Q & A with Ed Kavanagh

1. What is your favourite book(s)?

Hmm. As is often said, that's a lot like trying to pick a favourite child. I do very much like Laurie Lee's autobiographical trilogy Red Sky at Sunset. Two others would be Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Anything, really, where the author performs the miracle of creating living human beings out of paper and ink. I mean, isn't that what we're all striving to do? 

2. What are you reading now?

Ordinarily I read just one book at a time, but in the last couple of years I've been doing a lot of concurrent reading--cherry picking, as it were. At the moment I'm into Margaret Atwood's Negotiating with the Dead; Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems: Volume Two; Pablo Neruda's Selected Poems; William Trevor's Collected Short Stories; Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way; Douglas Glover's Elle; and Robert Gutman's Mozart: A Cultural Biography.

3. What do you like to do in your free time?

I listen to a lot of music and also spend time studying music. These days I've also been working hard at trying to make a decent sound on the fiddle, and I'll probably take some lessons in the fall. I also like to run and bike, and I usually go for a hike at least a couple of times a week.

4. What kind of music do you listen to?

As a harper I'm drawn to harp recordings (I currently have over a hundred), but I also listen to a lot of classical music--primarily Mozart, Schubert and Bach, at the moment--as well as Irish traditional music.

5. What is your favourite movie(s)?

I've never been much a movie person, but in recent years I did like Il Postino (The Postman). Generally I tend to like movies from the '30s and '40s more than modern ones.

6. What other jobs have you had besides being a writer?

I've primarily been a music teacher, editor, theatre director, and university lecturer. I also perform on the harp.

7. What was your first piece in print (book, review, or article, etc)?

If memory serves, I wrote some articles about events at the LSPU Hall when I worked there in the early '80s. I don't remember where they were published . . . The Telegram? I was also published in the 1984 Arts and Letters Prize Winning Entries booklet. My first book was Amanda Greenleaf Visits a Distant Star, released in 1986.

8. What character from your book(s) is the most like you? What one would you most like to be?

People always assume that The Confessions of Nipper Mooney is based on my life. It is, however, a lot less autobiographical than it may appear. Still, I suppose there's at least a little bit of Nipper in me. In some ways I'd like to be like Brendan in that book. We both have the same solitary personality and connection with Nature, but he takes the irritations of the world a lot better than I do.

9. If you could live during any time period and in any place, when and where would you choose?

Definitely Paris during the '20s. It was so vibrant and wild, and there was so much new going on. That era is a hobby of mine and I've done quite a bit of research on it. I've also read quite a number of the authors, both the lesser lights as well as the greater. The more I read, the more I wish I'd been there. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, jazz--it would have been impossible to be bored during that era.

10. Make a question of your own and then answer it.

What's the main benefit of being both a writer and a musician?

Well, if a book of mine comes out and gets universally panned, I can always plead that really I'm a musician. So what can you expect? And, of course, if I release a CD that's panned, I can always say: Come on. Give me a break. Don't you know I'm really a writer?