The author of Open, Heaven, opens up about home, roots, family, success and more …
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. He has received the Laurel Prize and Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
ON HOME I think home is always where your childhood was, so my home is still a village in Cheshire in England, but my mum is from Limerick so Ireland was always a parallel home, or there was a version of Ireland in England as I grew up. I’ve lived in Dublin for eight years now and I bought my first house last year, so I have a new place to call home. I still have that thing that I think a lot of people who move away have – when I’m here, home is in England, and when I’m in England, home is here.
ON FAMILY I’m the middle child of three sons. We’re very different. My older brother is a joiner and my younger brother works for Adidas, he’s very sporty. I’m very middle child, I think. I get the sense that the middle child is usually the quieter child because they’re left to their own devices a little more and that was good for me because I was always in my imagination.
ON ROOTS My dad ran a hardware shop, then he was an electrician and a joiner. My mum was a primary school teacher when I was young and then she got a job in a university. My mum’s family is very Irish. She’s one of nine and was raised Catholic. I have this sense of experiencing a reformation every week because we went to church every Sunday, but I was in a Church of England primary school.
“There is so much cultural similarity, particularly in the north of England where there are so many people with an Irish heritage, it doesn’t seem like a strange or unusual thing.”
ON WRITING If I’m on a project, like a novel or memoir, I usually have a vague word count per month. I’ll think about it every day, but I don’t always write every day. Some days if I sit down and I’ve stared at the laptop for an hour and I’ve written a hundred words, I’ll think, maybe today is not the day and I’ll go for a walk instead.
ON MY DESK I have three desks, which is extravagant. I have my university office, an office room upstairs in my house and my kitchen table. I work where I feel like working at any given time. I write in bed quite a lot. I have a little daybed in my office too, so I like to lie there. It’s under the window so you can see the garden and hear the birds. I find that the more comfortable I am, the longer I can write for. Was it Patricia Highsmith who used to eat chocolate and smoke cigarettes in bed while she was writing? If I smoked, I’d probably be doing that.
ON SUCCESS I think my idea of success when I started out as a writer is probably common to a lot of writers starting out – a good review was like getting a good mark in school. Now I think if a book has done what I wanted it to do, that’s success for me and if other people like it, that’s great.
ON BOOKSHOPS As a kid, we used to go to the library where I would burn through shelves and shelves of books. I also used to go to charity shops and, in some ways, that made me the kind of writer that I am. I used to pick out anything that said Penguin Classics or World Classics because it seemed like a good bet if you were spending money. I genuinely love all bookshops, and booksellers in Ireland are so committed and excited about books. I love Books Upstairs in Dublin, it has a special place in my heart.
Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape, €16.99) is out now.
