Contemporary Authors

• Restless Souls - 2018 Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, United Kingdom

• Dan Sheehan Home Page - http://www.dan-sheehan.net/

  Dan Sheehan is an Irish fiction writer, journalist, and editor. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, GQ, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Words Without Borders, Epiphany, and Electric Literature, among others. He lives in New York, where he is the Book Marks editor at Literary Hub and a contributing editor at Guernica Magazine, and was a recipient of the 2016 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship.

  His debut novel, Restless Souls, is available now from Weidenfeld & Nicolson (UK) and Ig Publishing (US).

• Vol. 1 Brooklyn - http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2018/05/07/ive-always-loved-gallows-humor-dan-sheehan-on-writing-restless-souls/

  “I’ve Always Loved Gallows Humor”: Dan Sheehan on Writing “Restless Souls”
  By Kyle Lucia Wu On May 7, 2018 · 0 Comments · In Featured, Interviews, Lit.
  sheehan

  “They told me he died around sunset, as if the word, the soft orange time of day it conjures, should have meant something even if it were true.” This is a line I wrote down and thought about for days after finishing Restless Souls, an alternatively witty and wounding novel about mental health, male friendship, and memory. It’s spoken by Karl, our protagonist, as he thinks of his foster brother Gabriel, who was lost to suicide years ago. Why does it matter to us what our beloveds saw when the light went out, Karl wonders. It left me to me meditate on our insistence to rewrite memories, even those that aren’t our own, how we alter them to be more soothing and beautiful when we’re aware that they’re plainly not true. There’s a skipping, excitable pulse in Restless Souls that’s made up of three childhood friends determined to play-fight with each other to the ends of the earth, but the beating heart is found in this struggle of truth in memory versus comfort for those left to remember.

  Restless Souls is rooted in friendship: a specific and instantly recognizable breed of swaggering, teasing, intimate-with-a-front friendship of four childhood friends: Tom, Baz, Karl, and the late Gabriel. Tom is a wartime journalist recently returned from Sarajevo with deadened eyes and a mysterious box: Baz and Karl are his blundering friends who, still reeling and trying to be less clueless after Gabriel’s suicide, are determined to find a cure for Tom’s ailments, even if they don’t understand what they are. After reading up on an experimental PTSD clinic that specializes in veterans’ trauma, Karl decides he’s taking everyone to California in search of salvation. It’s important to state the obvious: that this is a book of straight male friendship. It carries the specific weight and baggage of those masculine relationships, and we see how their inability to communicate with each other is something that they have to address if they are hoping to heal. It’s rife for comedy as we watch them blunder through talk of therapy and PTSD when we know they are much more comfortable making jokes or talking football, but it’s also quite vulnerable and sad once their shadows catch up to them and we watch their attempts at intimacy.

  Just before his book’s release in the US, I spoke with debut author Dan Sheehan about the culture of mental health in Ireland, writing humor in fiction, and how I think Springsteen fits into Restless Souls.
  There is the moment where Karl realizes that he thought he was protecting Tom’s privacy by not inquiring directly about this mysterious box of pages Tom had been carrying around–written memories of his time in Sarajevo, something that Karl knew was a traumatic reminder of his time there–but that really, Tom might have wanted him to ask. Karl thinks he’s doing the right thing by staying silent, but if he had just asked, then perhaps Tom would have opened up. This parallels poignantly with another traumatic memory of his, when he could have confronted Gabriel about his emotional struggles, but instead walked away. A more storybook ending would have seen Tom behaving in a direct contrast to that, but I love that you let Karl still not be comfortable enough to address it.

  I knew that it was going to be like pulling teeth, getting these men to the point where they could express themselves to one another in a meaningful way. They’re so well-practiced in talking around, or ignoring completely, the issues that have damaged them, that it’s almost incapacitating. Karl wants to engage on a deeper, more direct level, with what his friends are going though; he knows that every time he walks away from one of these conversations he’s failing them, and failing himself, but he just can’t do it.

  What is the cultural attitude around mental health in Ireland, and how has it changed? Karl himself has had a life that would be depicted in devastating language elsewhere, but is recounted in monotone that’s-that storytelling in this book. An orphan with a dead father, an alcoholic mother, a foster brother lost to suicide: yet he feels he doesn’t have a reason to complain? Though he is searching for Tom’s cure, Karl could certainly benefit from some talk therapy as well.

  By God he could. Unfortunately that wasn’t really an option in 1990s Ireland. It’s only in recent years that the silence, and the stigma, around depression and mental illness has begun to lift. I think we’re now at the point, thanks in no small part to a handful of charities and awareness groups, where the subject is being openly discussed in schools, colleges, and on national television and radio, but we still have a long way to go. Despite the high rate of suicide among young people in Ireland, it’s taken governments a long time to put in place any kind of cohesive strategy for getting a handle on the problem. There’s also a persistent, and maddening, tendency in our health service to treat alcohol and drug abuse as wholly separate from, rather than symptoms or byproducts of, mental illness, and to deny people crucial emergency treatment because of that.

  At one point, Karl imagines Tom’s future and can see no options other than completely healed or dead. This is perhaps a downfall of misunderstanding certain conditions with often no complete cure, but also kind of how we imagine our lives: perfect or obliterated, until we get older and realize everything is so complex. Why do you think it takes them so long to learn this distinction?

  I think we’re obsessed with that all-or-nothing duality, the idea that the decisions we make will bring us to either lasting contentment or irreparable catastrophe, despite the fact that there are very few instances in life where that’s the case. Maybe it’s easier to believe in the silver bullet if we also believe in the specter of the complete opposite—like our attempts to achieve perfection can’t be totally delusional if we’ve also considered the possibility that everything could go straight to hell. These men want so badly to be transform their lives, to fix their lives, and because they’ve been blown so far off course for so long, huge, Hail Mary gambits seem like the only way to make this happen. Ultimately, they, and Karl in particular, have to wake up to the realization that there are no easy answers, no simple solutions to the difficulties they’re facing.

  Each of the female characters in this book feels really unique to me, even though they don’t have nearly as much time as the boys. They are the only people that we really get a look into besides our main foursome. We meet Dr. Saunders and his assistant Theo, but they belong to another world. I wonder if you had any reasoning for making our characters’ main bridges to their world almost entirely female: we don’t meet many other male friends of theirs from childhood and the only Sarajevo characters who seem to be important are important by proxy to Jelena.

  Some of it was about balance. This is a book that focuses on the nature of a certain type of male friendship, and the way in which that can be both a comfort and a constraint in difficult times. It made sense to me that the characters jolting these men out of the patterns they had placed themselves in together would be women. Beyond that though, it was important to me that their three-dimensionality not be sacrificed just because they are supporting players in the narrative. They’re the catalysts for a lot of the action, yes, but I also wanted to give them (in particular Jelena, her mother Fadila, and Tom’s mother) a depth of characterization that would allow the reader to picture their lives before and beyond the tragic events of the book.

  Hasan tells Tom at one point that he does not like politics, and he does not like to fight: before the war, he’d punched one person, and it had kept him up for weeks. But now he kills people like it’s nothing, because it’s required. It’s interesting that we as humans are so easily adaptable to these situations: what we can bear, and what we can bear to do, seems to be so elastic at times, but it can be hard for us to forgive. Is it better to be elastic, to be forgiving of the evil we have let ourselves witness?

  On principle, none of us want to advocate violence, but I also believe that the idea of condemning people who resort to violence in order to protect their homes and families from a far greater force—one which has been brutalizing and subjugating them for years with relative impunity—is ludicrous. Everybody has a breaking point. People need to forgive in order for societies to rebuild, yes, but also so that their anger and grief doesn’t steal away more years from their lives on top of what has already been taken by the aggressor. I think post-conflict reconciliation is absolutely vital, but I can’t imagine how an individual who has lost what can never be brought back goes about trying to do it, and I certainly don’t blame anyone who cannot bring themselves to forgive.

  What prompted you to delve into the Bosnian war for this narrative?

  Even though I was very young when I first saw the news footage from the Siege of Sarajevo, I remember clearly how the images lodged in my brain. The idea that in the age of the 24-hour news cycle a city, a country, could be brutalized in that way for so long, with no reprieve and nobody coming to its aid, was just incomprehensible to me. It still is. People are, and should be, apprehensive about creating fictions out of other people’s trauma, and I was no different; but by the time I sat down to write the novel, I had been reading about the conflict for so many years, and had been so moved by my visit to Sarajevo in 2007, that I knew it was something I wanted to write about. The question then was how to do it in such a way that would be both compelling as a story, and respectful to those for whom it was a terrible reality.

  Where did the name Restless Souls come to you from?

  The title changed a few times throughout the writing process, but it never felt like the placeholders did much. They were just kind of boring and functional and, well, shit. Restless Souls, when it did finally come to me, seemed right for two reasons: It’s absolutely the kind of name a New Age-y clinic on the California coast would have, at least in my imagination, but more importantly it’s a title that I hope also evokes the mental and emotional state of the characters at this point in their lives.

  What is the significance/resonance of U2’s song, Miss Sarajevo, that you use as an epigraph?

  Well the U2 we know now has become, as I think most aging rock bands become, a little bit of a parody of itself, so it’s easy to forget sometimes just how popular and influential the band was in the early 1990s. They were coming off the back of albums like The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby (both of which I’ll defend to the death no matter how many times Bono and Apple try to dose us with corporate musical poison) and those early songs spoke to people in a very powerful way. I think that Bono, despite his then-burgeoning Messiah complex, was genuinely moved by the plight of the people of Sarajevo in those years. The band, as demonstrated by the possibly ill-advised live feeds from the Bosnian capital that they organized during their stadium shows, were actively invested in shining a light on what was happening in the city—how these tens of thousands of people had been abandoned by the rest of the world. When the war ended, U2 were the first major band to perform in Sarajevo and the concert was attended by 45,000 people who all came out to hear Miss Sarajevo ring though the recently liberated city.

  How much research did you do on PTSD and the neuroscience aspects? Is Dr. Saunders’s cure something you made up?

  Believe it or not, Dr. Saunders’s treatment is actually real; or, to be more accurate, it’s on its way to being real. I had been researching different treatments for PTSD—some of them well-established, some more experimental—when I came across a New Yorker profile of a neuroscientist named Dr. Daniela Schiller who is renowned for her work in the nascent field of memory reconsolidation. The idea behind memory reconsolidation, insofar as I understand it, is that long-term traumatic memories (previously thought to be fixed and unchangeable) could actually be recalled and altered in order to dampen their negative emotional impact. The goal is to be able to ease the suffering of those for whom more conventional treatment options have been exhausted and unsuccessful, not by destroying traumatic memories à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but by disentangling the painful emotion from the memory it’s associated with. In that way, the memories would survive, but the fear attached to them would disappear. It sounds like science fiction, but memory reconsolidation may well be the future of severe PTSD treatment.

  This book is really propelling and fun, and the last part came to life so cinematically. I wonder what your influences were while you were conceiving of this book, because I think that it’s so clearly influenced by other forms of art, rather than just by literature. There is a scene in the end that involves a mad dash return that I think should obviously be set to a Springsteen song in the movie.

  I’m truly delighted you mention that! A frankly ludicrous amount of my relationship to Americana comes from Springsteen songs, and has done since I was pretty young. The mythic stories of doomed romances and dying steel towns and lonesome highways that infuse his music are always in the back of my mind when I think about travelling through America. Even though the characters in the book are driving up the pacific coast, which is not really Springsteen country, I still imagine his songs playing on their car radio. Beyond the Boss, meandering California noir stories, road trip movies like Y tu Mamá También and The Motorcycle Diaries; the films of Bosnian directors Danis Tanovič and Jasmila Žbanić; the work of Irish playwrights Marina Carr, Mark O’Rowe, and Brian Friel; the essays of Aleksandar Hemon; and the journalism of Barbara Demick, Janine di Giovanni and Sheri Fink, all, to one degree or another, informed the writing of Restless Souls.

  This was a book with tremendous amounts of light and humor, even and especially in its darkest parts. Does humor come naturally to you on the page? Is humor important to you in works that you read?

  I’ve always loved gallows humor—whether in books, theatre, or film & TV—and the kind of rapid-fire, back and forth piss-taking that the characters in this novel engage in with one another was something I grew up around, so I suppose it was always going to play a sizeable role in whatever story I wrote. I love constructing scenes where there’s a tension between the comic and the tragic, and I think that a lot of interesting things can spring from the balancing act. Having said that, I think the danger for me, and something I struggled with in the earliest drafts, was that I would use humor as a crutch—deferring to a comic set piece or machine-gun blast of dialogue when the narrative actually called for a quieter moment of introspection. Enough is as good as a feast when it comes to humor, and it took some time for me to realize that.

• Believer - https://logger.believermag.com/post/dan-sheehan

  NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBE CURRENT ISSUE PREVIOUS POSTS
  An Interview with Writer Dan Sheehan
  May 7, 2018

  "THERE IS A LINE BETWEEN BEARING WITNESS AND GOING SOMEWHERE AS A DISASTER TOURIST."

  How Dan Sheehan Got His Eyebrow Scars:
  1st scar—His Friend Trevor Stabbed Him With a Broken Crutch
  2nd scar—Jumped by Teenagers Near a Train Station in Dublin
  2nd scar reopened—His Brother Swung at Him with a Coffee Mug

  I’d been impatiently awaiting Irish writer Dan Sheehan's debut novel, Restless Souls, since reading a piece that touches on his first job in the US: a prolonged and painful employment at a bar in Times Square. His writing contains just the balance of comedy and poignancy I gravitate toward. And while I’m susceptible to ruining my own experiences with unreasonably high expectations, Restless Souls exceeded all anticipation. It’s a road novel, a comic novel, a war novel, and a mystery novel framing a character-driven story full of so much pathos it’s hard to think of any other relatively short book that covers as much ground and as many emotional registers as it does.

  When Dan entered my apartment, he took a dog-lover’s moment to engage my 85lbs. pit bull mix (whom he’d never met) with some light wrestling. I hadn’t done the week’s shopping yet and offered Dan the only comestibles I had in the apartment: red wine and cashew cookie Larabars. He’d never had a Larabar before and ended up eating three of them during the course of our conversation.

  —Karim Dimechkie

  I. Repressive Effusion

  THE BELIEVER: I swear I’m not texting, I’m just looking for the Dictaphone on this thing and—oh, I found it. It’s actually been going. I guess it’s called Voice Memo.

  DAN SHEEHAN: I think it was called Dictaphone before.

  BLVR: Dictaphone is definitely the better word. Okay. Your book covers a lot of territory. There are three countries, four or five time periods, two different characters’ first person perspectives, and somehow it’s all inside of 248 pages without feeling rushed or incomplete. Did the book change length at all while working on it?

  DS: The book did go through some pretty sizable alterations over the course of the first few drafts. The largest was definitely this one hundred-page central section set in New York which I cut because, fun as it was to write, it didn’t move the plot along a single step. It was sort of a comic interlude where the characters wandered around the city getting up to various madcap hijinks, but really it was just me proving to myself that I could describe New York with a local’s eye. I’d only lived here about a year by then, and I think it was important that I felt like I had a handle on the city, or at least my small sections of it.

  BLVR: It’s not an easy line between plot-efficiency and fun details. If the only thing that mattered was plot we could probably boil your novel down to one sentence.

  DS: Right.

  BLVR: But that’s not what I want. I want to read a novel with all the adventure, and the jokes, and the little wise observations. That balance is tricky. Moving on. We have to talk about research.

  DS: Well, a lot of the research was wonderful because it involved me musing back over rose-tinted teenage memories of Dublin, and traveling to Sarajevo and central California—which have become two of my favorite places. I remember driving up the Pacific Coast Highway and visiting these small beach towns and surfer enclaves, discovering national parks and Elephant Seal rookeries and Hearst Castle—

  BLVR: I love the scene when the characters are trying to figure out who Hearst was. It ends up being a Simpsons reference.

  DS: I had to get that in. I feel like we’re losing the noble Simpsons quoters of the world, and it breaks my heart.

  BLVR: The Simpsons is being buried before our eyes.

  DS: It’s been so many years since anyone has watched it with that old reverence.

  BLVR: I feel Seinfeld will outlast the Simpsons.

  DS: Depends where you are. I’ve talked to people about this and I think it’s different outside the US. Every single person my age in Europe has seen every single episode of Friends as far as I can tell. Same goes for the first decade of the Simpsons. Wait, stop. I've totally sidetracked us.

  BLVR: No, I did that. What was the first idea of the book?

  DS: It sprang from two images in particular that I just couldn’t shake. The first was of the National Library of Sarajevo in flames, having been shelled to complete destruction from the hills above the city in the summer of 1992. I remember watching a documentary called For the Love of Books, which showed footage of the burning building—its millions of volumes, some of them ancient, priceless texts, destroyed forever. The documentary was about a group of brave people trying to transport boxes of books from another library across an exposed bridge to the relative safety of a nearby mosque. The second image was that of young man hanging from a goal posts in a field in Ireland at dusk.

  BLVR: Where did that image come from?

  DS: Youth suicide has long been a terrible problem in Ireland. Our rates have always been a lot higher than most of Europe. When I was in high school that wasn't really talked about. In my parents’ generation it wasn’t mentioned at all, so we were a beat beyond that, but we still lagged far behind in terms of talking about mental health. The first time I remember it really entering the public discourse was when I was in college, and that was the mid-2000s. Meanwhile there is no one of my generation in Ireland whose teens or twenties were not marked in some way by the suicide of a classmate, teammate, sibling or friend.

  BLVR: Speaking from a place of total ignorance, I feel like the Irish reputation in the US occupies two, seemingly contradictory generalizations. On the one had there’s this tell-it-how-it-is thing going on where the Irish are depicted as being very comfortable speaking their minds, albeit often through humor. On the other hand, there’s this generalization that they are somewhat repressed, tight-lipped people.

  DS: It’s always hard to sum up an entire people, but part of what you’re saying is very true. There’s always been a gregariousness and emotional effusiveness to Irish people that has gone hand in hand with a very traditionally repressive culture.

  The country has changed so much in the last twenty-five years. Now Ireland is quite progressive and quite secular, but when we were children, people still went to Mass every Sunday, divorce was still illegal, there were heavy restrictions on buying condoms, homosexuality was still technically a crime, the clerical sex abuse scandals had yet to break—the sensibility was just very, very different. It didn’t mean it was a repressed country in terms of personality and exuberance, but there were these long-standing pillars of silence and secrecy that stubbornly refused to fall. I feel they have now. The last great one is abortion. The referendum to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the constitution (ban on abortion) is happening in May of this year and with it, hopefully, will come the end of one of the most shameful chapters in our nation’s history.

  II. Bold Gestures

  BLVR: A good fourth of the novel takes place outside of your country. Talk about writing about Sarajevo, for instance.

  DS: Some friends and I were doing one of these euro-rail trips around Europe. For 150 bucks you get ten journeys in thirty days, and you live like you’ve adopted vagrancy for the month. You sleep in train stations and all that. Sarajevo was at the very edge of the allowable map on euro-rail trip.

  The reason I really wanted to go was because some of the earliest images of violent conflict that made an impression on me were from the war in Bosnia. I would have been five, six, or seven years old. I remember being horrified by the dispatches from that region on the news. And then you get older and start researching and the interest in the war becomes a wider interest in the city and the country and the people and the geography. When I met Teá in 2013 it was late at night, we were at a bar and—

  BLVR: Wait. You met Teá in 2013? That’s crazy. In my mind you two have been married for much longer. I guess it’s just because I met you guys as a married couple.

  DS: Well we moved in together after four months and were married after seven.

  BLVR: Seems to be working out so far.

  DS: So far so good. When I first met her at the bar it was late, we were chatting about Bruce Springsteen, our mutual great love, but I also started talking to her about the war in Bosnia, which is probably the stupidest, least appropriate chat-up line imaginable. Luckily she was very sweet and patient and didn’t tell me to fuck off.

  BLVR: When you were writing about Sarajevo, did you feel a different level of responsibility than when you wrote about Ireland? Did you feel the need to be more careful in any way?

  DS: So much of the Ireland stuff was about a place that’s a mile or two down the road from where I grew up. It’s a half-generation back from me but it’s all fiction based on firsthand familiarity. With regards to everything else, I’ve always felt that you can write about anything as long as you approach it with empathy and have done your research. If you’re missing either of those things then you probably have no business writing about another country or another people. And even with the best will in the world, you’re going to mess up some stuff. I spent a long time reading books about the period, pouring over histories of the city, watching documentaries, speaking to people who survived the war, and got kind of obsessed with historical accuracy. But that can go too far. You can end up with reams of tedious description because you’re so proud of yourself for learning the details, and then of course you have to strip all that away.

  Funnily enough I got so worried about capturing Sarajevo accurately and was so confident about my memories of Dublin, that I was a little blindsided by a review from The Guardian. The reviewer points out that an early scene where the characters are driving mentions that these heroin addicts are huddled together on the Liffey Boardwalk, the river boardwalk, but the river boardwalk wasn’t constructed until two years after my characters were supposedly driving in that car. And I thought, fuck, I spent so much time trying to get the details of the streets and buildings and corners in Sarajevo right and I end up getting called out on the fucking Liffey Boardwalk, which is like three miles from my childhood home.

  BLVR: The same review criticizes you for having one of your characters use “meh” during a dialogue to express indifference. The reviewer says “meh” was not a thing in 1992. At first I found that unnecessarily nitpicky, but then I realized that to have someone read you that closely is really flattering.

  DS: Right. And I get it. People are protective of their cities. Especially if somebody is describing your hometown, I mean it’s my hometown too, but it’s really only my version of Dublin. It’s a mixture of fiction, things I remember mostly accurately, and then things I remember inaccurately, and that’s fine. At least it’s my city and my people to piss off when I get something wrong. What I never wanted, through negligence or lack of research or lack of empathy, was to end up depicting Sarajevo in a way that was lazy or simplistic. I mean I’m sure there’s things I got wrong but it wouldn’t be for lack of trying.

  BLVR: There’s a character in the book who has a little bit of a hang up regarding his obsession with other people’s suffering, and he’s accused once or twice of being a war tourist. I thought that was interesting because I feel like a lot of white privileged guys live in fear of being accused of that. And there’s a confusion that comes with being interested in suffering that’s happening far away, which isn’t, at face value, an inherently bad thing. But if it goes on long enough you start questioning your motives, worrying there’s something impure about it.

  DS: There is a line between bearing witness and going somewhere as a disaster tourist. Sarajevo is an incredible, iconic city. It was traditionally known as the Jerusalem of Europe because it’s been a place where different religions and ethnicities and cultures have met and co-existed for hundreds of years. Within a couple of hundred meters you’d find a mosque, a synagogue, a catholic church. It was also a very vibrant, cosmopolitan place—a city of music and culture, a city that hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. So I was entranced by all of that. But, if I’m speaking honestly, a large part of the reason I wanted to visit back in 2007 was to see this place that had, only a decade previous, withstood the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. That was a big draw for me then. I’m ashamed to say it, but there was certainly an element of disaster tourism in that impulse.

  BLVR: I know I brought it up, but I’m realizing as we speak that I’m not entirely sure what constitutes war tourism. Is it someone going to a war zone to get their kicks? Or what exactly is it?

  DS: It’s a good question. War tourism is such an evocative term but what does it actually mean? I suppose it can take a number of forms. For me, if you go to an impoverished part of the world, or somewhere recently lain low by war or natural disaster, and one of your first impulses is to take a photograph with a local child to use as your Tinder profile picture, then you’re probably as much a disaster tourist as the brash adrenaline junkie who wants to feel the earth shake. Then again, most people do go on humanitarian missions with good intentions, the efficacy of which is sometimes undermined, though not always negated, by a more ignoble streak. And I think that most people, on some level, do want to help, do feel pangs of guilt when they see, for example, updates from Aleppo or Ghouta on the news.

  BLVR: I thought about Syria a lot when I was reading your book.

  DS: Yeah. Before writing about Sarajevo, I was trying to wrap my mind around how something like the Siege could have happened in the 90s? How could a capital city like this have been abandoned for years by the world in the age of the 24-hour television news cycle? But then you look at Syria.

  BLVR: You started writing two years into the Syrian war?

  DS: In 2013, yeah. Back then the idea that the war would still be raging in 2018 was unthinkable. The death toll of the Syrian conflict is now over three times that of the Yugoslav Wars. In many ways the battle for Aleppo resembled the siege of Sarajevo. Both were attempts to destroy a city, to wipe out entire neighborhoods of people, to decimate the infrastructure, to attack cultural centers; neither were about simply seizing control. It was always about more than just driving people out and acquiring a stronghold. It was about killing a city.

  BLVR: When we spoke on the phone the other day I told you the book made me a little misty.

  DS: Just you and the dog, weeping away huh?

  BLVR: It came at an unexpected moment. It wasn’t in scenes of war or death. It was when the main characters were teasing each other. There’s so much sincerity and love communicated through the insults and sarcasm in this friendship. It’s all action based devotion.

  DS: These are guys who are always talking at each other, teasing each other, giving each other shit. They don’t really have a language to convey worry or affection or grief about the things they’ve done or the regret about what they’ve failed to do. Really the only way for them to demonstrate these things to one another is through bold gestures. Whether that’s punching a guy out because he’s speaking ill of the dead or taking this kind of ridiculous road trip into the unknown—

  BLVR: It’s very Good Will Hunting.

  DS: We’ve all experienced a version of that before. You spend years among these people who you become very close with but you never build an earnest or open communication channel. The whole wild goose chase of the road trip serves as a therapeutic process for them; there’s so much about the tragedy and the grief of the years before the story of the book starts that they have not come to terms with, but they’re now trying to deal with it in the only way they know how.

  BLVR: I call it Dumb Love.

  DS: Yeah.

  BLVR: There’s something almost animal about it. Or familial. It’s this I-will-kill-for-you reflex. There’s nothing intellectualized or diplomatic.

  DS: I grew up with guys who are the closest people in the world to me, and for whom I would do anything. But I wouldn’t know how to communicate that verbally in a way that, hopefully, I can communicate comparably strong feelings to people who I've met and bonded with in later years. Those relationships are from a time when that way of expressing myself wasn’t available. I didn’t have the language.

  III. Qualified Admiration for Bono

  BLVR: Why did you come to the US?

  DS: Some of it was itchy feet. Some of it was that it was the lowest ebb of the economic collapse in Ireland. Dublin’s an artsy city but at that time the idea that there would be a steady wage in it or that I could pay rent on the back of doing stuff like this—that wasn’t going to happen. I’d never been to America and there was a visa open to graduates within a year of graduating. I had gone back to school to do a master’s, and I had a few months left in that window, so I said fuck it I should make an effort to come over here. I found an internship at the PEN American Center and applied, did a Skype interview. I thought it went pretty okay. So I went down to the American Embassy and applied for a visa. I came over and worked that job during the day and the god awful Irish bar at night.

  BLVR: Tell me again why it was so awful.

  DS: I had never been to the US before. All my siblings had lived in New York, and I probably should have asked them more about it. They would have told me to get a job at an Irish bar somewhere where there were regulars who would tip. It might have been a bunch of finance people who come in and drink themselves stupid and get obnoxious, but they’d still tip, you know. But I went to Times Square because that’s where I thought people went to go get Irish bar jobs in New York.

  BLVR: You intentionally went looking for work in Times Square.

  DS: I landed in the US on the 14th, on Valentine’s Day, 2013, and I went and applied for jobs on the 15th. I just figured Times Square, there’s got to be a lot of bars in there, I just needed to make some money straight away.

  BLVR: Who was the clientele? What kind of people get beers in Times Square?

  DS: Terrible people, Karim. Terrible, terrible people. No, that’s not fair. There were a lot of tourists, many of whom didn’t know to tip, which wasn’t ideal, but the bigger problem was that there were no real regulars. Nobody wants to make the bar on 45th street their regular haunt anymore because getting there involves running the gauntlet through this chaotic, Disneyfied hellscape. It was about the least lucrative bar job you could get in the city. The guy who ran the place was a racist old goblin too, but that’s another story.

  BLVR: There is a U2 quote in the beginning of the book. And U2 comes up a couple of times in the story. Is U2 still cool over there? Or is liking U2 comparable to liking Kiss or something?

  DS: The short answer as to whether they’re cool at the moment in Ireland is probably no. When you team up with Apple to drug people with your new album against their will, you run the risk of that I suppose. Bono’s savior complex doesn’t tend to be received that well back home either. So I was a little worried about using them in the book. I do have huge love for old U2, as I think most people back home do, but like all of the dinosaur or soon-to-be-dinosaur rock bands, there’s a degree to which, after a point, you become your own tribute band. We’re certainly not at a moment when U2 is peak cool. In 1991 and 1992, however, when people were listening to Achtung Baby and Joshua Tree and October and these albums (which I will defend to the death, by the way), they were. Also we have to remember that U2 were the first major rock band to play Sarajevo after the siege was lifted. It meant a lot to the people in the city. It meant a lot to the band. They wrote a song about it. You can be cynical about it but it was a genuinely inspiring moment

  BLVR: Wait tell me more about the savior complex. What is that about?

  DS: Most of the U2 concerts will have screens in the background talking about something terrible that’s happening in the world and how we need to pay attention to it. That’s a noble thing. If you’re using your celebrity platform to talk about the disappeared in Argentina or the shelling of Sarajevo, or the troubles in Northern Ireland, that’s a good thing and I genuinely admire Bono for it. But people respond badly to the arrogance of thinking you can solve a country’s complex problems by throwing money at it or making some speeches from a stage. And they’re not wrong, but I’ve always felt that the good work accomplished far outweighs the irritation of having to listen to a multi-millionaire rock star sermonize.

  Karim Dimechkie is the author of the novel, Lifted by the Great Nothing. He lives and writes in New York City by night and works for a non-profit, CAMBA, by day.

  Dan Sheehan is an Irish fiction writer, journalist, and editor. His writing has appeared in The Irish Times, GQ, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, TriQuarterly, Words Without Borders, Electric Literature, and Literary Hub, among others. He lives in New York, where he is the Book Marks editor at Literary Hub and a contributing editor at Guernica Magazine.

  His debut novel, Restless Souls, is available now from Ig Publishing (US).

• Bomb - https://bombmagazine.org/articles/dan-sheehan-restless-souls/

  Darkness and Light: Dan Sheehan Interviewed by Sara Nović
  The Restless Souls novelist on reading his reviews, working as a medical equipment tester, and writing responsibly about war and trauma.

  Apr 17, 2018
  Interview
  Literature

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  Evstafiev Bosnia Cello
  Vedran Smailović performing in Sarajevo’s destroyed National Library, 1992. Photograph by Mikhail Evstafiev.

  Set in early 1990s Dublin, Sarajevo, and California, Dan Sheehan’s Restless Souls (Ig Publishing) is a debut novel that lives up to its title. Sheehan deftly guides us through the minefield of the coming-of-age experience, moving his characters Tom, Karl, and Baz across the boundaries of setting, time, narrative voice, and genre. Both funny and tragic, Restless Souls examines how war and loss burrow into our very marrow, and what it means for friendship, love, and life in the aftermath. Sheehan grew up in Ireland and now lives in New York City, where he is the Book Marks editor for Lit Hub and a contributing editor at Guernica.

  Sara Nović How does it feel to be a debut author? Your editorial work deals with aggregating reviews, I wondered if you find them valuable in a different way than the average writer.

  Dan Sheehan I was all set to play it cool and avoid my reviews completely but that, unsurprisingly, has not happened. I told myself that Google-searching my book reviews in the U.K. and Ireland was in service of finding pull-quotes to build momentum for the U.S. release, and that’s kind of true. But what’s far truer is that I caved.

  SN You’re a braver man than I.

  DS Already I regret it.

  SN Do you feel like you might learn anything from reading them?

  DS I’m cursed/blessed in this instance with a really shitty memory and an inability to dwell on these things, but the mixed reviews still linger in the mind longer than the good. There was a Guardian review that was pretty positive but the reviewer, a Dubliner who is the same age as my characters, pulled me up on including a boardwalk in Dublin that was built three years after when my story takes place. I read that and thought, I flew to California and Sarajevo to make sure I got certain specific details right, and then I go ahead and fuck up a boardwalk two miles down the road from where I grew up. So I probably could have done without reading that.

  SN Why did you choose Sarajevo as the novel’s central location?

  DS When I sat down to plan out the novel, I knew I wanted to write about Sarajevo in some capacity. It’s a city that I fell in love with when I first visited about a decade ago, and a place I find endlessly fascinating. We’re talking about a capital that was known as the Jerusalem of Europe because of its long history of cultural, religious, and ethnic diversity. A five-minute walk through the Old Town district can take you past a mosque, a synagogue, an Orthodox church, and a Catholic cathedral, as well as countless kafanas, bars, hookah lounges, and small museums.

  Having said that, my reason for setting one of the storylines there, and using the Siege as a catalyst for the book’s central journey, was seeded years before I ever visited the city. I was very young during the war, but the footage from Sarajevo that aired each day on the evening news from 1992 until late 1995 made an impact on me like nothing had previous. There was something about the ongoing chaos and brutality of the Siege and how that was reported that I couldn’t shake. I was befuddled to watch how correspondents arrived not in the wake of a single brutal attack, which was how I understood coverage of the Northern Ireland troubles at the time, but to cover the continued, and seemingly unending, destruction of this beautiful valley city. I don’t think it takes a child’s naïveté to be shocked by how the world can watch on impassive for months, for years, while a city dies. We need only look at Aleppo for a recent example of how things barely change.

  Restless Souls Cover
  SN Did you ever worry about how you were going to handle the themes of war and suicide? How do we, as writers, make sure we do justice to the characters’ traumas and push readers beyond the bounds of rubbernecking?

  DS It was certainly something I thought a lot about as the book came together. The bulk of the violent incidents in the Sarajevo chapters are based on specific historic events, and Gabriel’s death is inspired by the ongoing epidemic of suicide among young men and women in Ireland—something that has devastated countless families and friend groups in the last quarter century. The novel invokes the personal tragedies of thousands of people, and it was extremely important to me that this was done in a nuanced and respectful way.

  The danger is always that in an effort to depict the full severity of the trauma suffered, you flatten characters, stripping them of any aspect of personality that doesn’t relate to that trauma. I think that’s something foreign correspondents and war reporters have to be especially careful of with each story they file: not to reduce complex human beings to ciphers and simply indulge that disaster tourism impulse that, unfortunately, is in all of us to some degree and that we should actively fight against. I hope that the characters I’ve written read as more than just the tragedies they’ve fallen victim to—that people see in Gabriel and Jelena more than just lives cut short by violence. That’s the very least we owe the real-life victims of war and suicide, and it’s also the very least we owe the characters we create.

  SN I wasn’t in Sarajevo for the Siege, but I had family and friends there, and I found what you wrote true to both the war, and what I love best about the city—its centuries-old tradition of diversity and unabashed liveliness even amidst the destruction and its aftermath. I think your affinity for the place comes through.

  DS That, genuinely, means the world to me. Full disclosure: I was a bit nervous sending the book to you. I know I came at this with respect and empathy and a great deal of research, and I think that’s a base-level requirement for a writer, but still, I worry. Maybe it’d be arrogant as fuck not to worry about how people directly connected to a war you’re writing about from a remove will react. Sarajevan friends have been supportive of the writing of the book, which I’ve appreciated so much, but it hasn’t come out in Bosnia yet so I’m mostly still in the dark on that front (gulp). My mother-in-law, who is originally from Sarajevo, called just the other day to tell me how much she enjoyed it, which made my day. There are always going to be false notes and anachronisms with a project like this, and I’m prepared for that if they’re pointed out, but I hope in an overall sense that I’ve been able to do justice to the way the city felt during that period.

  The last thing I would want is to depict siege-era Sarajevo and its people in a reductive or voyeuristic way. There was chaos and carnage and terrible, unfathomable loss during those years, of course there was, and to not put that at the forefront of a fictional depiction would be ridiculous; but it’s important to remember that people carried on living too. They published newspapers and produced plays and played football and studied and worked and fell in love. They also drank and laughed and argued over stupid shit like the people of every other city did at the time—Sarajevans just had to do it while shells rained down around them and snipers tried to pick them off at intersections on their daily commute.

  SN You said earlier, “when you sat down to plan out the novel.” Did you know you were writing a novel at first?

  DS I knew I wanted it to work as a novel, but I was also acutely aware of the danger in trying to force together pieces that didn’t fit. The initial difficulty I had was trying to combine the Sarajevo storyline with another story that focused on young men in Ireland going through the grief and trauma of losing a friend to suicide, and doing it in a way that would be respectful and compelling and add up to a novel that was greater than the sum of its disparate parts. I told myself at the time that if it felt like the existence of one narrative strand or section was shortchanging another, rather than enhancing it, I would be ruthless about cutting it, and that’s what I did. I had a whole central section set in west Harlem, which I probably wrote because it felt like a way to affirm that I had gotten my feet under me in America, as though I must be settled if I can write a story set in my new neighborhood. But it amounted to a 100-page comic interlude that didn’t advance the story one bit, so I had to kill it with fire.

  SN I’ll look for it in your next book!

  DS Ha, thank you. If there ever is one.

  SN I remember feeling after my first book: Well, that’s it; those were all my thoughts!

  DS Right. This is the story I’ve managed to wring from my entire life so far. See you again in a quarter century.

  SN Reviewers refer to this novel as “genre-bending.” I experienced an interesting tension between the road-trip buddy novel and the much darker themes associated with war writing. Certainly, I’ve always been a fan of humor in war writing—the Bosnian poet Izet Sarajlić is a kind of master of this—but it’s not something we see a lot. I think people are, understandably, afraid to mix those two things. When you were writing, how much did you think about genre or audience in general?

  DS At the beginning I had a vague sense that the stories could and should connect somehow, and maybe if that was all it was, if I didn’t find myself returning to both again and again in my mind, I might have chosen one and made that the entire novel, but then it wouldn’t have been the right book. The more I threaded the two storylines through one another, the more sense it made for them to exist together—the more I realized that they had to exist together. Karl is prompted to re-interrogate his feelings around his surrogate brother’s suicide because of the state Tom is in when he returns from Bosnia. Similarly, Tom’s story—his entire life—would drift off into blackness without these men there to keep him tethered to the world, to reconnect him to something that trauma had stripped away. I never really thought about what audience the book would be most suited to, or whether the genre-bending aspect would be appealing or off-putting to anyone but me.

  There may not be a huge, untapped market out there for hybrid Bosnian War/California road-trip novels studded with Irish colloquialisms, but that was the story I needed to write—the one that felt true and significant to me, so I was going to get it out of my system no matter what. Tonally, I suppose I just enjoy that mixture of light and darkness in fiction and the attempt to find balance for the two is always something I’ve been drawn to. I have a background in theatre criticism (and in trying, and failing, to write plays) and have always been a little obsessed with the streak of jet-black humor that runs through much of the best contemporary Irish drama. Playwrights like Marina Carr and Mark O’Rowe, in their depictions of people living under clouds of rage and grief and confusion, are able to infuse stark depictions of stagnating lives with an almost mythic grandeur. The way, in their best work, they construct sentences—lines that are both tender and apocalyptic, musical and brutal, full of gallows humor and intense sorrow—floored me and made me want to play with dialogue more and more in my own fiction, which is why, I suppose, there’s so much of it in the novel.

  SN I also found it really in keeping with the general darkness of Balkan humor.

  DS Absolutely! And that really was a wonderful surprise—the similarities there.

  SN Do you relate to any of the characters more, or do you have a secret favorite?

  DS I would say I’m particularly fond of Baz and Jelena in equal measure. I would have loved to have written a scene with the two of them interacting; but alas, it wasn’t to be.

  SN Jelena is a badass.

  DS She really is. Jelena is the polar opposite to Baz in terms of common sense and ability to navigate the world effectively, but they share a complete absence of filter, which I’ve always admired in people. Both Karl and Tom suffer, to varying degrees at different stages in their journeys, from a lack of self-awareness. They’ve convinced themselves that their motives are entirely pure and their decisions are sound. Baz and Jelena, on the other hand, know exactly who they are and are far more pragmatic about what that means. They’re unafraid to call bullshit on the partly romantic, partly selfish plans dreamt up by these men that they’ve come to love so fiercely. Jelena and Baz are impulsive, and at times that makes them do extreme things, but they’re not delusional (though Baz does have his moments), and their loyalty is absolute.

  SN What is the weirdest part of your writing routine or process?

  DS I suppose it involves intense periods of reading and writing, broken up by long stretches of being too busy, or too disorganized, to do much of either. I worked so many different jobs over the course of writing this novel—bartender, waiter, script reader, editor, medical equipment tester—that the amount of useful work I got done on any given month was subject to the demands of another, usually weird, job.

  SN Medical equipment tester!?

  DS Probably my favorite of all of them. I was doing under-the-table bar work and that was going through a dry stretch, so a woman I knew put me in touch with a medical equipment company who needed a test subject. I’d show up to a hotel conference, take off my clothes, and lie on a gurney. Then, the sales rep would hook me up to a machine (kidney ultrasound or some such) and doctors would file out of their lectures and shuffle over for a demonstration. Easiest money I ever made.

  SN Well, I really loved Restless Souls. I am very much looking forward to your Harlem-based medical-equipment-tester novel in twenty-five years.

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/restless-souls-is-a-war-story-and-journey-epic-that-fights-for-male-fragility-cc2b1c8f4cba

  ‘Restless Souls’ is a War Story and Journey Epic that Fights for a New Masculinity
  Dan Sheehan’s debut novel follows three Irishmen on their way to an experimental PTSD clinic after fighting in Sarajevo

  Photo by Stijn Swinnen on Unsplash

  The first work by Dan Sheehan that I ever read was a visceral and twistedly comic short story set in Ireland about a man inheriting his infamous and imprisoned father’s urge to murder. The title, “Our Fathers,” was a double entendre, invoking the Lord’s prayer. I was engrossed. I met Sheehan a few years ago while we were both in New York and he was working as a contributing editor for Guernica Magazine. He had a joyfully hungry ear for a story and a genuine enthusiasm for discussing various pitches and experiences of reporting. He was about to head off to the West Coast to do research for what would become his first novel. A surreal and poignant debut, Restless Souls charts the journey of three young men from Dublin — Tom, Karl, and Baz — who are hoping to find redemption at an experimental PTSD clinic on the edge of a cliff in California.

  Purchase the novel.
  The shifting narrative flickers between this strange road trip and intimate vignettes from Tom’s memory of the haunting three years he spent in Sarajevo while the city was under relentless siege. Their odyssey from Tom’s mam’s house in Dublin to the Restless Souls clinic, via a random desert commune, is a last ditch effort to save Tom’s unraveling mind. But it is also an unspoken and desperate pact to save themselves from a churning guilt, an exorcising of the collective grief that all three are barely enduring following the suicide of their childhood friend Gabriel.

  At the Dublin launch for Restless Souls in The Gutter Bookshop, self-deprecating and unfeigned in front of an audience thick with family and friends, Sheehan read out the first chapter. Even in the first few lines, I was struck by the focus on the act of bearing witness and what that means, a question I would return to time and again reading the book. I had recently returned from an assignment in Syria and had seen the devastation that an intractable war causes up close, but also the resilience of the mundane, the everyday life that continues regardless.

  Amidst cruel losses and the most brutal of wars, the three laddish anti-heroes of Restless Souls are animated by a genuine humanity. I spoke with the author about exploring trauma and grief without shying away from the surreal mundanity, imperfect relationships, and strange humor that percolate through these experiences.

  Caelainn Hogan: I was expecting to focus these questions on the more concrete themes of male friendship or the trials of survivor’s guilt, both central to Restless Souls and worth exploring. But what fascinated me most about your book was the way it explored ideas of perception, experience, and the concept of bearing witness. You completed years of research and you are writing about two very factual crises. Was the Restless Souls clinic always at the center of the novel? Did these more intangible subjects surface out of the process, or were they always fundamentally what you wanted to raise through the narrative?

  Dan Sheehan: I knew that I wanted to find something less grounded in reality, more outlandish, to place at the end of what is essentially a quest narrative. The realities of adult life have been so brutalizing for these men, who, in their teenage years — in a way that many of us do I suppose — assumed that they stood together on unshakable foundations, and always would. They now feel that all of that promise and hope and invincibility has been stripped away and that the last chance to retrieve it is through a bold move, a grand gesture. Having said that, these Californian cliff side facilities do exist (they just usually house Don Draper-esque meditation gatherings rather than PTSD clinics) and the futuristic-seeming memory treatment detailed is real (it just hasn’t reached the human trial phase of research yet).

  I had been researching the different therapies available to returning soldiers and trauma victims for a number of months when I came across a fascinating New Yorker profile of a neuro-scientist named Dr. Daniela Schiller and her pioneering work on memory reconsolidation (the process by which fixed long-term memories can be recalled and modified in order to dampen the intensity of their emotional impact, to essentially rewrite the memory). There can be a wariness in people with regard to manipulating memory because we tend to picture mad scientists and cold-blooded dystopias, but there are many out there, like Dr. Schiller, whose cutting-edge work comes from a place of deep compassion and an abiding belief in the duty of care we have toward those sufferers for whom all conventional treatment options have been exhausted.

  Matt Gallagher & Phil Klay Discuss the War in Iraq and Finding Purpose at Home

  electricliterature.com
  CH: These treatments seem so alien compared to the mental health care available in Ireland, basically as surreal as zebras in a garden…

  DS: Absolutely. The fact that in Ireland we’re only now, deep into the 21st century, coming to the realization that a national, multi-faceted approach to the mental health crisis is required, is pretty disgraceful. The bottom line is that before you can address a problem of this magnitude, you have to admit that there is one. You have to cultivate an atmosphere where that discussion can be part of the public discourse, and it took us a long, long time to do that. No country’s mental health services are perfect, of course, and, God knows, if you’re poor in the US, your chances of having access to adequate care are slim to nil, but there has at least been a reckoning with the existence of the problem for some time now, which is more than we in Ireland could say in the nineties and previous years. That’s been no secret of course, but I think spending time with these characters and considering the options they would and would not have had in the Ireland of the early nineties brought it home to me in a deeper way.

  CH: This was a project that spanned five years and we have discussed your trips to Bosnia and the way you researched the conflict there, speaking directly with people preserving that history and visiting sites. You said that, when you were young, you were fixated by the images on the TV of the Bosnian war but also felt a sense of shame for being so eager to learn more about the horrors that befell Sarajevo. I sometimes grapple with this in my own work. Looking back, in what ways did the novel and your expectations of it shift? Did you always have that self awareness of the thin line between bearing witness and “disaster tourism” as you described it?

  DS: I like to think I did for the most part, but that’s probably not true. From my experience, we (and by “we” I mean tourists, rather than journalists) tend to assume that if we briefly perform our grief — whether in the company of others or just as a sort of montage in our own heads — at one of these sites of recent tragedy or destruction, that we’ve done our job as empathetic, informed human beings. We give ourselves permission to revel, for want of a better word, in the rawness of the experience, as if our moment of silence or sorrow gives us the right to pass unjudged and unimpeded though the wreckage of other people’s lives, other people’s memories, without actually doing anything about it. I look back on my first visit to Sarajevo and I remember my genuine fascination with the food, the buildings, the history, but it’d be a lie to say that there wasn’t also a macabre interest in the conflict that had only ended a decade previous, a desire to suck up as much of that recent tragedy as I could. I still feel a little ashamed about that impulse, to be honest, but I’m glad that I’ve moved, and am hopefully still moving, in the right direction.

  We tend to assume that if we briefly perform our grief at one of these sites of recent tragedy or destruction, that we’ve done our job as empathetic, informed human beings.
  CH: By the end of the book, there is a distinct sense that no witness is reliable, but that we should perhaps embrace this. We are reminded of the strange power of a eulogy to reanimate a person we have lost, or a single frame of memory that can give us solace. It gives us the sense that we can, in some way, shape our own reality. That surreal monologue at the desert pitstop particularly struck me, with Karl putting himself on trial through the reincarnation of Gabriel, projecting his own guilt through some form of hallucinogenic ventriloquism. These days we seem to live in a state of constant staging and performance. How important was form for you in representing this state, and did you experiment with different approaches?

  DS: There’s relief, and escape, to be found in stories, and I think one of the things that’s so fascinating and heartbreaking about the idea of a eulogy is that it provides a loved one the opportunity to briefly bring a person back to life though story, even if it’s only for a few minutes, even if that story is only the half-truth. There’s such a bewildering senselessness to so many deaths, but eulogies give, or can give, a coda to a life in a way that feels right to us, I suppose because we’re a species that needs stories in order to understand the world and our place in it.

  I think the fact that these men are so dependent on, and paralyzed by, their memories meant that flashbacks were always going to play a major role in the structure of the novel.

  CH: The novel takes on two brutally real crises: suicide and war. You decided to write these experiences through a fairly experimental fictional account, with a solid dose of humor. The sections recounting Tom’s narrative, and indeed his whole character, raise quite a few questions on the futility and limits of journalism. I think the scenes in Sarajevo captured the surreal and intimate mundanity of everyday life within a conflict. The way Tom involved himself in peoples’ lives was ethically complicated and he admits repeatedly he was chasing an experience. You referenced the work of journalists like Janine di Giovanni as important to your research. Her knack for highlighting the everyday humanity within even the most inhumane of conflicts is something I admire. How and why did you decide to make Tom a failed journalist, one who is broken by witnessing, and at the same time, unable to put his observations to any use?

  DS: I think you highlight a very important point about di Giovanni’s journalism, and it’s something I greatly admire in your own work — that ability to capture the complex humanity of individual lives alongside the broader sweep of a brutal and dehumanizing conflict that threatens, in the eyes of world only fleetingly interested in their plight at least, to subsume that individuality. I suppose I saw Tom not necessarily as a failed journalist, but more as someone who naively thought he could throw himself into the deep end without pausing to consider the kind of emotional and experiential work required.

  A War Story About Searching for the Disappeared

  “René from Vukovar” by Spomenka Štimec
  electricliterature.com
  CH: Throughout Restless Souls there is an obsession with the act of recording and also a tension between the importance and the inefficacy of witnessing. Karl is a photographer and Tom a writer. We see a mother risking her life to save books from a burning building surrounded by sniper and mortar fire. A young boy is sent to fetch reporters despite the dangers. At the same time, people are burning obituary sections of newspapers to stay warm. In our so-called post-truth era, can fiction address societal and political issues in a way that nonfiction is unable to?

  DS: I hope that there’s still an important role for both fiction and nonfiction to play in spotlighting the most significant societal and political issues we’re facing today, although I regularly end up doubting this. The tsunami of information and opinion and rebuttal (content for content’s sake) that washes over us all these days — most of it designed to be hoovered up but not dwelled upon or considered in any meaningful way — can be overwhelming. I still hope that the best journalism, like the best fiction, works like an oxygen mask or Moses’ staff: it offers a bubble of respite from all this and allows us to breathe again, to really consider what’s happening, even if only for a few extra moments.

  I hope there’s still an important role for both fiction and nonfiction in the societal and political issues we’re facing today, although I regularly end up doubting this.
  CH: Karl, Tom, and Baz are all affected by trauma and the experience of survivor’s guilt. The varying ways in which the characters lose control, and the impact one person’s pain has on another, seems to illustrate the unavoidable domino effect of trauma. We are confronted with the irreversibility of loss, the way it changes us and the fact we can never return to the same “normal.” The war in Sarajevo and the suicide of a best friend are two very different means to expose these workings of trauma and loss. How did you decide to bring these two crises together and parallel them?

  DS: Well it took a long time to figure out how to bring these two traumas — so removed from one another by scale and distance — together in a way that created a narrative that was compelling and coherent and, most importantly, greater than the sum of its disparate parts. I wish I could say that there was a grand plan from the outset — some initial reason why I felt these two tragedies had to speak to one another. But, in reality, the book began as two distinct images I couldn’t shake from my head. The first was that of the beautiful Neo-Moorish library of Sarajevo, which sits on the banks of the Miljacka river, engulfed in flames. The second was of a young man hanging from the goalposts of a football pitch at dusk. Once I decided that they were the anchoring incidents of the two main narrative strands, it was a matter of making sure the stories spoke to one another as they expanded outward.

  OIF

  by Phil Klay, recommended by Nathan Englander
  electricliterature.com
  CH: Self-help narratives, therapy, and the quest-trip to find oneself are so often associated solely with women. War trauma is often positioned as an exception, a socially acceptable reason for men to seek treatment. Perhaps this explains why three lads would go on an epic journey to a PTSD clinic when they never sought help for the more intimate trauma of suicide. There is a true spirit of “ladism” while the novel simultaneously peels back the defenses and reveals the fragility of these men. They seem surrounded by women they can’t fully connect with, from fussing old mothers who can’t seem to handle the world, to a topless tanned maternal figure in the desert, and countless idealized girlfriends. In the end, as Karl truly reckons with himself, he acknowledges a guilt that he has been trying to escape and wishes his friends had been “more to me than just supporting players in my own story.” It made me think about these men’s perceptions of themselves, the pressures they feel to be a certain kind of man, the ways male privilege can be damaging to men themselves. What were your hopes when you set out to explore the psyches of these three men? And what did you discover through exploring their experience of vulnerability and loss?

  DS: I think, for the most part, the women in the novel, even the ones who only briefly cross their path, are far more emotionally attuned to the what these three men are going through than they are themselves, and there’s a shame attached to that for Karl that causes him to bristle and pull away; the shame of knowing that his psychological and emotional frailties — these aspects of himself that he has, at least up to this point, been unequipped and unwilling to come to terms with — are being exposed. We’ve entered an era where the stigma attached to admissions of anxiety and depression in men is dissipating, and that’s a wonderful and necessary thing, but it’s also a very recent development, especially in Ireland. The first time I ever remember encountering a mental health campaign aimed at young men was when I went to college, which was only twelve years ago, so it was very important for me in creating these characters that they exist in a landscape largely devoid of options in this regard, because that was the reality of the time.

  CH: Finally, I’m curious to know what you learned about your own processing of memory through writing the book? As much as Restless Souls is a manic road trip through California, it is equally a very intimate ode to Dublin, and I’m sure drew on and resurrected many personal experiences. We spoke about an idea you had for a new novel, also set in Ireland and exploring aspects of bereavement. Are there any unresolved questions raised by writing Restless Souls that you are itching to work through?

  DS: It’s funny (in a bleak way), I didn’t realize how preoccupied I was with the themes of bereavement, grief, and regret until I started writing this book. I don’t know whether that’s because eliminating most of the positive side of the emotional spectrum is sort of necessary to create interesting conflicts in fiction, or because that’s just where my brain goes. The scenes in Dublin in the eighties and nineties are fictional of course, but the writing and re-writing of them did at times feel like resurrecting actual memories. I don’t have enough distance from the book yet to know what that means, but it’s hopefully something that’ll become clearer down the line.

• Sydney Morning Herald - https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/dan-sheehans-restless-souls-is-the-funniest-sad-book-youll-read-20180227-h0wqjp.html

  Dan Sheehan's Restless Souls is the funniest sad book you'll read
  By Karen Hardy
  9 March 2018 — 2:28pm
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  RESTLESS SOULS
  Dan Sheehan
  Hachette, $29.99

  For a book about suicide, the war in Sarajevo, and post traumatic stress disorder, Dan Sheehan's Restless Souls is a hilarious read. It's being billed as part comedy, part road trip, part tragedy, the story of four Irish men and their literal journey to save each other, to reconcile their past.

  Dan Sheehan was drawn to Sarajevo.
  Dan Sheehan was drawn to Sarajevo.

  Photo: Supplied
  "I've always been drawn to the idea that when you're attempting to grapple with things such as war, suicide, death and trauma it's important to inject some amount of levity," says Sheehan. "You don't want to overwhelm readers and you don't want people to switch off. The tricky thing is finding the balance, finding the appropriate time."

  Karl, Baz, Gabriel and Tom grew up in Dublin, their lives diverging as they hit their 20s. Tom fled to Bosnia to become a war correspondent of sorts, Gabriel committed suicide, hanging himself on the soccer goal posts of their hometown. Karl and Baz fall in and out of relationships and jobs, just a little lost.

  Restless Souls, by Dan Sheehan.
  Restless Souls, by Dan Sheehan.

  Photo: Supplied
  Restless Souls is as much a dissection of male friendship as anything else.

  "Those years late teens, early 20s, I had a strong group of male friends," Sheehan says. He grew up in Dublin but moved to New York five years ago at the age of 25.

  "We seemed joined at the hip almost. It was an idea I wanted to explore." He particularly wanted to look at how a close group of friends fractures after a tragedy,

  "Suicide is so prevalent among young men in Ireland and has been for some time," he said. "I don't think there's anyone from my generation in Ireland whose teens and 20s weren't marked in some way by the suicide of a sibling, a friend, a teammate, a classmate and I've seen the damage it does to the people left behind.

  "It was important for me to try and examine that and to see the ripple effects on a group of people, especially those who are close to those who have died."

  When he sat down to write Restless Souls he was also drawn to Sarajevo, in particular the siege in the mid-1990s that lasted 1425 days. He holidayed there in 2007 and it brought back childhood memories of the conflict.

  "It was the period before the ceasefire in Northern Ireland, before the Good Friday Agreement, so there was a conflict much closer to home that dominated the news.

  "But there was something about the dispatches from Bosnia, and from Sarajevo in particular, that seemed so brutal and unending. The idea of this city, this beautiful city, being destroyed and its people being held under siege for such a long period of time – about three times longer than the battle of Stalingrad – the idea of having to live through that, to grow up in that environment, was just something I couldn't believe, it was an impossible situation."

  In Restless Souls, Karl and Baz are looking for a cure for Tom, who's returned from Sarajevo a broken man. They find a clinic in Southern California that looks at the idea of "rewriting memories" as a way to treat post traumatic shock. Sheehan says such treatment is being researched in the United States and it fascinated him.

  "Most of us have all thought about that notion in some form or another, whether or not there was an event in your life that was so jarring, or something on a much more basic level, something that set you off on a path you never intended to go down.

  "We all have that desperate need to rewrite parts of our lives that didn't go the way we planned, deciding if there was a turning point.

  "I guess the problem with that is you run the risk of losing parts you don't want to let go of, you change one piece and everything else changes along with it."

  Sheehan, whose great uncle was the Irish author Flann O'Brien, grew up in a family with a "literary air", studying literature at Trinity College and University College, Dublin. He was working in the stores department in the basement of a hospital to save up some money while he was freelancing and left for New York with the hopes of making his mark. He's now an editor at Literary Hub and Restless Souls is his first novel.

  "My father has just retired in the last month or two and he said he's taken to going to bookshops and talking loudly about how good my book is," Sheehan says. "He's very enthusiastic, which I appreciate, but dad, please, please stop."

6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Restless Souls
Publishers Weekly.
265.7 (Feb. 12, 2018): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Restless Souls
Dan Sheehan. Ig (Consortium, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (256p) ISBN 978-1-63246-066-0
Sheehan's stunning and moving debut novel explores the weight of trauma and the complicated contours of
male friendship. Aspiring Irish journalist Tom had snuck into Sarajevo, drawn by the desire to witness the
devastation of the early 1990s siege. He returns home three years later with debilitating psychic wounds.
His childhood friend Karl, haunted by his inability to save his foster brother, Gabriel, from suicide, enrolls
Tom in an alternative therapy program for former soldiers on the California coast. Underemployed
photographer Karl and equally unambitious Baz leave behind their aimless lives to accompany Tom to the
secluded New Age camp and support him there. Sheehan intercuts the trio's week-long distraction-prone
road trip with compact chapters of Tom's flashbacks to slowly disclose some of the harrowing things he
experienced in Bosnia. Karl and Baz doubt the efficacy of the eccentric camp director's touchy-feely
therapies, but encourage Tom until a surprising, late-breaking revelation about the deeper methods of
treatment. Sheehan's blend of breathless action, unsentimental depictions of love, and spot-on period
touches will appeal to readers who like their hopeful narratives tinged with powerful uncertainties. Agent:
Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Restless Souls." Publishers Weekly, 12 Feb. 2018, p. 53. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528615468/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e8317cd9.
Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528615468
6/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1528173580623 2/2
Sheehan, Dan: RESTLESS SOULS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Sheehan, Dan RESTLESS SOULS Ig Publishing (Adult Fiction) $16.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-1-63246-066-0
A moving journey through grief, loss, war, and new beginnings for three childhood friends on the cusp of
finally growing up.
Irish debut novelist Sheehan packs an emotional gut punch in his new book, as well as a fair number of
laughs--a tightrope walk to be sure, but one he handles with aplomb. The story is set in the mid-1990s and
concerns the efforts of Karl and Baz, two friends, to help their friend Tom, a failed war correspondentturned-relief
worker, who returns to their native Dublin from the Bosnian War a shellshocked ghost of his
former self. Karl and Baz convince Tom to accompany them to an experimental treatment facility for PTSD
in Northern California, a last-ditch effort to restore some semblance of a normal life for him. The novel
alternates between Karl's first-person narrative (which shifts between laugh-out-loud schoolboy humor and
heartbreaking pathos, often in the same breath) and Tom's sober, journalistic account of his time in
Sarajevo, of atrocities witnessed, of friends made and lost. As such, the novel reads as part buddy road
movie, part harrowing war movie, switching between hijinks and horror. Hovering above the entire
narrative is the memory of Karl's foster brother, Gabriel, who committed suicide not long before the book
begins, an albatross of grief and regret hanging around the characters' necks. The novel reads like a long,
slow reveal--several of the most dramatic events that give the story its heft show up in the first few pages,
but the hows and whys are slowly doled out over the course of the rest of the book, and this keeps the reader
involved. Certain events in the third act may be a bit too far-fetched for some, but they serve the story well;
with the depth of character on display here, a few plot points do not affect the emotional impact of the
conclusion.
A paean to friendship and the resilience of the human spirit.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Sheehan, Dan: RESTLESS SOULS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525461637/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=62f75faa.
Accessed 5 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525461637

• Irish Times
  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/restless-souls-by-dan-sheehan-review-friendship-memory-and-human-capacity-for-endurance-1.3376911
  Word count: 1069

  Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan review – friendship, memory and human capacity for endurance
  An uneven debut set between ’90s Ireland, California and Eastern Europe tries to cram in too much

  Where Sheehan comes into his own as a writer is the descriptions of a war-torn Sarajevo
  Where Sheehan comes into his own as a writer is the descriptions of a war-torn Sarajevo

  Sarah Gilmartin

  Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 05:24

  First published:
  Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 05:24

  Billed as “a tragedy, a comedy and a road trip novel”, perhaps even the publishers of Dan Sheehan’s debut Restless Souls know there’s too much going on in one book for it all to work cohesively. Sheehan, an Irish journalist and editor who lives in New York, writes with verve and feeling about the aftermath of trauma. His debut centres on the stories of a group of young men from Dublin in the ’90s that see them travel to Sarajevo, to California, and to hell and back.

  Two interlinked narratives explore themes of friendship, memory and the human capacity for endurance. Karl, the book’s voluble narrator, has arranged a trip to California for himself and his mates Tom and Baz. This is no J1 holiday, however, but an attempt to rescue a friend from his demons. Tom’s journalistic endeavours in the Balkans war have led him to witness first-hand the casualties, fall in love with a brave local doctor and return home with PTSD five years later.

  Following a failed attempt at treatment in a British clinic, Karl has applied on Tom’s behalf to an alternative rehabilitation centre in California, the titular Restless Souls, whose mantra “where the wounded come to heal” gives way in the book’s closing chapters to an interesting exploration of PTSD and the limits of modern medical science. Interspersed with the trio’s journey to California, which ticks off a stay with Burning Man-esque desert dwellers, the hairpin bends of the Pacific Coast Highway and the media mogul William Hearst’s famous tourist attraction castle, is Tom’s own story from Sarajevo.

  Julie Mayhew: I am preoccupied with coming-of-age, that period in life when we realise exactly who we are, and this of course, resonates with an audience who are experiencing this, or about to, as well as those who have moved far beyond it‘Literature is a safe place to learn about the darker aspects of life’
  Marian Keyes: “Say what you like about me but my books are funny. What more can I do to qualify?” Photograph: Alan Betson Marian Keyes is not amused, as novel not entered for comic prize
  Edna O’Brien 100 essential books by women
  The hills are alive with the sound of malice
  Anti-globalisation demonstrators in Seville protest during an EU summit. Photograph: Dani Cardona / ReutersThe dark side of globalisation
  In early chapters, Karl and Tom’s voices – both first person, mixing past and present tenses in a way that jars – blur together. Although the backdrops are different, they speak and think in similar patterns. As the novel progresses, distinct voices do emerge, but this is more a factor of circumstance than style. Where Sheehan, who is married to the author Tea Obreht, comes into his own as a writer is the descriptions of a war-torn Sarajevo: “Five that I could see were missing limbs. Tiny stumps, blood seeping through the bandages and gauze. One boy in a slashed blue Italian football jersey was being held down by two knackered orderlies. His left leg was burnt black, flesh and fabric melted together.”

  The characterisation of peripheral characters is also skilfully done: the layabout Baz, whose incessant bickering with Karl gives lightness to the novel’s dark subject matter; the kindness of Karl’s foster parents Eugene and Therese; and in particular the bolshie female heroine Jelena, a Bosnian doctor who sacrifices her own safety for the lives of others. Her voice captivates the reader, and Tom, from the beginning: “I am not here to babysit reporters or put on a show for ghouls. You come, you help or you fuck off.”

  In terms of tone, there are similarities with Restless Souls and Ronan Ryan’s 2017 debut The Fractured Lives of Jimmy Dice, with both novels examining tragedy through inventive narratives told by likeable if long-winded narrators.

  The problem with Restless Souls is a subplot that easily could have made a novel in its own right. A fourth friend, the vividly rendered Gabriel, has killed himself some years before the trip to California and Sheehan’s attempts to link this tragedy to Tom’s Sarajevo experiences feel strained. The impetus is heavily flagged – they failed to save one friend so they must save the other – but Gabriel and Karl’s history as foster brothers feels dropped into the novel at inopportune times. A sequence towards the end that splices the day of the suicide with Tom’s therapy efforts in California only reinforces this issue.

  The busyness is most apparent in the opening chapters of the novel which mix scenes of the boys arriving at Dublin airport, passages in Sarajevo and references to Gabriel, before jumping back to the night before they go to the airport when they stay with Tom’s God-fearing mother, a nod to an older Ireland.

  There is a lack of care in certain descriptions – “We were the worst type of clucking hens”, “I made my face a mask of solemnity” – that elsewhere gives way to a verbosity that doesn’t feel in keeping with Karl’s character: “Her mother is slightly more diplomatic, but an elitist bitch to her marrow.” As a prelude to an anecdotal section on Irish college, he tells us: “As soon as we heard he was off to spend half the summer dancing and splashing around the Atlantic with two hundred gamey country girls, our collective interest in achieving proficiency in the native tongue suddenly shot up.”

  “Don’t reach for epiphanies,” Karl tells his friend Baz towards the end of the book in a line that again seems out of character. There is the sense in Restless Souls that the author is also reaching at times, of a restlessness within his debut.

  Sat, Feb 10, 2018, 05:24

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/01/restless-souls-by-dan-sheehan-review
  Word count: 468

  Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan review – bereavement, friendship and banter
  Three Irish lads deal with fear, trauma and the loss of a childhood friend in this debut set in Dublin and California and and Sarajevo

  Claire Kilroy
  Thu 1 Feb 2018 11.29 EST Last modified on Thu 8 Mar 2018 07.07 EST
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  Tenderness and fear … Dan Sheehan.
  Tenderness and fear … Dan Sheehan.
  This Irish debut describes Tom, Karl and Mal, three Dubliners in their 20s, struggling to come to terms with the suicide of their childhood friend, Gabriel. The novel shuttles between Dublin and California in 1996 as the three lads navigate their grief and survivor’s guilt, and Sarajevo from 1992 to 1997, where Tom spent the siege years, losing both an eye and the woman he loved. A mission to save Tom from terminal despair leads the young men on a journey to the Restless Souls clinic in California, which specialises in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder using experimental methods.

  Sheehan runs into difficulties portraying the generation preceding his own. Karl remarks on the junkies on the Liffey boardwalk, although the boardwalk wasn’t built until 2000. A war correspondent in Sarajevo says “meh”, but “meh” was not a thing in 1992. Tom uses phrases such as “perp-walked” and “own it” – terms unlikely to be familiar to a lad from Inchicore in the 90s. What a delicate construct fiction is, what faith it demands from the reader to keep it aloft. If there are errors in a Dubliner’s depiction of Dublin, how can we trust Sheehan’s depiction of Sarajevo during the siege?

  In his depiction of the bonds of male friendship, the novel stands on firm ground
  But beneath the anachronisms beats a good heart: the story of three bereaved youths (“large angry children”) desperate not to lose yet another friend to suicide. The lads communicate through banter, gagged by a policy of – as Seamus Heaney put it of Northern Ireland – “whatever you say, say nothing”. “Honestly,” Karl remarks of his inarticulacy, “I feel like that midget out of a Twin Peaks dream sequence sometimes”; Sheehan can nail a 90s reference when he puts his mind to it. In his rendering of the bonds of male friendship, the novel stands on firm ground. He evokes the boys’ confusion, their tenderness, their fear. But also their hope that they can save their damaged friend and, in so doing, rescue themselves from the guilt that has haunted them since the first of their number took his life, a message that transcends generations.

  • Restless Souls by Dan Sheehan (W&N, £14.99). To order a copy for £12.74, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.