How About This presents Ronan O'Driscoll

An interview with an Irish born writer who has chosen to make his home in Nova Scotia

Welcome to Atlantic Canada Mondays, a regular feature of How About This where we interview interesting residents of the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Today’s interview is with Nova Scotia based author Ronan O’Driscoll. Originally from Ireland, Ronan’s lived in several countries before settling upon Nova Scotia as his home. Ronan is currently a senior software engineer at Wattpad, as well as having been an educator in Computer Programming at the Nova Scotia Community College. He’s published two novels with a third in progress.

Here’s Ronan!

Ronan O’Driscoll

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When you were a teenager, what did you want to become when you grew up?

The short answer is I've always wanted to be a writer. As a kid in rural Ireland of the seventies, I remember my teacher giving us an assignment to write a poem based on a waterfall. I can't remember what I wrote but I recall getting so absorbed in writing it, I felt the words flowing like a torrent. When I read it out to the class (at the risk of much abuse!), I got praised for it being even better than the example we were given. I'm sure it wasn't and my teacher was just being nice. However, the experience turned on a switch in my brain: I want to be a writer. I became obsessed with books and reading.

When my teens hit hard (including being uprooted from County Kerry to 1980s Chicago, because of my Dad's job), I retreated to the imaginary world of books, including writing stories and poetry. Of course, society doesn't really want young people to do anything self-fulfilling so I got distracted: first becoming a teacher, then a computer programmer. I would love to write full time but it is a daunting prospect to try and pay the bills that way. 

Coming from the perspective of someone born and raised in Ireland, what differences between Canada and the US are most striking to you?

My wife, Lisa, is Canadian, so I suppose I was always predisposed to like this place. It has been wonderful to discover the places she told me about, just as Lisa did when we moved to Ireland after Japan. That being said, I am aware my concept of Canada is predominantly East Coast as I haven't had a chance to see as much of the rest of the country as I would like.

One difference that struck me when I first moved here was how sincerely people follow rules: driving, queuing and just overall genuine politeness. Although Irish people tend to be friendly, rules are often there to be broken. One reason there are so many roundabouts in Ireland: nobody obeys stop signs! Part of this comes from the history of British control. If your government was imposed and making unfair laws, it made sense to celebrate rebels and lawlessness.

A common saying of my Grandmother's sums this up for me: "Might as well be shot for a sheep as a lamb". This roughly means: if you are going to do something wrong, might as well do it in style. Whenever I hear it, it brings to mind hungry poachers taking livestock from the wealthy landowner's estate. However, the "high trust" society we have in Canada feels more fragile recently. The vitriolic resistance to mask mandates in the light of the pandemic and lockdown were very surprising to me.

Are there any specific things that you particularly miss about Japan (based on your time living and working there)?

So many things! Comfort foods like oni-giri and okonomiyaki that don't make it over here. Home furnishings like tatami mats, kotatsu heaters and fusuma sliding doors. The absolute insanity of bustling Japanese cities. The quiet beauty of the Japanese countryside. In general, I love that unique Japanese aesthetic you find reflected in even the smallest details.

Japan is the ultimate example of a "high trust" culture I mentioned previously. In my case, I worked in a rural junior highschool up in the mountains where the vice principal would, once a month, drive to a different town and come back with everybody's salary in cash. Just lying there in the front seat of his car!

Of course, nowhere is perfect but I have a deep nostalgia for my time there and an abiding fondness for all things Japanese.

How long have you lived in Nova Scotia? Would you recommend it as a great place to live?

I have lived in Nova Scotia for nearly 17 years. In fact, it is the longest I've lived in any place! Plus I've been visiting this part of the world for over 25 years now. One benefit to having lived here for so long is to observe how much the place has changed. In Dublin, my wife and I would get up before dawn to try and beat an hour and a half commute to get our eldest to daycare at 7:30. Then we would try and leave work as early as possible to beat the rat race home with a toddler in the back seat. It was very stressful and unsustainable. We were living so far away just to afford an apartment for the three of us. Coming here meant a much better quality of life for our family.

As my children have grown, so also has Halifax. Lately, the news stories are increasingly sounding like the Ireland we left behind. I am very lucky in that I essentially work from a home that was affordable when we came here. However, I really worry, not only for my own kids, but for the young people I work with struggling with the same issues we did.

Do you prefer writing by keyboard, do you prefer pen and paper, or do you have another favorite method?

Like I mentioned, I type for a living, i.e. I'm a software engineer. Naturally, I gravitate towards the keyboard and screen. I do keep a notebook nearby for jotting down ideas but mostly I use Google Docs for writing everything. If Google ever went out of business, I'd be in big trouble! When I work on a manuscript, I keep two documents: one is the main document and the second is a scrapbook for notes, links, and images. etc. It would be hard to copy-paste links into physical notebooks!

What's the story of how you came to publish your first novel? 

It took me a long time to realize that initial dream (forty years!) of becoming a writer and publishing my first novel. To follow on from the previous questions, it all started with a laptop. My first job was as an English teacher in Japan in the mid-nineties. I had an incredible experience, even meeting my Canadian wife there. However, as our time there came to a close, I realized I needed to get a "real" job. I had a beloved Toshiba laptop from my time there that I was always fooling around with, writing stories and programs. I thought maybe I could do something with that? I remember browsing an English Language bookshop in Kobe and seeing the map of Ireland on the cover of Newsweek with a title of "The Celtic Tiger". We returned to Ireland and its boom and I did a programming diploma with that Toshiba laptop. That got me my first job: writing code not fiction. 

After a few years, the Toshiba began to show its age and I traded it for a friend's fiddle. I remember squawking away on that poor instrument in our little flat in Dublin. I think that desire to play music was the writer in me resurfacing. As I learned "trad" (Irish traditional music), I discovered the extraordinary character of Francis O'Neill (1848-1936). He left County Cork at the age of 16, travelled the world as an impoverished sailor, even getting stranded on an island in the middle of the Pacific. Finally, he settled in Chicago and, at the turn of the century, became chief of police. Today, he is fondly remembered by Irish musicians all over the world for the encyclopedic books of Irish tunes he collected. His life story is not so well known. I wanted to share O'Neill's history in a story for others who had caught the trad bug. It was a struggle of some years getting the book written, reminiscent of those early days of sawing away on the fiddle. Then one summer, visiting my family in Ireland, I discovered a local publisher in O'Neill's hometown of Bantry. I sent them the manuscript and Chief O'Neill found a home.

What's one thing about being an author that most people don't understand?

Suzette Mayr, who just won the Giller prize, had a great quote in her acceptance speech: “I think today I’m officially done with my feelings of imposter syndrome as a writer.” Note the "I think" in that sentence. Despite having a stack of bound papers with your name on the cover, the feeling of being insufficient as the author of any given book never goes away. To write a book takes dogged persistence, maybe even foolhardy obsessiveness, to overcome a world of self-doubt and other obstacles.

After Chief O'Neill was accepted, the pandemic hit and lockdown meant publication ultimately got delayed for over a year. This was disappointing but rather than give up, I instead turned to writing a second book, the opening of which I had written years before. This one, called Poor Farm, is set in roughly the same time period but in rural Nova Scotia. It is dedicated to and based on my son Martin, who is autistic. One day we were out on a nearby walking trail and stumbled onto an area of white unmarked crosses. A bit of research revealed the area was once a Poor Farm for the "harmlessly insane" and these were the graves of the nameless misfortunates who died there. I realized that my son, had he been born at that time, might well have ended up in a place like this, condemned with that label of "harmlessly insane". Thus the character of Stewart, and the idea for his unique voice, emerged.

Again, I was fortunate that the publisher of Moose House Press had an interest in writing about the history of rural Nova Scotia and wanted to take on the book. Amazingly, both books were finally published within a week of each other. So on top of having a compulsion to get a story out there, a big heavy dose of luck is helpful too. Maybe I still have work to do to get past the imposter syndrome.

Do you do any writing exercises or other work to further develop your writing skills?

Any exercise that tricks your reluctant self into the act of writing is worthwhile, no matter how unusual. Personally, I find having an "under-text" to work off of helps a lot. For example, in the case of Chief O'Neill, I had Francis O'Neill's memoir as a guidebook. He wrote it at the end of his life and while it is a compelling narrative in its own right, he left out as much as he included. Amazingly for modern readers, he skipped over how he felt about losing six of his ten children. Filling in the gaps in the under-text proved fertile ground for me creatively. Likewise, the under-text of Poor Farm was an unpublished history of the poor farm only available at the Cole Harbour Farm Museum. For me, having this skeleton to build the story upon was an indispensable scaffold.

My third book, which I am currently working on, takes this process a step further. I am taking the out-of-copyright text of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and directly rewriting it 42 years from today. Twenty Sixty-Four is set in a Halifax ravaged by climate change and overtaken by an amalgamation of nearby superpowers called Amerussia (instead of the original's Oceania). Big Brother and the Party are replaced by a clownish dictator called The Ronald who is a mascot for the ever-watchful Corporate. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this is political satire as much as science fiction. In any case, the courage and impetus to write this way was borrowed from Orwell's classic. Another writing exercise I have found helpful is to use one of the Text-to-Image tools that have become widely available, for example Stable Diffusion. I like to take a passage from my draft and adapt it as a prompt to generate an image that suits the text which I paste back in. Orwell imagined artificial intelligence taking over the creation of fiction (he called it the Versificator). I am hoping we are entering an era where these software tools enable an explosion of creativity

We are seeing more information about how AI (artificial intelligence) is growing in capabilities. Is this a good thing or do you see any concerns with these developments?

It's a tool, like any other technology. Although it can be misused on a grand scale, there are incredible benefits alongside that. I believe education about this technology can allay a lot of the fear out there at the moment.

In terms of benefits, there is the potential to reliably care for vulnerable members of society. I am a parent of a young man with severe autism. A constant worry is what will the future hold for him when my wife and I are not there for his needs. What if there was an AI system to monitor and help him navigate the day-to-day of life? Also, for all the stories about AI taking jobs and so on, there are many good news stories: drug discovery, vastly improved diagnostics, and that's just in the area of health care.

Are there risks of AI being misused along with examples of manipulation and coercion? Absolutely! In fact that is a major theme in Twenty Sixty-Four. We can't put our heads in the sand on this technology. We are in a world now the sci fi comics of my childhood only glimpsed at. If we don't figure it out, we can't navigate away from the often dire outcomes those comics portrayed.

Pretend you wake up one morning and you learn that the Internet has been destroyed. What's the first thing that you do?

Run for the hills!

I would like to think I could take it calmly but I'm afraid a cataclysm like that would essentially shut down society. I just mentioned working from home. Goodbye to that! The company I work for, along with a multitude of others, would effectively be shuttered. And think of all the other crucial infrastructure we depend on the internet for: banking, government, shopping, etc. Actually, your question would make a great premise for a novel!

Joking aside, the news in recent years shows the world is a lot more fragile than imagined. For example, when Rogers went down last July, it was only one provider (albeit a major one) but it had a huge downstream impact costing the Canadian economy hundreds of millions of dollars. I believe there has been some government effort to make the system more resilient but I remain sceptical.

In a previous question I was optimistic about technology, this one has me all pessimistic again!

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Thanks to Ronan for agreeing to be interviewed!