COVER STORY
gave her a confidence and a platform on which she could grow and develop. “I met Ger, and I met Tom Creed, who were some of the people who formed my early career, and who allowed me to see that this wasn’t just something you did in the evenings after work,” explains Stefanie. “You could have a career in the arts. I went in thinking that the only way I could have a career was to be a drama teacher, and I came out as an artist who had an understanding and a sort of a vindication of their efforts. I am well-equipped to argue a point, I have a lexicon and a language around this industry, and to anyone who’s going to roll their eyes at me because I say that I’m an artist, I can show them my degree.” From UCC, she went on to graduate from Dublin’s Gaiety School of Acting and then began writing and acting in her own work. Her critically acclaimed one-woman show, Solpadeine Is My Boyfriend, was a hit at the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2012 and went on to tour internationally. It was after the success of this show that she was approached to write for television, eventually leading to two seasons of the RTE/BBC 3/Netflix smash hit Can’t Cope,
• Former UCC student and successful writer, Stefanie Preisser, takes her job seriously, pictured in the Amelian Theatre in St Mary’s Secondary School, Mallow (Photography: Clare Keogh)
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Won’t Cope. Yet, despite her successes, her feet remain firmly planted in the reality of such objectively momentous achievements. It’s perhaps very telling of her personality that, despite all she’s achieved in the last three years, she still shows no signs of slowing down. Last year, along with writing season two of Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope, she published her first book, Why Can’t Everything Just Stay the Same? Her follow-up, No. It’s A Full Sentence, is due out early next year. She’s also currently developing two TV pilots in the US, and a third in the UK. If her career seems bereft of any of the usual clichéd trappings of a struggling artist, it’s because she approaches her trade with the pragmatism of a government agent in a Kafka novel. “I get up early in the morning and I write, in the quiet, before anyone can interrupt me. For my last book, my publisher said I had to give them 70,000 words in the first draft, so I divvied it up: 2,000 words a day, five days a week, for seven weeks, is 70,000 words. And that’s what I did. I just got up and wrote 2,000 words – that’s not difficult. So I did that five days a week for seven weeks, and then I had the book, and then I sent it in,” she confesses. She is, however, quick to dismiss any fetishisation of hard work. “People think that they’re objectively better people because they get up at four o’clock in the morning, and I think that’s bullshit. Because I think that if you’re not looking after yourself, and you’re driving yourself into the ground, there’s nothing more unattractive than that. I get eight hours’ sleep; I happen to go to bed very early because I’m pretty anti-social, I don’t really like the evenings, and I love the morning time.” Her dedication to her craft might seem intense – bordering on obsessive, even – but for Stefanie, writing is her job; and the effort she puts into each word is warranted if, at the end of the day, somebody is going to facilitate her art by buying her book. “Like, it’s hard work to read a book. It’s actually a big-time commitment – you’re taking a lot of time out of your own life. And if someone’s going to give me their time to read my book, I should be showing up and giving my time to write it.”