Welcome to BookView Interview, a conversation series where BookView talks to authors.

Recently, we had an interesting conversation with William Shaw, author of On the Run, a coming of age story which follows the trials and tribulations of an Irish family as they navigate personal challenges and political issues. (Read the review here). Read the post below to know what William has to say about his book and the process of writing.

Writing transports from the physical and emotional restraints of everyday life into an imaginary world where those restraints are less intrusive. The restraints do not dissolve completely, though, because the raw material of my stories comes primarily from personal experience, observation, or reading.

Once the writing begins, however, new characters and places intrude, and my ego recedes. These characters demand their own voices, and the new places expand the original landscape. Both, then, shape and alter the plot, giving the imagination a chance to play.

When I get started on a story. I do not want to stop. I will write six to eight hours without noticing the time passing. I am eager every morning to return to my keyboard.

I favor family stories, stories that show individual family members struggling against the chains placed on them by other individuals, religions, and/or socio-political forces. My earliest favorite book was Huckleberry Flynn, followed by Catcher in the Rye, Oliver Twist, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A River Runs Through it, Prince of Tides, and many others in that vein.

On the Run is such a family story. It emerged from a version of my personal experience as a Catholic high school student and track athlete, then later as a teacher who spent years travelling and working in Ireland. I became immersed in the literature and history of Ireland, especially its long struggle to free itself from the oppressively brutal rule of Great Britain.

Hence the bullying premise of my story: After the Earl Mountbatten is assassinated by IRA bombers off the coast of Sligo in 1979, Margaret Thatcher instituted a harsh regime against captured IRA prisoners and exacerbated the worsening Troubles. In this tense climate, Terence Connolly, a rural Irish farmer is wrongly arrested as a terrorist at the Northern Irish border. His arrest sets in motion a series of painful events that profoundly affect not only him and his family, but also individuals and communities that interact with Terence, his wife, Bridget, and his teenage son, Tim.

I break the novel into mirroring intersecting plots.

1. Once Terence is imprisoned in Maze prison, he becomes hopeless and depressed, even joining the hunger strikers.
2. Bridget falls into loneliness and depression, especially after sending her son, Tim to stay with her sister and brother-in-law in Queens, NY., fearing he might join the local IRA and get caught up in the violence.
3. Tim, however, is not safe in his new environment. He is bullied and beaten in school and becomes depressed and homesick.

The arc of the plot shows how each family member struggles to emerge from their darkness, conquering their fears and depression. I decided on the book’s title to insinuate the idea of running as a motif and metaphor:

1. Tim channels his fear and anger into track and gains confidence as an elite runner. He feels strong and untouchable, comfortable in the isolation of running, though his growing confidence infuriates his enemies and them plan violence against him.
2. Terence gives up the hunger strike and joins a group of prisoners planning and executing an escape. Once out of prison, he is “on the run.”
3. Bridget is recruited into a women’s political action group and successfully protests the brutal treatment of the H-Block prisoners. Her success makes her a target of violent Unionist paramilitary. She retreats, “on the run” from their threats and attacks.

Additionally, all the secondary characters who interact with the Connolly family are “on the run” from some painful secret in their lives: debilitating alcoholism, sexual abuse, issues with rage, self-conscious loneliness, moral cowardice.

The interweaving stories of Tim, Terence, and Bridget, episode by episode, lead them to their climactic reunion.

I hated to end the book. I grew to love my characters and especially enjoyed that I gave birth to them.

I hope my readers are inspired by the decency, strength, and resilience of my main characters in facing down cruel and violent people and systems.

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[An essay from my Substack Newsletter: Wormwood.]

The Zen of Running and Writing

William Shaw

“Tim had been tending the sheep two kilometers from his cottage when [his great grandfather] arrived. Hearing his father’s whistle, fourteen-year-old Tim signaled his border collie, Millie, to herd the sheep to the adjoining field. He pulled his woolen cap down tight over his long red hair then set off at full speed, his wiry body weaving down the hill, leaping over rivulets, hurdling low stone fences, skirting thorny patches of yellow gorse, deftly dodging field patties left by their sheep and their few cows. Tim loved this part of the day, the running part, the part where the day’s chores were done and he was free, free to ramble up and down the hills, imagining that one afternoon a sea-borne breeze would lift him among the seagulls, soaring high above the green-gray tapestry of field, stone, and sea below him. He would dip and glide, alone and weightless.”

“Above is a passage from the opening pages of On the Run, my recently completed novel about an Irish teenager who is forced to leave Ireland in 1982 and live with relatives in Queens, N.Y., because his father has been wrongly arrested as an IRA terrorist at the Northern Ireland border.  Tim experiences bullying, beatings, and loneliness at his new high school until a dedicated coach discovers his extraordinary speed and not only trains Tim to a championship caliber, but helps him grow in strength, courage, and self-esteem.

I was a runner from the time I was thirteen till my knees and back retired me at fifty-eight. I was never a championship runner. But I loved to run. What I loved, and this has stayed with me all my life, was the aloneness and serenity that descended on me when I went through the ritual of dressing, warming up, then gradually lengthening my stride until I relaxed into a steady pace. At that moment, my mind would wander, relax, meditate, organize, create.

Running, for me, generated the meditative experience Andrew Marvell describes in his extraordinary poem, “The Garden.” Running offered me a communion between the spirit within and the animal without. Nothing compared with running a wooded trail, hearing the easy rhythm of my breathing, challenging the steep hills, feeling the quadriceps strain, then lengthening my stride on a flat, open grassy patch, imagining myself a horse running wild in nature: soaring over rolling hills, across meadows, mane and tail blown back by the wind, no saddle, no bridle, no fences.

Running took me away from Ridgewood and Maspeth and Williamsburg, away from darkness, dirt, congestion, and confinement. It gave me control of my body and mind. It provided me a clarity and coherence often lacking in every other aspect of my life. I enjoyed the process as much as the product, the training as much as the races. The workouts and the races were one and the same to me. At a workout or in a race I could “relocate.” My first coach wondered why I was so loose and casual before a race while other guys were agitated, even vomiting. This was where I needed to be: outdoors, on my own, in control. Once the starting gun went off for a race, I was lost in time and space. I noticed no people around me, heard no noise. Just the tempo of running feet and breathing, the gradual weakening, the burning lungs and tightening arms and legs in the final lap; the rigid straining of limbs and muscles to hold form through the final straightaway and through the finish line.

Whatever amount of self-esteem I achieved as a suspicious, private, pimply-faced teenager came more from running than anything else — more than parents, more than teachers, more than church.

I can’t run anymore. Even walking is becoming a chore.  But writing is filling some of the space in my head and heart once filled by running. The empty page is the track or trail waiting for me. The fidgeting rituals — messing about my keyboard, checking emails, checking the Mets’ scores, or the latest political news — are me shedding my street clothes, getting on my shorts and sweats, lacing my Adidas. The tentative opening lines, usually rough and rejected, are like the first slow fifteen minutes of warming up – chasing the stiffness, and then…finding a rhythm, settling into that quiet place, quickening the pace, curious about where today’s “run” will take me. As with all things, some days are better than others.”

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