The China Factory

Mary Costello

2012 • The Stinging Fly

The main themes that interest me are place and chance, how in a moment life can take a turn […] It can be a moment when the future is fractured. You know, we can be a wing beat away from catastrophe. I say there is only love, death and faith. These are my trinity. We all float close to hazard and that is what my characters know. They are straining towards inner coherence but they suffer inner eruptions. So even as they have this outward calm and a facade of a normal life, they are internally at a place of fracture. They are open to other realities and possibilities. They have this awareness of a hidden potentiality and are often poised, almost frozen, at the portal of this other place, this different life, but it is one they are not living. If that is so, maybe the reader can feel in them a gentle sense of resignation, a sort of muteness, a sense of sad inevitability. Some of the wives in the stories, for example, can’t articulate their interior landscape and eruption. They can have what might look like a defeatist attitude. The thing is, I do place a higher value on the unspoken and the interior than I do the external world where words are said. I have more faith in the hidden than the unhidden. Mostly I love that in fiction you can write other life into existence.

— Mary Costello

Short Stories English Language

The China Factory

Mary Costello

2012 • The Stinging Fly

The main themes that interest me are place and chance, how in a moment life can take a turn […] It can be a moment when the future is fractured. You know, we can be a wing beat away from catastrophe. I say there is only love, death and faith. These are my trinity. We all float close to hazard and that is what my characters know. They are straining towards inner coherence but they suffer inner eruptions. So even as they have this outward calm and a facade of a normal life, they are internally at a place of fracture. They are open to other realities and possibilities. They have this awareness of a hidden potentiality and are often poised, almost frozen, at the portal of this other place, this different life, but it is one they are not living. If that is so, maybe the reader can feel in them a gentle sense of resignation, a sort of muteness, a sense of sad inevitability. Some of the wives in the stories, for example, can’t articulate their interior landscape and eruption. They can have what might look like a defeatist attitude. The thing is, I do place a higher value on the unspoken and the interior than I do the external world where words are said. I have more faith in the hidden than the unhidden. Mostly I love that in fiction you can write other life into existence.