An Interview with Frank Mcguinness (Interview‪)‬

I'd like to start with Donegal, where you were born and reared. It's a border county in two senses: it's part in a way of the North of Ireland but it's also part of the South. And in a way it's a place all on its own. I wanted to ask you about coming from there and your emergence as a writer. As you say, it's a place of contradiction, a place of ambiguities. It's an isolated place, as well. I think all of those factors contributed to making me into a writer. I am a man who doesn't really know where he stands a lot of the time. These various plays are an attempt to decipher the location of where my head's at. I never found a sense of place an easy thing to grasp and I certainly never found it an easy thing to celebrate. I'm not at ease anywhere. But I have no doubt where I absolutely belong and where I come from, and that is Donegal. And I've no doubt where I will go to, and that is Donegal. It has continued to have a very powerful hold on my imagination and it will always be so, I'm certain of that. I find that there's no escaping it, but then I don't think there's any desire to escape from it. That said, I don't think I could live in it, certainly not at this stage in my life.