books
In her multilayered, metafictional novel Helen Keller Really Lived, Elisabeth Sheffield introduces us to several women entangled in the complicated threads of motherhood. Alternating between chapters in close-third- and first-person points of view, Sheffield positions these women in relation to a fertility clinic that’s failing to help its clients achieve pregnancy. Selina, the protagonist, is a childless online-certified Reiki master and widow. Shopping in the mall one day, she meets Lyndon, the wife of the fertility clinic’s owner, and learns Lyndon is having trouble conceiving. Selina is desperate to make money after her husband’s death, so she invites Lyndon back to her house for a marijuana-induced “healing experience.” Afterward, Lyndon convinces her husband to hire Selina at his fertility clinic. Selina works alongside Fritzi, a registered nurse whose sons now live with their father. These three central characters evince varied experiences of motherhood: loss of custody in divorce, infertility, and, as we later learn, abortion and step- and surrogate motherhood. On the outskirts of this drama, there is Cara, speaking in her own chapter from beyond the grave, whose unplanned son Selina often cared for while Cara was ill with Lyme’s disease. Another outlier is Kyle, the “Tattoo Girl” with premature ovarian failure, whom Selina finds crying in the Pregnancy and Motherhood section of a bookstore.
In Helen Keller Really Lived, Sheffield has woven an intricate and sensitive tapestry of female experience. The choice of the fertility clinic as a fulcrum for this story indicates that motherhood will be problematized; that a man owns the clinic is equally telling. In each of the female characters’ stories, male intervention has disrupted their ideal pregnancy narratives: Fritzi’s husband forces her to get pregnant; Selina’s forces her to get a hysterectomy. Lyndon dreams of having biological children but is forced into step-motherhood. After her hysterectomy, Selina serves as a surrogate mother to Cara’s disabled and ill-behaved son, but her jealous husband won’t allow her to foster him. Powerfully, birth and death cycle together through the narrative, along with ghosts: the ghosts of babies not born and the ghosts of these women’s former lives, including memories of their own parents’ failures, the stories of their parents’ own childhood traumas and fallen siblings. But there are also literal ghosts, as disembodied voices in first-person chapters. These chapters contain the key to the book’s title, in the form of a multiple-choice question: True or false, Helen Keller really lived.
Well, what is living?
Of all the characters in Helen Keller Really Lived, Fritzi’s story may be the most tragic. Though she didn’t want to be a mother, she was forced by her husband, a doctor, to get pregnant, and gave birth to twins with ADHD. She resents motherhood and hates her children, and thus hates being a mother. She is in the throes of a psychotic break when we meet her; she has left the children she never wanted with the husband who demanded them and has been staging a revolt against her husband’s clinic. In light of medicine’s misogynistic history, this sabotage feels like a sweet refusal to heed the doctor’s orders; to give a finger to the man with the stethoscope who “knows better,” who points with a tongue depressor and cries, “Hysterics!”
Tiff’s journey back to selfhood in The Wallcreeper is another story of revolt in the form of refusal. After her miscarriage and defilement, Tiff refuses to go back to work. It’s easy to mistake Tiff’s inaction as long-term convalescence, or even laziness, but a deeper reading reveals Tiff has dug in. In shock, and unable to care anymore, she decides to give Stephen what he wants. If she has to be passive, she’ll be radically, annoyingly passive. She’ll stay with Stephen even if she doesn’t care about him. She’ll be a stay-at-home wife and be sexually available to a fault — even with other men. She’ll be utterly uninformed on current issues, have no ideas of her own, and look the other way, indifferent, when Stephen sleeps with other people, including her sister. Ironically, the result is the opposite of what Tiff later calls “the right kind of wife” — a woman wholly shaped by mainstream patriarchal standards. This new Tiff is outwardly boring, unfaithful, and emotionally impenetrable.
Stephen’s new, clicktivist girlfriend, Birke, is a graphic design major whose media campaign to save salmon from the fate of hydroelectric power becomes an Internet phenomenon. Housed in a design agency, her Global Rivers Alliance earns widespread recognition and invitations to two environmental conferences. Swept away by convert’s enthusiasm, Stephen decides to leave his job as a pharmaceutical researcher and go to work for Birke, and Tiff eventually follows. She accompanies them to one of the conferences, where she is abandoned by Birke and Stephen, and initiates an affair with a married man who later publicly denounces her. The vanity of Global Rivers Alliance’s mission is thrown into relief when Tiff, disillusioned, and at the urging of a reclusive priest, begins removing rocks from a medieval levee in order to flood a long-dry forest. She works in solitude, and works steadily with her hands. Alone in the woods, there are no philandering lobbyists sexually harassing her at a conference; no snarky, elitist tweets. No banner ads. And most importantly, there is nobody telling her what to think, or not to think. There is just labor — a return to a sense of cause and effect, which Tiff lost with the miscarriage — and the sun rising and setting, a return to natural order.
Tying these two books together is the contiguity of the female body with the natural world. There are animals, trees, rivers, rain. The seasons change; Selina falls asleep on the grass; one wallcreeper eats another. And within that, there is the sense of the female body’s connection to what is tangibly intangible. In Helen Keller Really Lived, Timor’s boyfriend, Bliss, teaches Timor about ghosts, saying, “There is nothing in the mind that was not in the senses.” Writing through the body as a living, complex, feeling organism throws shade on any simplistic motherhood narrative. Nothing about motherhood is simple because, like the body, motherhood is not any one thing. It is a range of caretaking, a process of transformation, the beginning and the continuation of a story. It is a radical shift in a character’s relation to an ever-shifting world, and a kind of origin, and an end. It is also a step we can choose not to take. - Sarah Gerard
Gone daddy gone…I don't know why you suggested that I come here. OK. You're right. You didn't suggest anything. You can't. There's nothing behind those deepset hooded eyes but the void yet the mouth mumbles as if saying a rosary while the fingers fumble with the edge of the sheet counting invisible beads… But you were an atheist, weren't you? Forgive me. Your mouth mumbles as if it isn't saying anything your lips expanding and contracting as rhythmically as the oral cavity of a fish. Is that better? Less judgmental more objective and scientific? I hope so because of course you're no more culpable than the carp trapped beneath the ice of the Otsego no more accountable than the sleet that smears the windows of the Lakeview Lodge for the Aged as I sit here by your bed.
Still I can't help feeling that you owe me something. You're my granddaddy after all the Big Fish who spawned us all with a sweep of his mighty tail. And so it stands that I'd swallow Juju's hook and line if not the sinker about how your grandfather has something he wants to pass on to you before he dies…Remember the old painting that used to hang in his study, the one of the young girl watching over a herd of cows in a field dotted with buttercups? Why shouldn't I believe her why shouldn't it be a Winslow Homer an early American gem to make up for the one I lost when you banished us to LaLa Land? Fair is fair or at least square cuz that painting's got to be worth a mint. So give me a home where the Mohicans once roamed where Abner Doubleday invented a pastime where mapletree sap flows thick and sweet where boys and girls play in the woods until the owl gives a hoot and Mommy hollers time to hit the hay. And if I can't have that I'll take a check.
