Author Q&A

Q&A with Keith Donohue, author of The Stolen Child

By Joe Barbato, WIW Past President

A native of Pittsburgh, Keith Donohue attended Duquesne University, earned a Ph.D. at Catholic University of America, and has worked for many years as a speechwriter in Washington, D.C. His first novel, The Stolen Child, inspired by the W.B. Yeats poem that tempts a child from home to the waters and the wild, was published recently by Nan A. Talese. It is a classic tale of leaving childhood and the search for identity.

The Stolen Child has garnered wide praise: The Washington Post called it “a luminous and thrilling novel about our humanity.” People magazine said the novel is “magical—in the best sense of the word.” And Newsweek declared it “a novel of great power and sadness” that “looks poised to become a word-of-mouth bestseller.”

Donohue lives in Maryland with his wife and children. He will be the morning speaker at WIW’s “The Business of Fiction Writing” seminar on Saturday, Jan. 13, at American University. For details on the day-long program, click here.

You've been writing stories since childhood. What got you into the story-telling habit?

In the seventh grade, we were required, as part of our English class, to keep a journal, but the teacher allowed anything and everything. Perhaps because my own life was so uninteresting, I made my entries into short stories and tall tales, and she was delighted. A little encouragement is a dangerous thing. Of course, by that time, I had long been a reader of fiction, beginning as a young child allowed to take out a dozen books a week from the local library. Love of stories got me hooked into the habit.

What were your experiences trying to get fiction published over the years?

Quite a bit of rejection and abandonment. I did well in college with the literary life, since it was all freely given and freely paid, and I wrote a novel in the early 80s that I sent to an agent. He wrote back with a long letter telling me why it wouldn't work, but would I please send him my next book. Twenty-some years later, he turned that down, too. Most of my attention was given over to the short story, since that could be squeezed out in shorter spurts. But most were rejected multiple times by everything from The New Yorker to small literary magazines. A few victories along the way—a piece in the Elysian Fields Quarterly, Pittsburgh Tri-Quarterly, and so on. A children's story in Cricket. But nothing much. At some point in my thirties, I simply quit. Fortunately, a second childhood began after 40.

How did you manage to keep working at your fiction while holding down a full-time
speechwriting job?

It was never a matter of finding the time, which can always be found if you know where to look. Subway trips, lunchtime, early hours. The real challenge was dealing with rejection, feeling you're not quite good enough to fulfill your ambitions.

How difficult was it to find a home for The Stolen Child?

Finding an agent took a long time, though I made some mistakes along the way. The Stolen Child is not an easy sell; it transgresses artificial boundaries between fantasy and literary fiction. And I sent it to many people for whom it would never work, but perseverance, not to mention bullheaded stubbornness, finally paid off after two years of looking for someone who could understand what the book was trying to accomplish.

What was it like having your first novel published by a top editor like Nan Talese?

Like having a stroke, then recovering, and then being encouraged to work harder than ever and make it the best I could. Nan and her assistant editors were wonderful, and I was used to the collaborative nature of the editing process by virtue of working on speeches.

Many critics have been lavish in their praise of The Stolen Child. Has that been gratifying or daunting?

Most of the praise and criticism feels like an abstraction, as if they're talking about someone else's book. Every once in awhile, however, a critic pierces through to the heart of the matter. You feel as if they get what you were trying to do. At other times, the critiques are so vitriolic that you wonder if there's not some emotion bubbling beneath the surface that has nothing to do with the work.

What are you working on now?

Another novel about why people believe without empirical proof.

What's your best advice to new fiction writers?

Read obsessively. Read the greats and the good. Find out what kind of fiction you want to write and study till your eyes pop out. Then, write every day. My friend Sam Hazo has these aphoristic lines: "Expect nothing/And anything will seem everything. Expect everything, and anything will seem nothing." Expect nothing, but keep going.