Rose Keating on Oddbody: "I would start writing at around 8pm and then I’d stay up until 6am. I listened to music to keep me going"

From James Joyce and Maeve Brennan to Nicole Flattery and Cathy Sweeney, Ireland has produced some of the world’s best short story writers. With her debut short story collection Oddbody out now, Waterford-born Rose Keating is proud to join such an illustrious tradition.

“There is something about the Irish and the short story format,” she muses. “I don’t know what it is about us, or why we do it the way we do, but we do it really well. It’s so nice to have grown up in a place where the short story format is taken seriously.”

An alumnus of both UCC and the University of East Anglia, Keating is quick to acknowledge the importance of an Arts Council grant to fund her writing. Without it, Oddbody might not exist – and she notes that’s part of what makes the Irish writing landscape so special.

“I don’t want to be a brown-nose for the government, but whenever people talk about the Irish scene, I’m like, ‘They give us money. They actually give us money,’” she explains. “If I had been English, I don’t know if I would have been able to write Oddbody, because the supports aren’t there. Here, people who don’t come from wealth or the upper class still have the space and time to write. It makes the field of writing feel open and creates a far more even playing field.”

There’s always room for improvement, she adds, “but that kind of appreciation for the arts makes me proud to be Irish.”

She’s also quite proud of her book. Oddbody features 10 bold, subversive, often unsettling short stories about the human body. It’s playful at times, disquieting at others. Each story embodies Cesar A. Cruz’s famous quote, “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”

In these compelling tales, a waitress gives birth to an egg mid-shift; a daughter takes care of her father after he becomes a giant worm; a woman is prescribed a grotesque health cleanse; and a teenage girl’s deceased best friend is none other than horror legend Bela Lugosi.

“Weirdly, the Bela Lugosi story is probably the most autobiographical,” explains Keating. “I remember doing my undergrad dissertation on vampires, and I was constantly thinking about the familiarity of certain media. As young girls, what do we see in the characters we like? What makes us keep coming back to certain music or films or books? What does it mean to have something and to need it not to change? And why is that familiarity especially appealing in the teenage years?

“That brought me to ask, why do we find vampires so appealing at that age as well? I feel like as an adult woman, I would still read a vampire book or watch a vampire movie, but there’s a special kinship between girlhood and vampires.

“I was thinking about finding an outward, physical manifestation of the feeling of girlhood. That loneliness and panic and grief about your own ageing, that fear of yourself and of other people, of sexuality and desire; what does that fear look like? And for me, it was something like a character from a movie. Something grotesque but familiar, like Dracula. That is my personal taste coming in, of course.”

A music lover, Keating says she needs sound to write. And also copious amounts of caffeine.

“I listened to so, so much music,” she laughs. “My writing routine for Oddbody was absolutely chaotic as well. I would start writing at around 8pm and then I’d stay up until 6am. I listened to music to keep me going. I had this giant playlist full of sad, gothy, repetitive music.

“I’d put it on really low, because I could not write in silence. I’d drink a million cups of coffee and have the music going all night, and that would get me in this hypnotic state. The catch is, I’d finish a whole story in one sitting, but then I wouldn’t look at it for eight months.”

It’s notable how complex Keating makes her characters even within the short story format, a quality she admires in other authors.

“When I think about the writing I like, like Nicole Flattery’s work, there’s often a distance between what we’re allowed to see in the inner world of the character, and what is actually there,” she says. “You can feel that something’s there, but you’re not always allowed access. I think that’s true of a lot of short stories.

“There’s a sense of something being denied to the reader – the reader is not granted everything, and there’s a certain pleasure in that. With character work, I don’t find it interesting if I’m giving you every single detail of what has ever happened to them, because that’s not the point. You’re getting a glimpse of something and that’s where the energy and the tension are.”

Albeit, it’s not easy. Keating notes that trying to maintain that distance “while still having the character be a person” is quite challenging. Her solution is to explore how she might react in a particular situation – and the situations in Oddbody are, well, odd. The visceral descriptions of bodies in all their strangeness can leave readers feeling quite vulnerable. For Keating, though, the experience during writing is quite different.

“During the writing process, what I’m doing doesn’t feel vulnerable, because no one else is in the room – I’m alone with myself. Writing is one of those things where I don’t feel exposed while doing it, like getting changed or having a shower. It’s normal when you’re with yourself.”

What was less normal was the experience post-publication. Keating says she didn’t expect having the book out there “to feel as intense as it has”.

“I’m so grateful for my publisher and it’s been so wonderful to have the book out there,” she says, “But I’m glad I wasn’t aware of what the publishing experience would be when I started. I wrote these stories from a very innocent perspective, where I wasn’t thinking about the fact that, even if you’re just speaking to personal truths without it being autofiction or autobiography, the emotional vulnerability is there.

“And sharing that is scary. I’m glad I didn’t know how scary it would be when I was writing, and what it would be like to know your friends or your family, or even just strangers, would all read this work.”

However, Keating assures us she doesn’t regret a moment and would do it again in a second. In fact, she hints that something else is in the works. While she can’t share exactly what it is – she says “it’s something slightly longer, but it’s not a novel” and that it’s still taking form – given the success of Oddbody, we know it will be just as good, if not better. And hopefully, if we’re lucky, just as weird, if not weirder.

• Oddbody is out now.