"I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat." said A. E. Housman, which sounds like a sane response to unpicking my working practice. I'm fond of that quote. I've been asked great questions over the years by various students of all ages- one young boy once wondered why I'd write a story if I already knew the ending. For him the reading was about finding out what happened. Caught off guard, I answered him that I wrote because he didn't know how things turned out, but really I'm not sure if that was an honest answer. Being not sure is part of the job too. Writers are often asked about their actual practice, time of day? every day? My answer is that I don't know, but my CV would suggest that I do have a discipline, even if it seems intangible to me.  I know that I wrote most of one book in a car, but that had to do with fighting for clear time when children were young. For a few years I clung to an anecdote about Luisa Mercedes Levinson, who took to the bed for months, when she had young children, in order to finish writing a book. The story may not be true, it might just have been wishful thinking on my part. Levinson was the mother of Luisa Valenzuela, the author of novels such as Como en la Guerra and Cambio de Armas, experimental, powerful critiques of dictatorship in Argentina. I remember wondering who would feed the children if I stayed in bed.  

 There's a mystery before a work begins, how come a writer decides to tramp that route and not another, how come a painter decides to draw us into that view and a musician pipes us straight into that particular cave? This mystery is the reason why it's farcical to say any one thing inspires a work. Yes there has to be a first conversation, a snap of overheard revelation. But no-one can really say why one writer would pick up that baton and run with it for years - I speak here of books or individual short stories that require dedicated research.  And after the research we cannot truthfully understand the flight. I get so nervous for Billy Collins and his bird. In his poem Madmen, the poet jinxes the unwritten work by mentioning it to someone who then, unintentionally, destroys what really has to be called the magic. At the end of the night the writer profoundly regrets the mistake - the poem has by now hovered at the end of the bar, and made its escape once the door has been opened by a new customer. The poet is left wandering home alone, with 'nothing swinging in the cage of my heart', sadly looking for the 'poor unwritten bird'.

In the spirit of the elusive bird I salute research which is a much more palpable activity, even though we should also beware here. Each person brings their own subconscious vigilance to the search for what matters and to the decision about what to illuminate.

To take an example -The novel Skin of Dreams began with one encounter, as all work does. 

I was visiting my friend Pat Murphy and her partner Tiernan MacBride.  He was on his way out to launch the book about Harry Gleeson, the Tipperary man executed for the murder of Mary McCarthy. Tiernan's father, Sean MacBride, had defended him and always believed in his innocence. There is something about execution that pulls us up in alarm, the state killing of its citizens always rattles us, mention of it causes pause in sentences. Add to that the possibility of innocence and it becomes even more chilling, if that's possible. I've always been drawn to imagining or attempting to understand prison - who knows why.  I remember, when living in Australia in the 1970s, going to visit a deserted prison. I can still feel it. The inmates, many Irish, made the bricks and built the jail around themselves. Can this be true or did I dream it because the metaphor fits? I do remember seeing a heartbreaking list of the physical attributes of men born in Cork, Kerry and Mayo who had escaped, their birthmarks on private parts of their bodies outlined as an utterly reliable way to identify them in the event of them being tracked down.

And here I was now thinking about Harry Gleeson. The following day I read the Marcus Bourke monograph. The day after that I started to take notes. And read histories. More notes. There are always notes.  At some point, after I had created the characters through whom I would relate the story, I became aware that the novel would have to move out beyond Irish shores.  At which point the research took on a life I had no control over. I took a first recce journey to America, having decided that my main character, Maud, would go there. I would have if I’d been her. I thought it the right thing to do, America being the only place that still executes in the language last heard by Harry Gleeson.  I visited the Amnesty International offices in New York for first information. The statistics are staggering. It’s when you see them written down that the full force of it hits you. And so another twist to the tale. 

 My visit to the Execution Chamber was approved after a lot of toing and froing. The searches, the permissions, the story gathering, became a few years all out on their own, culminating in one particular month which included the visit to Death Row. There are many things to remember and more to forget about that particular time in my life.  I have described the Death Row visit in the novel, but of course not all of it. Or not exactly as I experienced it, because I am not the character Maud, and I had to stay true to her, the innocence and naivety of her. I left the prison holding my breath. I got into the rented car and wrote up notes, afraid that if I moved before doing so I would deliberately forget. 

Not the Same Sky has the clear credits of research acknowledged, but again I have to say that after the factual gatherings came the job of imagining  those Famine Orphan girls, all 21 boatfuls of them, brought to Australia between 1848 and 1850. The few years dedicated to that novel had, I remember, a lot of playing with voice.  I gave a lecture in Australia after its publication titled Corridors of Truth, What Fiction adds to History. In it I referred to my visit to the Hiroshima memorial, which features in the story Virgin Birth from Moving About the Place. I talked about the pictures in the first room and wondered how the birds fared on the bright sunny morning that the bomb was dropped. One historian said wistfully,  "that's the difference between you and us, you can have a bird."  Here's to the birds I say.

The last paragraph of Not the Same Sky:

Joy began to make a map of bird migration. She found a picture of Coronelli’s globe, and although New Zealand isn’t there and Australia is marked inconnue, and Ireland is not the shape of Ireland, it’s fine to mark the movement of birds. They can fly over and under Saturn and rest on flying horses. The swifts, being perfectly designed for life on the wing, can sleep as they fly. Marine invertebrates are carried by ocean currents, crustaceans migrate to reproduce in sea- water, insects and frogs move too. But it is the flight of birds that interests her most. It is their fine art that moves her. They go from where they breed to where they winter. They may travel over the open seas or close to the coasts – even the most private of them become gregarious on these journeys and flock together, often making a comfortable V shape to help them in their travels. They have learned where the sun and the stars are. They move when their pituitary glands feel the darkening evenings. They go to where the food is, a lot like us. Some of them have altruistic tendencies and some don’t – also like us. And there are regional variations in some birdsong. They get their accents and put them in their mouths, so no matter where they are we should know from where they came.

Read more about Evelyn Conlon's work on her website. A new publication about her work, Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing by Teresa Caneda, is available to order now.