Passport to Ireland with Colum McCann

Selected Shorts

Host Meg Wolitzer and guest Colum McCann lead a literary tour of Ireland through contemporary short stories. The episode features works by A

Key takeaways

• Anne Enright's 'Lucy's Boyfriend' explores the psychological weight of past infidelities through a modern yoga class encounter.
• Colum McCann uses magic realism in 'Fishing in the Sloe-Black River' to depict mothers fishing for emigrated sons.

Main topics

• Contemporary Irish Literature
• Magic Realism

Notable quotes

We are torturously poetic.

Conclusion

A moving celebration of how modern Irish voices continue to shape and

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:08) It takes one to know one. This week on Selected Shorts, great Irish writer Colin McCann's picks for great Irish stories. Established masters and promising newcomers take us on a literary tour of the Emerald Isle. I'm Meg Wolitzer. Grab a stool. Stay put. Speaker 4 (0:44) We are lucky to count best-selling author Colm McCann, whose powerful works of fiction include Let the Great World Spin and Twist as a friend of Selected Shorts. So when we wanted to explore the work of exciting contemporary Irish writers, we knew just who to turn to. Here he is from the stage at Symphony Space during our most recent event with him. Speaker 2 (1:07) So let's talk for just a little moment about the Irish. Let's face it, we are torturously poetic. Speaker 2 (1:18) We're unbearably self-conscious. We're awkwardly comic. Speaker 2 (1:25) We're willfully ambiguous. We'll answer a question with another question. We joyfully use three words instead of one. We give you the directions to the exact place you don't want to go. Speaker 2 (1:43) So tonight's show is your passport to Ireland. You're a selected shorts crowd. You know your stuff. And you know the short stories of James Joyce, for instance. He will always be our guiding light. But I hope after you hear tonight's programme, you'll understand that while Dubliners is everything, not everything is Dubliners. And we can't bring you the entire diaspora over the course of one night, so we're going to focus on contemporary. writers, some of those who carry on the tradition of Irish literature and some of whom are breaking things and disrupting the conventional narratives. And so, let's begin with a long-time favourite of mine, a colleague and a friend, the wonderful Anne Enright. Her novels include The Gathering, The Forgotten Waltz and The Green Road. She's won the Man Booker Prize. This one is truly a short story, but you'll see just how much ground Anne Enright covers in just a bit over a thousand words. And reading the story... one of our shorts family, an actor whose Broadway credits include Clyburn Park and who appeared in the recent Lincoln Center production of The Blood Quilt. She's also known for series including The Shy and the film I Origins, so you know who it is. Now performing Anne Enright's story, Lucy's Boyfriend, please welcome Crystal Dickinson. Speaker 5 (3:23) Lucy's boyfriend. Speaker 5 (3:27) Everyone said that Jen had run off with Lucy's boyfriend. Though she had not run off with Lucy's boyfriend, he had run off with her. Also, it happened a good three months after he and Lucy had broken up. I can't believe you did that, Sharon said. He Speaker 4 (3:50) was Lucy's. He really wasn't. Speaker 5 (3:55) But Jen found she could not say as much because Lucy had locked herself in a toilet cubicle and people said she was throwing up in there. She was so upset. Lucy was in love and Jen was maybe not in love. So he was Lucy's because Lucy said he was and everyone agreed with that. Everyone except the guy. who was called John Dolan. John Dolan said that Jen was the one he wanted all along. Speaker 5 (4:33) He had broken up with Lucy at Christmas. They all knew that. It was supposed to be a time of joy and goodwill, not of ghosting and dumping. So the holiday had been ruined for everyone, especially for Lucy's mother. And it was March when he got with Jen. A full, count them, 13 weeks later. And by the way, she wanted to remind people he made the first move. A move that felt so right, it did not occur to Jen that he had once wrapped his arms around Lucy the way he was now wrapping his arms around her, saying, Speaker 5 (5:16) So hey. Speaker 5 (5:25) Hey. She said back. Speaker 5 (5:30) Later, she did mention her friend. She said it after they'd finished their first long kiss, which took place outside against the trunk of a huge budding tree. She nestled into his shoulder and looked back at the house where everyone partied on oblivious, and with a sudden, unforeseen pang, she said, What about Lucy? He was so surprised he started. He might have said, Who? Speaker 5 (6:04) Later, when it was all a big drama, he folded Lucy back into the story as if she had some role in their getting together. It was you all along, he said. They were in his mother's car up in the hills where the darkness was huge. Saturday night was happening elsewhere, and it felt as if they were hiding from everyone they knew. Really? Speaker 5 (6:34) Jen thought this was a bit of a lie. She thought it would be more truthful to say that he never wanted Lucy in any serious way or that he used to like Lucy and then he didn't like her. These things happen. Speaker 5 (6:50) What did all along mean anyway? John Dolan was talking the way Lucy talked, as if people belonged to other people. You could be involved in other people's wanting, whether you knew it or not. He leaned in and whispered into her hair. It was you I liked. She could hear the melancholy in the lie as she looked at the city lights spread below. All his sadness opened out for her. Really? Speaker 5 (7:28) Jen felt a tiny lifting sensation in her chest. She would sleep with John Dolan. She had been reluctant, but now she would give in, not because her body wanted it so much, but because of this new, sweet untruth. He had loved her all along. Speaker 5 (7:56) This was when they were in the last year of school and everyone was panicking about final exams. Lucy was so upset about John Dolan that she tanked biology. So it was actually really serious because first Jen stole Lucy's boyfriend and then she stole her future as a veterinarian. Speaker 5 (8:21) So, that all happened in 2004. Speaker 5 (8:25) And now, it was 2024. Speaker 5 (8:30) No one knew where John Dolan was, and no one cared. There were hundreds of John Dolans on LinkedIn. It was hard to know if he was even online. Speaker 5 (8:43) Lucy popped up whether you wanted to see her or not. Many snaps of her three children who Jen thought always looked perfect and never looked happy. Also pictures of her lovely house with its coffered wooden ceiling and its color scheme in a pale yellow that Lucy called primrose and Jen called omelet. Speaker 5 (9:14) Jen was online a lot in 2024 because she was in a nervous breakdown. Speaker 5 (9:21) Or a time of transition. or whatever you wanted to call it. Her marriage was over. She had one fabulous spark of a child who, according to his school, had behavioral difficulties. A raging, grieving boy who hated his mom and missed his dad. Her job was unsatisfying, but well-paid, and she despised. That is not too strong a word. everyone in the yoga class where she went to calm down. Speaker 5 (9:59) Especially the wisp of a woman who leaned both hands on her knees in Baddha Konasana and said that tightness in the hips was sometimes trauma-related. Speaker 5 (10:19) It just wasn't. Jen wanted to say. And all the scented candles in the world could not tell her otherwise. Speaker 5 (10:30) She was crying in savasana one day or releasing water down the sides of her perfectly still face. Speaker 5 (10:40) when she saw Lucy. Speaker 5 (10:44) pick her way through the mats on an early exit from the room. It was just a glimpse of Lucy passed above her, looking about ten feet tall, her thigh long and planar like a sculpture of a leg, her hair swishing in a ponytail, and her face oddly blotched, which, Jen decided later, Speaker 4 (11:05) might have been Speaker 5 (11:07) a problem with her filler. Speaker 5 (11:11) She scrolled all evening eating pizza from a grease-stained box. Everything in Speaker 4 (11:17) Lucy's life was sunny and bright. Speaker 5 (11:20) A man, presumably her husband, cooked on a barbecue. A daughter in a tulle skirt twirled on a green lawn. No sign of a job or a profession. But Speaker 4 (11:31) why Speaker 5 (11:32) post about that? Speaker 5 (11:34) A few weeks later. Jen glimpsed Lucy through her own legs in a downward-facing dog. Speaker 5 (11:44) and was relieved when Lucy did not recognize her dangling there. Speaker 5 (11:50) Lucy floated into Chattaronga in a way that was beautiful and unreal. Later, she lifted a leg and swung it to the side without a wobble. This was before the three-minute headstand, during which she looked a little worried, and her face flushed red. Her filler was definitely a bit lumpy upside down. Speaker 5 (12:16) Jen felt stuck to the mat as she waited for Lucy to leave at the end of class, but she seemed in no hurry this week, and they were both still for a very long time. And because she had nothing else to do, Jen began to survey her body the way she had been instructed. Fingers. Wrist. Forearm. shoulder, up over her scalp, all the way down to her toes, which she relaxed one by one. Before, during, after, all along, she found it was women she was counting. Speaker 5 (13:00) The other women in her ex-husband's life twitched into her mind toe by toe. The silly one. The one who did not matter. The one who would not leave him alone. She thought of his voice as he lied to her. How she wanted to fill that hollow melancholy with her love as for some reason her heart now rose to do, filling the silent room in its many supine women and two stunned men. The wisp at the front with her prayer bell, the light-filled window, the street beyond. Speaker 5 (13:43) She let her hand lull sideways onto the wooden floor, which was slick with the condensed sweat of all their bodies, but also nicely cool. Speaker 5 (13:58) He was really Lucy's boyfriend. Speaker 5 (14:03) That had been a wrong thing to do. Speaker 5 (14:07) Oh my God. Speaker 5 (14:09) Lucy was standing right over her, whisper squealing, her hand doing a tiny private flutter of hello. How are you? Shh. Speaker 5 (14:21) Are