About
I write.
Novels, poems, essays, blogs and feature articles. But mainly novels.
I read.
Novels, poems, essays, blogs and feature articles. Plays, biographies, psychology, philosophy and history. Newspapers, magazines, yoga manuals and nutrition labels. Tabloids, freesheets and cereal boxes.
But mainly novels.
I prefer the Brontes to Austen, Woolf to Joyce, Yeats to Pound, Atwood to Amis.
I prefer the writings of the romantics and moderns to the postmoderns. And not just because they are easier.
I watch movies. And too much TV.
I was born in Ireland (Waterford city). I live in London (Acton Town) now. I am also about to buy a house in the sun. Europe or California? It’s a dilemma… a very nice one.
I have been with the same man for 27 years. I love him more this year than last.
I have two adult kids. To me, they are frighteningly fabulous. They are called Orna and Ross.
Yes, Orna Ross is a pseudonym and they kindly lent me their names.
I have three brothers and a sister. My father, Con, died suddenly in 1997, way too young. My mother lives in Wexford, where I grew up (waves: Hello Ida!).
I am lucky to have married well – the man had seven sisters. (Hello, lovely Lynches!)
Before I wrote fiction I was a freelance feature writer for newspapers and magazines.
I have also worked as a teacher, a fitness instructor, a saleswoman, a clerk, a waitress, a university lecturer, a barmaid, a literary agent and a writing mentor.
Right now, I’m writing full-time and loving it.
I have had cancer (breast) but I’m in recovery.
I like to jog, to walk and to dance.
I have an MA in women’s studies from University College Dublin. The title of my thesis was “Hearths, Minds and Bodies: The Commital of Women to Enniscorthy Lunatic Asylum 1916 – 1923″.
Anyone who is Irish will know the significance of those dates. I wrote it in 1997. It taught me how history gets written and how to see silences.
The character of Nora in Lovers’ Hollow is based on a real life story from that research. More than a decade on, those women still turn up in my dreams.
I love the Internet, Facebook and, especially, Twitter. I have met so many booklovers there.
Each of my novels is a big, big story that takes me years to write. The plots are full of emotional twists and surprises.
They interweave past and present. They mix real-life, historical events (and sometimes people) with things that never happened and people who never lived, outside of my imagination.
I like what all that allows me to say.
I am a freethinker. I believe “Is there a God?” is the wrong question. I prefer the enlightened to the religious. I distrust dogmatism, including dogmatic atheism.
I believe in spirit and believe inspiration is its breath.
According to the Irish Times, the characters in my books “could never be described as ordinary“. I agree — but only because I don’t think anyone could ever be described as ordinary.
One critic described my writing as “Maeve Binchy meets John McGahern”.
I think I might know what she means.
She also said “this is no mass-produced chick-lit”. That is certainly true. I take pains.
I love my readers.
I know it takes a great reader to make a great book.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: GENERAL
Why do you use a pen-name?
There are a number of reasons why I write under a pen-name. Firstly, people outside Ireland find ‘Áine’ an impossible name to pronounce (it’s “awn-ya”, folks, not “ay-neh”) and my publishers agreed that a short, phonetic name that was easier for people to remember would be a good idea.
But there’s a bit more to it than that. Every writer has a double-act going on. There’s the you who does the writing (a bundle of processes). And the you who lives your life (a bundle of neuroses). The two “selves” connect in strange ways and I find having a pseudonym makes it easier to navigate these connections.
Why Orna Ross?
I knew I wanted something easy to read and remember. But what? I spent ages playing around with names. Then, one day as I shouting up the stairs, calling my two children down to eat – ‘Orna! Ross! Dinner’s ready!’ – I realised: the perfect name had delivered itself to me. I asked them if they’d mind, they said fire ahead and Orna Ross was born.
Where Do Your Ideas Come From?
Every day I have oodles of ideas for articles, blogs and books that I know I’ll never write. F-R-E-E-Writing and Inspiration Meditation just keep them coming. Occasionally, things go into my novels that arise out of other writing that I’m doing — or vice versa. Most often, though, the ideas arise, as if from nowhere, when I’m lying in bed, telling myself I should get up, or when I’m jogging or walking, or in the bath…. It’s a two-pronged thing. As Picasso said, “Inspiration does exist, but it has to find us working.”
Is your writing autobiographical?
Every novelist gets asked this and it is very difficult to answer. Certainly, despite what some readers seem to think when a story is narrated in the first person, I can say unequivocally – and with some relief! – that neither Jo Devereux (Lovers’ Hollow) nor Izzy Mulcahy (A Dance in Time) is me.
But yes, I share some experiences with them — brought up in small villages in rural Ireland, went to boarding school, lived in London… Most significantly I suppose, my great-uncle was shot in the Irish Civil War, in an incident very like that described in in Lovers’ Hollow — though the reasons attributed in the book are entirely imagined.
While my experience of birth family, marriage, children, death and so on differs from my characters’, something of me is in them, and vice versa.
There’s a mystery and a (possible) murder in both of your books. Are you a crime fiction fan?
I read everything and anything if it’s well put together — including crime. I’m currently reading Denis Lehane, as it happens. But when it comes to genre reading, my choice would be historical fiction. I’ve just finished reading (once again!) the 13 books of the Poldark saga, set in 18th Century Cornwall. Oh bliss, oh joy!
How did you come to teach creativity and inspiration? What do you like about teaching?
For me, writing and teaching arise from the same impulse. I write to learn, and to share what I have come to know, and I teach for the same reason. I have always taught, a great variety of subjects to a great variety of students in a great variety of settings: English and history to secondary school students, creativity to MA students at university; exercise to music in gyms; F-R-E-E-Writing in community centres, creative writing and journalism in writing groups and one-to-one….
Teaching is more social than writing and easier to do, so I have to limit myself. I now mainly teach one course, “Be Inspired”, sometimes to writers and artists but often to general audiences.
What are you writing now?
My biggest project ever! Again, it’s a family story of murder and mystery, three interlocking stories set in 1863, 1968 and 2010 which explore money and war, sex and gender, family and race through the life of the super-dysfunctional, over-achieving MacIntyre family. Again, the historical story is told through a more contemporary lens.
The idea for this novel sparked during an evening course I took in American History while living in the north of England. The story itself was shocking — of how a black man called Abraham Franklin was hung by an Irish mob. After Franklin was cut down, sixteen-year-old Patrick Butler dragged his corpse down the street by the testicles. And all to cheers from the onlooking crowd of Irish men, women and children.
As powerful as the story itself was the tension in the classroom. The teacher and the, English students were all uncomfortable about my presence in the room — as if my being Irish in some way associated me with the actions of those far off people, in that distant time.
The novel tells the story of two families, one Irish, the other black, and plays out the myriad connections between them during this troubled time. There is also a front story in a more contemporary setting — late 20th century New York City — where a baby, the newest addition to the McIntyre clan, has just died. Officialdom labels it a cot death but each member of the family – father, mother, twin sister and brother – knows it wasn’t an accident. Which one of them did it? The answer is only revealed to the reader in the last paragraphs – and it is strangely connected to the atrocities that happened during that long-ago riot.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: A DANCE IN TIME
Izzy says that the original Iseult would have been horrified at the thought of being the subject of a historical novel. Do you agree?
To some degree. Iseult Gonne was a very private person, who shunned attention, partly because of the complications around her illegitimacy, partly from seeing the trouble that attention-seeking brought to her mother, Maud Gonne. I can’t imagine that my interpretation of her father, Lucien Millevoye and her husband, Francis Stuart, for example, would delight her but I believe she would understand what the book tries to do. And I like to think she might quietly approve. She was a very big person, able to get beyond her own ego in a way that the characters around her like Stuart and Maud, Yeats and Pound, were not.
How did you come to write about Iseult Gonne - have you always been interested in her?
I came to her through her mother Maud, who kept popping up in my research into the Irish civil war for my first novel, Lovers’ Hollow. And I had this niggling question that wouldn’t go away: how could Willie Yeats, who had made such a career out of his unrequited love for Maud Gonne, wind up proposing marriage to her daughter? That question led me into Iseult’s life, which I found ever more fascinating, and also into a major exploration of that triangle: mother, daughter and other.
Your first two novels look at the tangled relationships between mothers and daughters. What draws you to this subject?
I guess that I am a mother and a daughter! It is an endlessly fascinating and complex relationship. One of the things I set out to do in A Dance in Time was to go beyond the “daughter’s viewpoint” which is at the heart of Lovers’ Hollow and so much feminist fiction.
In the past, few mothers found their way into print so they tended to be written about from other people’s point of view — and to get a bad innings as a result. I wanted Dance to capture the complexities from both sides, but most especially the mother’s.
The multiple narratives work very well in the book (especially Star’s critical footnotes to her mother’s narrative). What are the advantages to you, as a writer, of adopting different narrative voices in one story?
This multiplicity is key to what I do as a writer, absolutely essential to me. I’m drawn to those moments in life when we suddenly ’see’ something we didn’t perceive before, when we drop to a new level of understanding. For me, that is what fiction offers: the opportunity to learn, to grow, to know, through the imagined experience of another. The more others the better, as there is always more than one side to the story.