Award-winning writer: An interview with Shane Tivenan
“This is pretty weird for me, to be honest,” Shane Tivenan says from Madrid.
“I’m only writing two years, and here I am with people ringing me up about it. The Irish aren’t great with that sort of thing I suppose. We’re just too suspicious of things.”
The Drum native recently took the top prize in the prestigious Francis MacManus RTÉ Short Story Competition, coming out tops over nine other shortlisted writers.
His story ‘Flower Wild’ tells the tale of Violet Gibson, the Irish woman whose failed assassination attempt on Mussolini in Rome in 1926 led her to a mental asylum in Northampton, where she remained until her death in 1956.
Writing is a relatively new venture for Shane, who only began to write fiction in 2018. While attending school, in St Aloysius College in Athlone, he showed little interest in English.
“I had no interest in English as a subject in school, which is a pity because I had a really great teacher in the late Joe Ducke. I was into music at the time, mainly electronic stuff, but in terms of literature I had no interest.”
It was only while attending Maynooth University that writing became a clearer avenue for Shane.
“I think studying anthropology changes the way you see the world,” he says. “The course was heavily dependant on writing, and lecturers and mentors at the time would have picked up that I could write. It was academic-style, which I wasn’t really drawn to, but that started me off.”
With some years as an electronic and electro-folk music festival DJ and producer under his belt, Shane moved to Madrid in 2018, where he teaches English.
“When I lived in Ireland I had been involved in the music scene for years, but when I moved to Spain I didn’t have that community.
“For artists, I think creativity needs to manifest in certain people around you. So I started writing fiction, and I think I started to feel much more settled living here.”
Writing then became a daily habit, one which he describes as “getting the dirty diesel out of the engine.”
“You’re working your way down to a pure style that’s your own, or as much as it can be your own. Initially, I was imitating writers, and that can be a healthy thing. Taking a piece of literature yourself and just re-writing it word for word to see how that feels can be useful. But consistently writing gets that stuff out of you, and you end up with something that’s worth putting out that you can get feedback from.”
Shane soon entered two short stories into the Desperate Literature Short Story Competition in Madrid, one of which was shortlisted while the other was longlisted. Another soon following with the Psychedelic Press in the UK.
It was Shane’s mother, Mary, who told him about the Francis MacManus competition.
“Up until this year, you had to enter a physical copy of your story. You couldn’t enter online. In 2019 it would have taken too long to write something, edit it, print it off, and send it to Ireland. But this year you could send it in online.
“I wrote ‘Flower Wild’ specifically for the competition. I studied the form of previous winners and I knew that you needed to write a story that was suitable for the airwaves. I had Violet Gibson in my mind, but I didn’t know whether I wanted a long or short piece.”
Shane initially heard about Violet Gibson through Lisa O’Neill’s song of the same name.
“I didn’t think it was a real person, just a folk character that they had invented. I’m interested in outsiders, and she was totally abandoned by her family, her people, the government, everyone. She was left in that mental asylum for 30 years.”
However, he believes that Gibson is returning to the zeitgeist at the moment. Along with Lisa O’Neill’s song and Shane’s story, a docu-drama from Colin Murphy entitled ‘Violet Gibson, The Irish Woman Who shot Mussolini’ premiered at the Kerry International Film Festival in October.
“I hadn’t come across her in literary fiction, so I really tried to get inside her head and write a really close first-person monologue of her last days and hours of her life.
“She was trapped inside her femininity,” Shane explains, “and she really had to fit inside the role that her family had pre-ordained for her because her father was the Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
“There was no room for her to be anything other than a proper lady, and that was reflected in how she was treated after. She was wrote off as a crazy old Irish woman.
“Mussolini was embarrassed that she had gotten so close to killing him, and there’s still disbelief that it happened at all, but it’s interesting that we’re coming to terms with it now.”
The competition received over 4,000 entries, the most in its history, so Shane put it out of his head until he returned a missed call from a Dublin number in September and was told he had made the shortlist. Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the winners were announced on the Arena show on RTÉ Radio One in October.
“They basically told us nothing, apart from saying that they would be ringing five of us during the show. I wasn’t on the list of numbers. I didn’t know if that was really good or bad. But I did get a call in the end and I found out I won five seconds before speaking on air. I probably sounded like a robot or froze up.”
Shane is now writing a novel, which he calls “a different animal to the short story.”
“I literally lost the plot first time around, and brought one character into a new idea. The same thing happened again, and I then started writing a third-person story in the first lockdown. It’s going really well.”
‘Flower Wild’ can be read here: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2020/0910/1164375-rte-short-story-shortlist-2020-flower-wild/