Readers Place

Keith Donohue interview/review

Interview with Keith Donohue as taken from randomhouse

1. You seem to know a lot about changelings. How much of The Stolen Child is autobiographical?

To the best of my knowledge, I am not a changeling. Nor am I a composer or a musician. Not an anthropologist, not a folklorist, and I have never eaten a bug or played the pipe organ in Bohemia. Any resemblance to persons or mythical creatures, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Of course, the style and subject betray deeper truths about growing up, heartbreak, creativity, and yearning-and by necessity, any work of art springs from its creator’s inner life.

1. I understand that the novel was initially inspired by William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Stolen Child.” Tell us about that connection and Irish folklore.

Well, I wasn’t even aware of my Irish roots until going off to college. Irishness, at the time, was all about stereotypes – leprechauns and St. Paddy’s Day and all that. I think my father had one Irish record, but he was just as likely to be listening to Mahalia Jackson or Herb Albert, and I was even more likely to be listening to “American Pie” or reading American books or watching American television and movies.

It was a surprise to me to encounter someone like Yeats and react so viscerally to the rhythm and the ambience of his poems, particularly “The Stolen Child.” It’s really not so much about the faeries, but more about the images of the natural world – the heron, the lake, the rushes – in contrast to the domestic life of the kettle on the hob and the mouse bobbing around the oatmeal chest.

So, I knew the poem ages ago, and one day wandered into a used book store and picked up Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds, which brushes the dust off the fairy story and brings it to life. A swath of that book revolves around a dialogue between a Pooka (a sort of third-class devil) and a Good Fairy, who being formless, spends a lot of time in his pocket. All very funny, contemporary, and subversive, which is how I decided to approach the changeling legend.

1. What are the roots of the changeling legend, and how much of it in The Stolen Child is pure invention?

Before I forget, there are another few threads to the weft. The Waterboys, a Celtic rock-folk band, recorded a version of “The Stolen Child” which helped make the poem stick in my mind, and they did a great job of capturing its sensibility. Another influence was Sarah Hrdy’s book Mother Nature:

A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection, which deals with the changeling legend from a social-anthropological standpoint. She writes about the practice in medieval times of parents simply abandoning babies with obvious birth defect – “failure to thrive” is the phrase – and how they justified their infanticide by conjuring up this elaborate theological explanation that their “normal” child had somehow been replaced by this devilish creature in the cradle. And out of that story sprang the folktales and legends that were prevalent in Western Europe.

Like most of these stories, there are an awful lot of variations, some contradictory, so I decided to move the story to America and make up the rules for their society – most importantly, how they become changelings and how they can change back into humans. For the purposes of the book, I needed a way to create a character who would be in a child’s body forever, and a character who was a child for too long and who has now reentered human life.

Also to hear the author speak about the book and for further information take a look at the keithdonohue