Juilene Osborne-McKnight
An Interview with Juilene Osborne-McKnight (July, 2013)
Dr. Juilene Osborne-McKnight is the author four Irish historical novels: I am of Irelaunde, Daughter of Ireland, Bright Sword of Ireland, and Song of Ireland, all published by MacMillan/Forge. She has also published poetry and essays in such journals asCommonweal, Parabola, Amelia, Blue Unicorn, POEM, and the Lyric and has published several hundred magazine and newspaper articles and columns. She directs the Department of Communications at DeSales University where she teaches journalism, creative writing, Celtic and native American mythology. She will be Teaching Professor abroad in Rome in the fall of 2013.
Her novel, Song of Ireland, will be re-released by Forge this Dec. 13th in trade paperback with a fresh cover. Five chapters of her work-in-progress new novel, Borealis Island. are available on her web site.
BWG: How did you become so deeply involved in Irish history, mythology, and mysticism?
McKnight: My family is Irish, ancestrally, from County Mayo, and came over during the period of Irish famine. They were all famine Irish, the whole crew.I knew that story but none of the story before that.By odd coincidence, I was teaching high school when I was twenty and was doing research on King Authur and Authurian mythology and came across a throw away line in a text, "Of course, the Authurian chivalric code is based the Irish Fenian Code of the 3rd century. I did not what the Fenian Code was, and after that it was Alice down the rabbit hole. The Irish stories, myths, and legends became, and still, my life long obsession. I am constantly reading, researching, and studying this field - and it is something that would never have happened if I had not come across that throw away line.
BWG: In your writing workshops you focus strongly on archetypes and universal mythical characters but you underline that good story telling focuses on the characters' reactions to the situation they face, i.e., storytelling comes first. Could you elaborate on this?
McK: Carl Jung was Sigmond Freud's student and he felt Freud was wrong on obsessing on id,ego and superego. Jung had a theory that man was swimming in a river of collective unconscious experiences and from those experiences we pluck stories and tell them. Josepth Campbell, the truly great mythologist, believes that cultures collectively see themselves as archetypes. The Irish, and all other cultures, see themselves as archetypes. That is not a stereotype but rather a way of telling their cultural history and mythology. When you study fiction, you find that all characters in all fiction in all cultures at all times are archetypes. They may dress themselves differently and see themselves differently but they are the same stories told over and over. I believe that human beings come seeded for story. Stories are important. Stories are culturally necessary. Themes arise out of a story, like a bird. The theme is built into all stories. The writer should not worry about that. Just tell the story.
BWG: Your 1st four books focus on ancient Irish legends and myths. Your newest book, Borealis Island, brings this mythology into modern times. Do you plan to go further into moderns, such as the struggle for Irish Independence or the '70's, '80s "troubles" in Northern Ireland?
McK: I deliberately set out to write a novel of urban fantasy,i.e., a fantastical, mythological story rooted in the modern world. I wanted to do it on purpose because I think culturally America has become too distant from its own storytelling. Everything now is technology or the internet or reality television, which isn't reality at all. We have become too distant from the stories that we should be telling ourselves about who we are and what we value.I wanted to write a story on contemporary American that would remind us that what we see on the surface of the world is not all that there is. It is an intersection between myth and modernity, faith and disbelief, and darkness and light. I am going to be working on a book that includes the "troubles" and then I am going to go way back to do on book on the Gallic wars between Ceasar and Rome and the Celtic tribes of France.
BWG: Do you have a schedule for producing new books, i.e., every year or 2 years?
McK: I would prefer, in the best of all possible worlds, to be on a schedule of producing a new book every 2 years. But a lot of that depends on your publisher and the schedule your publisher has set out. For example, my publisher will release a trade version of one my on December 13th, which in fact makes a gap of 5 years. And this is all at the discretion of the publisher. If you want to self--publish, you determine all of that on your own. But what has been happing lately is that many writers are now doing books with multiple publishers, which makes their releases rotational. I think that is smart and something I will explore this summer. That way you are not at the mercy of just one publisher's schedule.
BWG: You teach full time, as well as acting as Director for Communications for DeSales University, plus conduct workshops at other venues. How do you find time for your own writing?
McK: During the academic year, I do not write much at all. I will do editing, I will do story telling, I will do marketing, particularly if new materials are coming out, and I will do book signings. But the actual writing I will not do. Then, during the summer, I will write eight to 12 hours, at least 3 days per week. Big long chucks of time where the only thing I do is get to go to the toilet or to get something to eat. It makes a nice life as I love teaching and being with my students and then, by the end of the year, that is finished and I am really ready to go write. Then at the end of the summer I am glad to get back to the classroom.
BWG: How often do you do writer's workshops?
McK: Most years I do approximately 5 major workshops. I do at least one per year for a university, not my university. Then I may do 1 per year for Barnes & Noble, And then I do between 1 and 3 for writers' conferences around the country. I thoroughly enjoy them as that is where you get the company of other writes.
BWG: Your books are currently available from MacMillan/Forge for Kindle, Nook, & I-Pad. Did these originally come out as hard covers?
McK: My books all originally came out as hardcovers starting in the year 2000. Then they came out as soft covers in 2006. They are still coming out as soft covers, with the last one coming out as a soft cover in December, 2013. They all came out last year as imprints. But MacMillan, in the same large publishing group as Forge, asked if they could re-release them, as fresh, for Kindle, Nook, and I-Pad in digital form. So the hard and soft backs are with Forge, and the digital versions are with MacMillan.
BWG: Do you do the full platform building (FB, Twitter, blog, website, etc.) as often now described as essential for authors?
McK: Now, if you are an author, you have to be. You do not have a choice, You have to have a web page, you have to be on Facebook, I am not on Twitter but I will be on twitter this summer. They suggest you be on Linkedin. They suggest you have a blog. They suggest in fact about 10 venues that you should be on. The truth is they are very time consuming and that you are competing with a world of other people who want the same PR and marketing space.It is very difficult to make yourself stand out from the clutter of all that self promotion. But every writer now does the full monty of that stuff. You have to do it and that's it. But I am not sure it is as productive as big publishing thinks it is.
BWG: What are the biggest or most common mistakes you see in your students' writing?
McK: The most common mistake is the tell as opposed to the show. Instead of letting the story act itself out, they tell you in summary format what has happened. Instead of letting the story unspin itself out, they tell you what happened. They go into narrator's voice. I also find this in the adult workshops that I teach as well, the narrative expositional voice. They worry about speeding things up before the reader gets bored. You have to let it unspin in your head like a theatrical piece, like a movie, to make it more compelling.
BWG: The single best piece of advice that you have received on writing?
McK: Don't give up. What I tell my students: Do not let them make you give up. The publishing establishment will make you feel at the beginning of your career,and even later in your career, that you are battering your head against a wall. Don't let them make you do that, don't let them make you give up. Don't let them demoralize you.
BWG: Tell us about being a Teaching Professor Abroad in Rome this fall. It sounds like fun.
McK: I will teaching in Rome with DeSales University with 15 of my students. I will teaching Cesar vs the Gauls, the literature of Italian Imagination, and a class in Spirituality. We will all take a class in Italian history and archeology, which is a "foot" course to local digs. We will be living in Trastevere, next to the Vatican for one semester, September to December.
BWG: How do you relate your poetry to your prose writing?
McK: Poetry in my mind is a God voice. It is the closest writing to my bones. When I am telling stories, they are other people's stories, not mine. Poetry is like prayer. My poems are profoundly meaningful to me. Each type of writing is its own different experience. They are both equally fulfilling to write. But novels belong to the readers when you are finished while poems are a shared ownership. They belong to you and to the readers.
Interview by BWG member Jerome W. McFadden