GUEST POST: Stephen Orr on the Making of Wilf Healy

In this guest post, Stephen Orr introduces us to Wilf Healy, hero (of sorts) of his forthcoming novel, Shining Like the Sun (March 2024).

Read on below to discover how getting lost on an overseas holiday allowed Wilf to emerge into the world and onto the page.

Wilf Healy is eighty, balding, fattening, not happy with his life, with his town (Selwyn), its inhabitants, his many jobs, his role as town peace-maker, postman, bus driver, unofficial mayor. He’s the ‘eldest of three, healer of stones, maker of bones … lover of whiskies (rousing them from a sleep of frosty bees), father of a dead son, husband of a buried wife … story-teller, shit-stirrer, toenail-clipper and non-reader.’

I first heard about the character who’d become Wilf fifteen or so years ago. A BBC story about a multi-tasking Scottish postman who wanted to retire but knew, if he did, his small, isolated village would fall apart. The young had left, the old too frail, or unwilling, so it was his choice: to stay, or go. I knew this character had potential. The idea (as Donne put it, and Hemingway re-used it) that ‘no man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ A loose-fitting theme – that we’re all part of something bigger. A household, a community, neighbourhood, town, city, country. And this (unspoken, or maybe unrealised) idea is the glue that holds us all together. And now we’re persuaded that I, me, mine comes first. And what’s this dollar-driven obsession doing to our communities, to us? The isolation and loneliness. The depression.

I kept Wilf in box of vague notions for years, until 2015, when a family holiday landed me, my wife and kids in the small town of Ballyvaughan, County Clare, Ireland. We’d just got lost in the Irish countryside, driven around until midnight, up a steep corkscrew road, seen the cottage (we thought) was our rental, driven along a stock lane, into a front yard, looked around the deserted cottage and decided it was the wrong one, got back in the car, couldn’t work how to select reverse, opened the glovebox, studied the manual by phone-light, eventually worked it out, back down the lane, the corkscrew road. So by the time we arrived in Ballyvaughan at one in the morning, we were already (by necessity) in love with the place. The narrow horse-and-cart high street, the shops (many empty) lining the road, and here I was, in Selwyn, thousands of miles away in the Australian wheatbelt, and the lid of my box lifted, Wilf climbed out, started greeting the locals, and I knew I had a proper story. Wilf made it to the end of the main road (a Y-junction) where a famous sign pointed to dozens of other places one might make a life. But I already knew what Wilf was thinking.

When I returned home I drafted an Irish version of the story, but eventually decided it’d be easier to give it a local setting. I came up with Selwyn – a small, wheatbelt town with a strange, insular, ageing population, its fair share of problems, the banks and government offices long-since closed, and poor old Seamus (who became Wilf) ironically working in Monk’s Irish pub, caring for his great-niece (sick with cancer), trying to straighten out his grand-nephew (who hates the town, the school). Into the mix comes Wilf’s brother, Colin, visiting from California, and the life he created while his brothers held the fort in Selwyn.

In short, I created a town falling apart. I created some version of what’s increasingly becoming our own society. I then threw Wilf into the mix, to see how he’d cope with it, what choices he’d make, if the ‘old’ values were enough to counter the new. A hand-written first draft, endless edits, the thought of throwing the whole lot in the bin, the self-doubts and literary poverty, but eventually I got something down with which I was happy.

Wilf wants to retire to the island of Louth, where he grew up with his brothers. The idea of an island recurs in the novel. Real, imagined, a place of refuge, but also isolation, and denial of more pressing realities. I’d been reading Randolph Stow’s To The Islands, a novel that describes a journey taken (or not) at the end of one’s life. The protagonist Heriot trying to understand Galumba’s desire to return to the islands. ‘But there was no persuading the white head to turn and look again at the man who spoke of death, and of his own death, with such lightness, defying the spirits to descend on him and send him on his last long journey to the far islands.’ Death, too, figures prominently in Shining Like the Sun. Wilf’s wife, and son, his niece fighting cancer, though she’s really only concerned with her son’s future.

Stow had taken the best title, but my recent reading of the American monk Thomas Merton soon solved the problem. A description of a day when he stood on a Louisville street corner and

‘was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness . . . As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.’

I’m not sure how much of Wilf’s, or anyone’s, journey, towards Merton’s realisation can be described, made clear in fiction. But like most writing this was, is, only an attempt to grasp something that can’t be sold, priced, exchanged – only given away.

Wilf Healy lives in the wheatbelt town of Selwyn, works in Monk’s Irish pub, delivers letters, drives the school bus, holds the place together. But he’s had enough, wants to retire – to forget his nephew Connor, at war with the world, his brother Brian, visiting from America, his niece Orla, sick with blood cancer. Although he plans, and tries, he can’t leave. Something is holding him back.

As the young people flee, the old people die, the drugs arrive in Selwyn, Wilf has to decide what’s important. Shining Like the Sun is about the value of promises, of words and actions that might save a failing community. In the process, Wilf learns there’s no such thing as retirement.

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