An Interview with Danny Denton

By Claire Watson (Features Editor)

Danny Denton is a writer of short and long fiction, and his debut novel The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow was published in 2018. He works as a contributing editor for the Irish literary magazine The Stinging Fly. But, you might know him as a lecturer of Creative Writing here at UCC. I had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Danny and discuss his latest novel All Along the Echo.

All Along the Echo is a wonderfully strange novel that takes on an innovative approach to form that distorts time, space, and voice. Radio DJ Tony Tony Cooney and producer Lou Fitzpatrick are taken across Ireland in a road-trip that unearths questions of their places in the world, and in their own narratives.

I ask Danny about the use of absurdism in his work, and he responds by opening the biggest dictionaries I’ve ever seen. 

“‘Absurd: out of harmony with reason or proprietary.’ I think reason is a very limiting thing. And so…I would be interested in doing a writing project of my own is stepping outside of reason. I don’t think it’s a surrealist novel; [All Along the Echo] it’s set in more or less the Cork that we live in now. The rules of gravity apply. Laws apply. You have a chance to do this in fiction that you don’t have a chance to do in anything else: to reframe reality.” 

“I wasn’t trying to deconstruct sense,” he explains, “I was trying to add a different frame. I was thinking with “In The Static” specifically that these radio waves are passing through us right now, all the time. They’re just flying around the place. Life is being lived inside the static, so actually we kind of live inside radio waves in a sense.”

“So trying to step out of reason, not trying to be silly, but trying to step out of reason to give perspective on the more realistic stuff that’s happening. It can only add depth, so that’s why I do it. Not with any absurdist agenda or anything like that but to step outside of reason.”

“I really like innovative stuff, stuff that challenges how work can be presented.” This is explicit throughout Danny’s writing, and I ask how he approaches innovation. What is the methodology behind reinventing writing?

“It’s not romantic. It’s mainly sitting at a desk and trying to make notes and work things out. You do get your Eureka moments, but it’s mainly hard work.”

“I will be constantly scrapbooking, making mind maps and trying out different things. When you see 20 ideas together on a page you start to see little links between them and you think, ‘well what if I tried that?’ and that’s where interesting stuff comes out of. ‘In The Static’ wasn’t an accident. I consciously asked myself a question. But the two voices, that was a total accident. The accidents in a sense are deliberate, because you have to create a space for yourself; an imaginative space where you’re able to follow hunches. You’re not trying to write something that’s perfect the first time around because that’s not possible. If you did that, you’re not allowing for any madness.”

Recently Danny held a talk at UCC, and in it he shared a few pages from his writing journals. Drawings stream across the pages of his notebook, catching lines and paragraphs of writing. I ask him about this visual approach to writing. 

“It’s a mixture,” he begins. “It’s visual for sure. I would take photographs on my phone and think ‘that’s going to be useful to me later. I’ll try to recreate that.’ It’d be more sensual because I’d be very aural as well. I’d have playlists for every writing project, and I’d listen to them and there’d be certain things that I’d be like ‘there’s a sound in there that I want to put in a book somewhere, or a repetition…’”

“The thing I’m working on at the moment - I was listening to some music and I was thinking about the way a song repeated the same line over and over again. I was wondering if you could get away with that in a novel. What if you repeated the same line randomly 20 times in a novel, just sat next to or in between the other lines, what would happen to that line? So I’m going to try that.”

“Inspiration from music, inspiration from film, inspiration from image definitely. I try to hear things or see things before or as I write them.” 

Radio, and in particular talk shows, play an important role in All Along the Echo. I ask Danny was his representation of different mediums an intentional decision.

“Maybe ideas have their own agency. I was just obsessed with listening to the radio for a particular period of time and it started to seep into my writing. When you then start to think about and write about that, the radio starts to say ‘do you realise how cool an art form I am? Do you realise how useful I’ve been to humanity? Do you realise the magic of what I do?’”

“FM signals stop at the horizon,” Danny says, as he gestures somewhere beyond his office and smiles. “There’s something magical about that. But, AM signals can go to the horizon and bounce down the horizon. When you start learning about that, the magic of that, which has a basis in science, then all of a sudden you’ve got something that’s magical, useful, interesting, informational… It takes 4 or 5 years to write a novel, so over 4 or 5 years you look into the science, and all of a sudden you’ve got this amazing tool to use in your novel.”

Following hunches, research, we begin comparing writers to scientists. “I got my dictionary out the other week because I knew I was going to be asked if I was an experimental writer… An experiment is a process you undergo in order to make a discovery or prove a point. I don’t write to prove a point; I’ve no interest in telling people what to think. Writing is to make a discovery. I would say all writers are experimental, in that way they’re the exact same as scientists. Probably scientists are trying to figure out what it’s like to be in the world, writers are trying to express what it’s like to be in the world.”

Naturally, the next question is to ask what discoveries Danny has made while writing. 

“I think through writing I came to understand the importance of empathy. Trying to get in the heads of characters made me better at trying to get in the heads of people. I think if you’re empathetic, not only are you a good person, but you pay attention to the world. If you pay attention to the world, that’s got to be a good thing. Above all, be an empathic person, put yourself in the other person’s shoes, la-dee-blah.” 

In All Along the Echo Danny explores non-place. He explains, “I wanted a contrast in the novel between non-places - by which I mean dual carriageways, garage forecourts, places of transit, industrial estates - and real places. It’s not an accident that in the novel they end up in Connemara where there’s none of those things. There’s just paved roads, trees, lakes, bogs, sea, birds… I wanted them to get lost and end up in a place, and for the magic to happen in a place.”

“One of the last scenes, they both go into a field, and there’s a transmitter. That’s another non-place, but they have to cross a field to get there. The field is a place. I tried to heighten the sensory language there, for them to feel the ground beneath their feet and to hear these things around them, while they’re inspecting this non-place.I wanted these characters to experience these two things up-close together. It’s not like one is good and one is bad. It’s like one is more conducive to human experience, and the other isn’t, but human experience imposes itself anyways.”

“If the novel was an experiment, that was one of my findings. No matter where you put people or what situation you put them in, people try to explain the world to themselves, to each other. Then trying to explain themselves to themselves, to each other.”