Mary Morrissy discusses the creative process behind her Issue Fourteen short story, ‘Mature People’.

‘Mature People’ comes from my recently published collection of short stories, Twenty-Twenty Vision. It could well have been the title of the entire collection since the overarching theme is the experience of late middle-age reckoning; the backward glance on life, love and the whole damned thing.

Some of the action of ‘Mature People’ takes place in Trinity College Dublin – so there’s also a sly echo of Sally Rooney’s Normal People in the title. However, this is Normal People for oldies.

Olivia Fletcher is a retired civil servant who decides to study creative writing at Trinity. (One of the ironies of the piece is that Olivia who’s 60, is obviously a mature student, though in the Irish university system, you qualify as ‘mature’ at age 23.) Despite – or perhaps because of – her so-called maturity, Olivia fails to thrive. She suffers from impostor syndrome and feels cowed by her more obviously intellectual peers. ‘It wasn’t that she hadn’t the brains; it was that her ambition wasn’t high-brow enough. Years of dulling, necessary work had knocked that out of her. Life and single mothering and bad TV had thinned her emotions.’

The mechanics of writing, the daily practice of it, rob her of her airy and unformed notions about fiction. The writing prompts in class reminded her of ‘those pasta machines, where you fed a fat piece of dough in one end and it came out in thin strings at the other’.

In no way is the story meant to reflect on the teaching of creative writing in Trinity – I taught on the MPhil programme myself in the mid 2000s. Like all fiction, ‘Mature People’ is not generalised statement; it’s a specific, imagined experience. But having taught CW for 25 years, I was interested in looking at the creative writing industry, if I may call it that, through the small end of the telescope. From a student’s point of view; a student, furthermore, close to my own age who has come late to writing, but is still new to and wide-eyed about the craft.

The workshop that Olivia falls foul of is one given by a visiting writer, as I was when I taught in TCD. Teachers work in isolation all the time – they may have full lecture halls but they’re essentially on their own. As a result, you never know how your colleagues teach. So I had to use some of my own teaching methods in the classroom scenes, those same methods that so disenchant Olivia. So if anyone’s teaching is being critiqued here, it’s my own.

Olivia drops out of Trinity for several reasons that have nothing to do with her experience in the classroom. Primarily she abandons ship because she realises how much her writing reveals of herself, to herself. Eudora Welty once wrote that she liked the feeling of ‘being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.’ But Olivia’s experience of being distantly loved by her friend Bernard, who has been devoted to her for 40 years, and who inadvertently dominates her writing, just won’t be accommodated in this way. ‘There was nothing elevating in what she wrote, nothing transformative. Her plain truth was just too plain.’

Olivia uses Covid as an excuse to quit college and this is where the second theme of the collection – the pandemic – enters the narrative. As well as looking back, the characters in Twenty-Twenty Vision are dealing with the first year of Covid – 2020 – so it’s also a vision of that year when no one quite knew what was happening and couldn’t know how much the virus would change our world.

It’s while she’s at a vaccination centre, that Olivia has a second epiphany. She’s jabbed into a long-dawning truth about herself and Bernard. But you’ll have to read the story to find out what it is.

Mary Morrissy is an award-winning Irish novelist (The Hennessy Award, Lannan Foundation Award) and short story writer, the author of four novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender, The Rising of Bella Casey and Penelope Unbound, as well as three collections of short stories, A Lazy Eye, Prosperity Drive and Twenty-Twenty Vision.

‘Mature People’ is featured in Issue Fourteen, which may be purchased here.

Twenty-Twenty Vision artwork by Adrian Robb. Twenty-Twenty Vision may be purchased here.