Rose Keating: Writing Is a Way To Communicate
In this interview, author Rose Keating discusses the support she felt from the publishing industry with her debut short story collection, Oddbody.
Rose Keating is a writer from Waterford, Ireland. She received an MA in creative writing prose fiction from the University of East Anglia, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. She is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Hot Press Write Here, Write Now Prize, and the Ted and Mary O’Regan Arts Bursary. She has been published in The Stinging Fly, Apex Magazine, Banshee, and Southword. In 2022, she received an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council. Follow her on X (Twitter), Instagram, and Bluesky.
In this interview, Rose discusses the support she felt from the publishing industry with her debut short story collection, Oddbody, her hope for readers, and more.
Name: Rose Keating
Literary agent: Ed Wilson (Johnson and Alcock)
Book title: Oddbody
Publisher: Simon and Schuster + Canongate
Release date: July 1, 2025 (U.S.) and July 3, 2025 (U.K.)
Genre/category: Literary horror story collection
Elevator pitch: Body horror short stories exploring shame, sex, and womanhood.
What prompted you to write this book?
The collection came about quite organically, so there wasn’t a singular, isolated motivation that prompted the writing of it. Over the space of a few years, I found myself returning again and again to thoughts about my body and the bodies of others, the strangeness and horror of them, as well as the silliness and beauty of being in a human form. I felt a need to share this feeling with others, to pin it down and convey it to another person. I often found myself failing while trying to speak to this, in both articulation and in courage. It’s difficult to talk about the discomfort and absurdity of our lives, and practically impossible in the normalcy of our day-to-day routines. But locking that feeling up is also a lonely, frustrating thing. The writing of the collection was my way of trying to communicate those feelings as accurately, specifically, and truthfully as I could, even through fictional, surreal worlds unlike my own and characters different to myself.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
The journey from idea to publication was a little convoluted. When friends ask, I tell them writing the book took about two years, and the process of publication took about a year and a half, which is sort of true, and sort of not. Some stories were written years before I knew I wanted to write a collection. I wrote the first draft of Next to Cleanliness when I was an inexperienced undergraduate student, and it looked a lot different than the version that appears in the book. Others were written during a more deliberate and concentrated time period.
I wrote the majority of the book during my creative writing master’s year, which gave me the space and freedom to treat the writing as a joyful, experimental and playful process, and allowed me to figure out exactly what I cared about in my work. I was lucky enough to attend the master’s on a scholarship, which took away financial worries for a while. After graduation, I had to go back to doing terrible, minimum wage jobs that made me sad and tired. I couldn’t figure out (and still haven’t completely figured out) how people work full time for very little money and also manage to write books. I was not able to finish a single story during the year post-graduation. I moved back to my Mam’s home in Waterford after a year of not writing, and then managed to receive an Arts Council grant which gave me both the financial and emotional boost needed to finish the collection. Once it was finished, getting an agent happened very quickly, and getting a publication offer also somehow happened very quickly, too. I am so grateful for both of those things—everything up to that point seemed to take me forever, so it was a relief that they went smoothly!
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Something that I did find surprising, in the most pleasant way possible, is the way in which the publishing industry does care about more than commercial viability.
When I began telling people I was writing a collection and didn’t have interest in writing a novel at that time, I felt I was often being told that it was unlikely to lead to publication. Stories were a good starting point, a cute beginning, not to be taken too seriously. If I did want to be taken seriously, it was essential to have a real book like a novel to back the collection up. Moreover, collections don’t sell—if someone would even take enough pity on short stories to consider buying them, you had better be working on a novel for the future to pay them back for the kind generosity that they have bequeathed upon you.
As someone who loves the short story form, finding it sharp, moving, shocking, elusive, intense and unpredictable in ways that I personally don’t always find novels, the tone of this advice didn’t spark joy.
It also is advice that doesn’t seem accurate. Throughout the process, I have felt very supported by my agent, my editors, and publishing teams, and never once felt like the form I cared so much about was an obstacle. Story collections don’t sell millions of copies, but that’s true of many different genres. Publishing as an industry does also seem to be aware of this—we aren’t all going to be Sarah. J. Mass, and they do seem to both understand and be OK with that! Conversations I have had with my teams have been about my writing, my work, and how to get that writing to the kinds of people who would like to read it, which seems exactly the way conversations about art should be.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Something which shouldn’t be surprising, but that I found and (continue to find) surprising, is the way in the passage of time allows you to write things you previously couldn’t. A part of this is obvious—you practice more at something, you get better. If you write more, edit more, read more, your craft improves. This is common sense.
What I don’t think I understood when I set out writing these stories is how much my own brain would change. How my understanding of myself, other people, my body, my world, would develop, deepen and become more complex. There are things I was able to speak to toward the end of writing the collection that I did not know or understand when I began writing it. Knowing these things allows you to go deeper and further with what you are making.
When I first wrote “Pineapple,” a story about a woman and her strained relationship, I thought I was writing about sex, passivity, and bodies as a kind of playful experiment. When I was redrafting the final version, I had come to realize I was writing about intimacy. Between these two time periods, I met someone who made me reconsider what it means to know someone. To sit with the magnitude of someone else’s whole personhood, to try to know the fullness of them, to attempt to be known by them. If I hadn’t met that person, the story would be shallower, because my understanding of this was shallower when I first wrote it. I suspect these kinds of things aren’t surprising for a lot of people, and might be common sense for most, but I’m slow on the uptake. I assume and hope I will continue to be surprised by common sense lessons like this for many years to come.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope through these stories readers will allow themselves to sit with discomfort. When I was writing this collection, I often stopped mid-draft and felt like I should delete what I had written, as I had said something too ugly or too pathetic or too shameful. I wanted to write things that were beautiful and good and would make people think I was lovely and strong. When I tried to write in that way, I quickly become bored and annoyed. Writing is a way to communicate; to write something uncomfortable and ugly but true was more important than saying something beautiful but artificial and inaccurate. To feel discomfort or pain is already difficult—I think the least we can do for ourselves is to acknowledge the things that we find shameful or painful, to give voice to them and sit with them, and to look them in the eye.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Focus on the work. At the end of my masters, I started listening to podcasts about publishing, agents, marketability, unique selling points. I went insane and did not do any work while listening to these. Publishers figure out marketing, promotion, sales. You’re a writer. Do the writing.
If you’re not doing the writing, read.
