DONALD S MURRAY
About Donald S Murray
Small Expectations is a collection of linked short prose pieces and poetry. Digressively and figuratively, it tells the story of a character born on the Outer Hebrides, steeped in myth, history and Gaelic, who is then educated for work on the mainland. The character's life thereafter has two poles, and Murray cleverly juxtaposes these strange attractors, bringing the power of ancient myth into the modern world with imagination and great humour.
Praise for Donald S Murray
‘This is an edgy, unsettling, fragmented collection of poems and prose – satires, twisted myths, darkly humorous fictions, poignant reflections on language loss – through which Donald S. Murray explores the uneasy space between Gaelic and English, between the strengths of an island community and its limitations, between the lives we have and the possible lives that escape us. It’s fine, assured writing, full of contradictions, dichotomies and ironies, and we should cherish its courage and honesty.’
– James Robertson
‘This is a very fine collection of stories and poems full of imagination and humour – the humour ranging from the hilarious to the sardonic. There is a finesse and craft to the prose and poetry which rings true to many an islander’s experience. This is a writer who has been and seen. The collection is a tour de force, a distillation, arising from a living imagination of Hebrideans’ experience at home and as émigré. The reader will never look at porridge or mackerel in quite the same way again!’
– Maoilios Caimbeul
An interview with Donald S Murray
When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?
I think my first inspiration was probably a comic. (I seem to remember reading one called Bimbo when I was in my early school years.) After that, I spent a few evenings inventing stories and foisting them on my father who was supposed to leave them at the local shop for sale. There was even a price scribbled in a corner of the front page. I have to confess there was more than a little greed inspiring my early writings. I won enough multi-coloured torches from competitions in The People’s Friend to light up the north of Lewis. And after that, I won a £1 postal order from The Dandy, filling up a page with an entry entitled ‘My Home Town Stornoway’. It’s been downhill ever since.
In terms of reading, I progressed through Brer Rabbit, Biggles, and even James Bond. The Dudley Watkins books – especially his illustrated version of Kidnapped, but also Oliver Twist and Treasure Island – were also an inspiration. I grew to love detective stories later and read a good number, such as Chandler, Dashiell Hammet, Ross Macdonald with his Lew Archer tales, John D MacDonald with Travis McGee. I think I would have liked to have been a beach-bum on a boat in the Florida Keys, but clearly, I took a wrong turning somewhere.
Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind Small Expectations in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?
I think I decided to have fun – after the longer, non-fiction work of The Guga Hunters. I also enjoyed playing with some parts of both my identity and those of many others around me. The Gael who ended up writing in English. The boy from a working-class, single-parent home who became a teacher. The islander who left home – even if it was to another island. The routes I took and the choices I made all seemed a bit ‘random’ (to borrow a teenager’s word), especially since I can’t remember making the decisions that led me to this position in my life.
How do you go about creating your voice on the page?
It’s all a little like the young John Travolta strutting down the street at the opening of Saturday Night Fever. I feel the rhythm move me!!
Sometimes, too, it’s just about as physical as that. My ideas and the voice come to me when I’m either walking or at the halfway stage between sleeping and rising. And then I begin to scribble something down on the page.
How and when do you write?
Mainly, it’s during the school holidays. I do it then as intensely as I can. I hear other writers congratulate themselves on producing 1,500 words a day. On a good day, I can manage double that. Unfortunately, I have no other choice.
What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?
I still love short stories – Alice Munro, Alistair Macleod, William Trevor, John McGahern, the Icelandic writer Gyrdir Eliason, David Constantine, a new Irish writer called Clare Keegan – and also increasingly poets like Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Longley, Bernard O’Donoghue … I also like reading European novelists, such as Stefan Zweig, Javier Marias and – recently – The Door by Magda Szabo.
At the moment, I’m back reading Italo Calvino again whom I first discovered and enjoyed in my early twenties, also a fair amount of Italian history and even the original Pinocchio. As the years go on, I’ll probably rediscover Brer Rabbit once more or begin writing for The Dandy…
Who know what’s waiting for me.
