[In the interview below, Shea discusses various aspects of Hula, including its composition, her new work, and her literary influences.]

[Giroux]: Numerous critics have praised Hula's emotional honesty, noting that the book is dedicated "to my sisters." To what extent is Hula autobiographical?

[Shea]: Like a lot of first novels it is and it isn't autobiographical. I think that the feelings that inform the book and the sensibility of the younger sister are very close to my sensibility and to my feelings. What I did was create a fictional story to get those feelings across. The impetus, I think, is always from your life. I think that the story itself is invented.

So did you do any sort of additional research for the book then?

No, I just lived (laughs)…. There's wasn't anything that I had to go and look up that I can recall.

Another way to answer that question would be to say that I identify with all of the characters in the book. I feel that I could really be any and all of them. I have felt all those feelings and had some of those experiences, not as they are set down in the book, but similar ones. You know, there's that answer too, that I am all of those characters and not just one of them.

Is that part of the reason why the characters are never named?

Well, I don't know how much of a conscious choice that was. I think that I just felt comfortable not giving the two girls working names. I like in the book, just at the level of language, the repetition of "my sister," "our father," and "our mother." I thought that it was rather prayerful and intimate, so I didn't feel that names were necessary to this particular story or to these particular characters.

It's a very effective device…. I noticed, when I was reading the book, that the first part of the book includes more scenes with the father, and the second half places greater emphasis on the sisters, their relationship with each other, and their developing sexual awareness. But then at the very, very end, the father reappears. Were you consciously trying to split up your focus like that? And how is that splitting up of those sections and their respective themes related?

Well, there is a kind of split. Again, I think when you write a novel a lot happens at an unconscious level and then it's only your readers who point things out to you and you say "oh yes, I might have been doing that," but you didn't have an awareness of that at the time.

One thing that is key is that the book does take place over two summers. The book is split that way, 1964 and 1965, so when the book opens the narrator is ten; her older sister is twelve. Now the second summer, the narrator would be eleven and the older sister would be thirteen, and I think that, as in life itself, in the book that time from ten to eleven and twelve to thirteen is pivotal. Pivotal changes take place. So it may have been that there was more of an emphasis on the girls' relationship to the father over that first summer and then more of an emphasis on their sexual awakening in the second summer just because they were that one key year older. It certainly wasn't something that I was conscious of doing, although I see how it could be seen that way. But I think it's just that their sexual awareness became that much more heightened over the course of the year.

I also think that no matter how you write a novel, you have to have establishing scenes that let the reader know who the characters are. That's the reason for having scenes with the father at the beginning—to establish his presence. I think that more than a character in the book, he is a presence, as is the mother a presence, who exerts pressure on the girls rather than a character interacting with them scene after scene. He's at a remove, but he's such a menace that he feels a lot closer, a lot bigger, I suppose, in the story than his actual character.

That makes sense.

He sort of hovers. He and the mother kind of hover over the story and over the girls.

You've won the Whiting Writers' Award, and time and again critics praised your use of a child as a narrator, but there were some critics who faulted your reliance on this technique. How do you respond to that?

Well, one review I remember was in the New York Times where Gary Krist said something like "One wishes Ms. Shea hadn't clung so persistently to the narrator's limited point of view or voice," and I thought that's rather absurd. I mean how would I have written the story if I hadn't clung persistently to her view which is, perforce, by definition, limited as is the voice of every narrator. How else do stories get told except by what limits them? In the case of Hula the narrator is a ten- and eleven-year-old. This is her story coming from her very strangely cloistered, and at the same time, violent world. So I thought, well, there are always critics who would have written the book differently, but I was so certain—if there was anything I was certain of in writing that book—that I didn't want there to be any psychology going on, nothing explaining what the girls were up to. And I think one reason that it took me almost six years to write the book was the difficulty of staying in that little girl's voice. I really only wanted the reader to be privy to her thoughts and her observations and her feelings. I purposely didn't want the story to open up into an adult, or explaining, world.

You said the book took six years to write. I also read, in a press release, that it was written in a closet while you were trying to sort out your own feelings regarding your divorce. Is that true?

Well, the sequence of events was that my first husband and I separated, and I was living on my own here in New York with a roommate, an old friend from college, who was kind enough to let me move in with her until I could find my own place. In her house, which was huge, there was a walk-in closet, and it was during that first year of being separated that I began to work on the book. I didn't have my belongings with me. I had just a few clothes, my books and typewriter and so forth. So I was cut off from a lot of my possessions and belongings, and it eventually turned out to be a wonderful environment to let my imagination take up all the room that all these other things might have. So, I would say that for the first ten months I did work in that closet; it became a world apart where I could sit and confront some of the feelings I had about my own separation and then also reflect back on why my parents' marriage had ended so long ago. The book really began with a couple of photos that I had brought along with me. One was of a dog that we had, a dog that my sisters—I have two sisters—that my sisters and I had as children and whom we dressed in a hula skirt. I think of the dog as being another sister to the girls in the book and almost more than a sister, a mother and a handmaiden. I had a picture of this dog and I taped it up on the wall and I just went into that picture. It was one of these square Kodaks with the frilly edges, and it was taken in 1964. It gave me a place to go in.

The fact that the dog is a character—one that even has a name—reinforces what you said about the parents being more of a presence rather than characters.

Right, they're presences—

While the dog is someone the girls actually interact with all the time.

The bond of the girls and the dog is quite intimate, quite close. I think the little girl, the younger sister, actually goes and lies down in the spot in the ground where the dog likes to lie down in the bushes. There's that kind of closeness.

Is it accurate to say that your goal in writing Hula was therapeutic on your own part?

It was investigatory. I prefer that word. It was a spiritual and literary investigation of a time and a place warped by memory and fed by memory.

I've read interviews where you've described yourself as a "failed poet," and I know that you've worked as an editor, too. Now, with a novel out, what do you consider your goals as a writer in general?

Just to be a better writer. I'm working on a second novel now and I don't know whether it is that we go after the things we want to write about or that those things come toward us and we just have to reach out and try to capture them and set them down on the page. I would say that my goals are so very fundamental, very basic—to hope that I find the story that I need to write. And/or the poems that I need to write.

Do you prefer writing poems to novels?

I think they're different activities. I love language and so when I write poetry I feel very freed into the play of language. To me it's a joyous exercise. Fiction writing seems more arduous, it's much slower. The rewards are different. It's not as enjoyable in the day to day, but it has a kind of cumulative power, a kind of seductiveness that pulls you along. I think it's harder to get in and out of fiction writing. If I have three hours in the morning to write and I use those three hours to write fiction, when it's time for me to go and pick up my little boy at preschool, I'm in a trance. I have to say "where's the school, where am I?" I find that fiction takes me very, very far away and I have to struggle back to reality. Poetry is easier to get in and out of.

You mentioned that you're working on a second novel. Can you talk about that at all? Does it continue themes that were developed in Hula?

It's a different story, called The Free World. I guess I'm thinking of it as a kind of female resurrection story. Hula was about a certain time and place. This book has more of a grounding in religion and politics. It's sort of a liturgy of one life set down over a period of six weeks, a very Catholic book, and perverse in its way. I suppose all my writing is about sex, and death. Isn't everybody's?

Do you have any idea when that book will be out?

Well, I just keep hoping that it won't be six years (laughs).

You mentioned that you write in the mornings—in a three-hour block—before you have to pick up your son. Can you describe your writing process more fully? Is that your time to write?

It is. It's a new schedule for me because my son just started school. I now have three new hours in my day, Monday through Friday, and I have found that since I wake up early anyway, the morning is the time when I can think and then the rest of the day gives over to a kind of chaos. So between nine and noon, I just try to be very diligent about using that time and working on the novel.

I write longhand, at my desk. I try to stay away from any kind of machinery that's noisy or makes me work too fast. I think computers speed things along somewhat treacherously. I like to go slow, so I just write on pads of paper. And if I write one to three pages each morning, I'm very happy about it.

When you write do you have a specific audience in mind?

No. When I was an undergraduate and wrote poetry, I remember that my friends and I revelled in the idea of being really obscure. We just thought that the more obscure our work was, the better it was. I would say that all these years later I probably think the reverse of that—which is that no matter what story you're telling, you have to tell it in a clear and convincing way. You can come in on a story sideways and backwards and upside down and make it clear. I'm not saying it has to be linear. You can tell it any way you want to, but you do have to bear in mind that there are readers out there. So I would say I don't write for a particular audience or readership, but I place a great value on clarity and lucidness however you do that.

Could you talk about who you consider your primary literary influences?

Well, the writers I love—you may see no bearing whatsoever in my own work, so I won't try to make that connection—but these are writers whose work I just love: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë,… Kafka,… George Eliot,… Faulkner,… I want to not forget the writer who had all the peacocks on her farm—Flannery O'Connor. I could go on with the list and maybe get more contemporary. There are so many poets whose work has influenced my prose, like John Ashbery, and some of the French surrealist poets. I love Baudelaire and Mallarmé and those fellows (laughs). I've been influenced by the surrealists, by the Irish writers, and by some of the American Southern writers.

You just noted that you didn't mention a lot of real contemporary writers, but how do you perceive yourself in relation to the larger picture of contemporary literature? Where do you place yourself?

Well, it's hard to say with one book. And my poetry is really more baroque and fanciful and … what other word could I use…. more language-drenched than Hula was. But I guess I feel you use the language that is appropriate to the story you're telling. If you're lucky, that language lends itself and is powerful enough to be able to tell all the stories you want to tell. I don't know … I think I'm still experimenting with that. Someone called Hula a "tour de force in the use of voice." I kind of agree that it's a voice novel, because it's not a novel of plot, certainly. But where do I place myself? Do you mean by that who am I like or who do I identify with who's contemporary?

Well … where do you see yourself fitting into what is popular nowadays?

That's hard to answer because I think every book is so different. I guess I instinctually feel that each book has its own voice, and style, and life.