One Image: One Hundred Voices

'One Image: One Hundred Voices 2013 is a global community literature project whose vision has been to bring together a cross section of voices from around the world based on one image.' The challenge was to respond to the image above in 100-250 words. There are non-fiction, fiction, and poetry pieces up on the site, with an intriguing world map showing the locations of the contributors. I'm delighted to fly the flag for the whole of north-western Europe with my offering, You Weren't Here. 

Red Boats

Clontarf viewed from Bull Island Boat House Dec 2013

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a great read, but as close as I'll come to actually running. I settle for a walk, most days along the Bull Wall, sometimes on Dollymount Strand. Once I've got those thousand words down I head out, and tease out the words that seemed to make so much sense in the uncritical first draft flow. I remember that it was morning at the start of a scene, but evening by the time she's finished her tea, or that there's already a character called Deano, so Danno has to go. 

Mostly though, I just walk. The variety in weather and wildlife is extraordinary. I snapped the shot above because it looked Mediterranean a couple of days ago; yesterday was wild and grey; today's just grey. Most days I see a rat or two, brown and fat, scurrying about, minding their own business. I'm training my peripheral vision to pretend they're little birds, then scurry on myself, wondering why two-legged feathery creatures are so much more acceptable than, well, rodents. [Note the absence of cuddly rat image here...]

The other day, I saw a goldfinch.  I heard it first, a glorious bright trilling sound which you can hear here. Apparently they're common, but I hadn't seen one before. Naturally it inspired me to put Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch on my Christmas Reads list. Hopefully I'll write about it here in due course. 

When I've had my dose of negative ions, or whatever it's called, I'm usually energised enough to face into that review that's waiting to be written, or those exercises waiting to be marked.

Ok. Look away now if you're squeamish. Deep fear-facing breath and... insert rat image. Actually, he's not so bad, is he? Maybe cute rat pics are the new cat pics?

Resurrected Beginnings

These innocuous scraps represent one of my 'early' periods. It's a poem, published in Icarus, a very long time ago (with one of Eavan Boland's on the reverse!). I rediscovered it while sorting through the last of the packing boxes from our 2010 move, but already lost in piles of folders for many years before that. Also rediscovered was a folder full of notes from a course I took in the Irish Writers' Centre with Eilis Ni Dhuibhne a mere eleven years ago. There were even a couple of decent stories in there which I had forgotten writing.

Two false starts, more than a decade between them. With the first, I wanted to be a poet, and my influences were (alarmingly) Charles Bukowski, and the Beats. It was never going to end well. With the second, I had a six month old and a three year old, which explains the amnesia which surrounds the entire course; at that critical, neophyte stage of becoming a writer, I was a tad distracted. [...though I did write my first bad novel at this stage, about a distracted mother of two young children.]

As someone who is never going to grace the pages of 30 Under 30, or 40 under 40, or, let's face it, if these editors don't bite soon... Well, let's not go there... I have come to realise that becoming a writer is a lot to do with being at the right stage of life and having the right conditions, and when these two don't come along, and unless you're a single, trust-fund kid, they won't, it's about having the chutzpah and the tenacity to ignore both and just go for it. And more importantly, to keep going for it. If I'd kept going all those years ago just think, I could be right in the middle of my mid-career novelist crisis by now.

Autumn at UCD

Autumn leaves at UCD. The mild weather led to more sugar being produced, hence the fab leaf colour, apparently!

The semester's teaching ended this week. [As a p/t MFA student, teaching was my only commitment, apart from writing, writing, writing, of course.]We looked for ways to trigger creative responses, and at elements of the craft such as creating characters, writing openings, using the senses, and writing dialogue. We read stories from Gish Jen, Kevin Barry, Alice Munro, Lydia Davis, Deborah Levy, James Joyce and Donal Ryan, and tried to figure out how and why these stories worked, and which attributes we could steal and apply to our own stories. Later, we read stories from the students themselves and even had a go at workshopping, which was both fun and productive. I look forward to receiving the portfolios in due course.

Follow This Blog

Hi Blog Followers,
Thanks for reading my offerings thus far. I've had some problems with people trying to follow - apparently google friends connect has been gone for some time - and I hope I've remedied this. Would you be so kind as to go to the site and click on the small 'Follow this blog' bloglovin button. Much obliged!

Necessary Reading at Necessary Fiction

 A teacher once told me that we all want/need our offspring to be brighter, faster, and better looking than we are ourselves. It hadn't occurred to me to want any of these - I was content to make it to sleeping-through-the-night and staying healthy. But in an evolutionary light, he is, of course, right. 

In the same way, I believe it is important for writers to continuously stimulate and challenge ourselves as readers. Because we all want to get better, don't we; we want the next book to be better than the last. Stagnation does no good for the writer or her readers, or the literature project in general.

Necessary Fiction is a webjournal which, along with one story each Wednesday, research and translation notes, and a writer in residence, publishes book reviews. At NF, they're 'interested in reviewing fiction from independent publishers, with a moderate emphasis on short story collections, novellas and translations.' I'm lucky enough to occasionally contribute to the latter, and one of the perks is receiving the kind of wonderful stuff I might not be able to pick up in my local bookshops. Bess, a chapbook by Daphne Gottlieb, was one such read, and my review is up today.


But the best bit is the five other reviews - commissioned by review editor Michelle Bailat Jones, a woman who knows where to get the good stuff - among which I'm likely to find my next outside-the-mainstream read. 

After that, nothing remains but to BE one of those reviewed books (or at the very least, a Wednesday story...)

Suddenly A Knock On The Door

When reading a collection of short stories I tend to put the book down when each story ends. This is to give me time to reflect on it, but also, like drawings on an Etch-A-Sketch, to clear away one story before preparing to imagine another. In complete contradiction to this habit, I picked this up yesterday and haven't put it down since. It's a breath of fresh air. The stories are quirky, funny, and incredibly original. It's not that they don't merit reflection — they do — but it's the kind of collection that, without being a linked collection, is more than the sum of its parts. I suspect its impact will continue long after I finish reading — the best litmus test (especially if I ever happen to visit Tel Aviv again, where most (all?) of the stories are set, and which, if Keret's stories are in any way representative, is a truly strange and wonderful place).