Caoimhe McKeogh

Caoimhe's PhD investigated ideas of imaginative play and playfulness in fiction, through writing a novel, Afterburn, and a critical study of playful novels.

PhD awarded 2024

Caoimhe McKeogh is of Irish and Cornish descent and lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She has been published in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand, Australia and Ireland, including Landfall, Overland, Turbine, Starling, Cordite, Meniscus and The Blue Nib. Caoimhe completed an Honors degree in English Literature at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in 2016 and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2018.

Caoimhe writes: 'The PhD program was such an incredible opportunity to read, write and learn. It gave me the time and support I needed to write a structurally ambitious novel and it made me a better, braver writer.

'The creative and critical components of my project were intertwined. I researched ‘imaginative’ or ‘make-believe’ play, which I called "paidia" (as opposed to "ludus," which is more rules-based play such as sports, chess and card games) and sought this out in contemporary fiction. I looked for books where the characters took part in paidia and where the author wrote about this playfully. I was particularly interested in the moments during paidia where the boundary between real and imagined was breached, with the game bleeding into real life or vice versa.

'I wrote about a wide range of novels but paid particular attention to Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, Sheila Kohler's Cracks, Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World, John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van and Eleanor Catton's The Rehearsal. I took a combined creative and theoretical view of these texts, looking for what they could offer me both as a reader and as a writer, how they could serve as illuminating models for my own project, and how they expanded my idea of what fiction could do.

'I found that paidia has its own specific type of playfulness, characterised by openness, exploration and exhilaration. I made paidiac choices in writing Afterburn, which included writing it in reverse chronology, using an "impossible" voice to narrate parts of the story, and having a sense of open-endedness. In Afterburn, Anya, a 30-year-old lawyer, is constantly looking backwards due to nostalgia and guilt connected to her high school years. She finds temporary reprieve, and adds excitement to her adult life, through a make-believe game with a friend. The novel travels backwards through time to Anya at high school, playing make-believe games with different friends, and finds the roots of her stuckness and guilt in an incident where play turned dark.'