Ladies Who Launch

L to R: Henri, Andy, Paula

This time last year the three of us were sweating our second drafts for our MFA in UCD; now we're looking forward to a season of launches: 

April 2nd marks the launch of Henrietta McKervey's debut, What Becomes of Us (Hachette Ireland). Later this month, she'll be mingling with the glamouratti at the Hennessy Awards.

October 1st sees Andrea Carter's new Donegal- based crime series kicking off with Death at Whitewater Church (Constable & Robinson).

Along the way there will be launches for the new John Murray imprint, JM Originals, and for my own debut, Generation, details tba.

And I'll be getting my kit off for Gorse No. 3, which looks gorgeous, as you can see, and which you can pre-order here. 

Mid-term Artist's Dates

Who here knows what artist's dates are? Go on, raise your hands, all you children of the nineties. For the rest of you, these were part of a programme designed to kick start your artistic side, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. I didn't do it myself; I was busy with other programmes from other books: how to type (Typing with Mavis, of course), how to write (Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer), how to swim...

(making me possibly the only person on the planet who learned to swim out of a book). But, taking advantage of  my job - I worked in the Upstart Crow Coffee Shop/Book Shop in Long Beach, California - I did leaf through The Artist's Way in idle moments, and took from what I fancied from it.

I fancied artist's dates. I still do.

Experience has taught me that the kids' mid-term means that I will get no work done. It is pointless to even try. When the Arts Council decides to endow me with plenty, I'll book camps or pay a minder, but until then I've decided to 'accept the things I cannot change'. No work will get done next week, but there's nothing stopping us going on artist's dates (they're supposed to be solo expeditions, but oh well...). Ideas so far:

• the Ór (Gold) exhibition at the National Museum
• the mine in Castlecomer 
• the Little Museum of Dublin
• the Japanese Gardens 

Any suggestions? 

Olwen Fouéré's RIVERRUN

I didn't get much sleep the night before, so I had extra coffee to compensate, but this meant I spent the day zipping through tasks, then crashing, and I wasn't sure what state I'd be in for Riverrun, Olwen Fouéré's adaptation of Finnegan's Wake, no less, and for which I'd bought tickets months before. I only knew that that Fintan O'Toole had said of it that we 'do not comprehend but we do apprehend'.

What to say about it? Every ounce of Fouéré, body and soul, went into that hour. Fading in and out of focus, in and out of comprehension, catching batt on tarf for the Battle of Clontarf in a tide of sound and motion, for example, but having not a clue what was afoot more often. It seeped in somehow - apprehended more than comprehended? - and in the end it was if it was all a dream, my own, not Fouéré's or Joyces. Crossing the East Link Bridge this morning I looked at the river beneath with a new appreciation.

Brief Thoughts on The Passion According to G.H.

Clarice Lispector

I finished The Passion According to GH. It's a strange, mesmerising meditation on life, love, language... actually, I'm not going to even try. It's like nothing I've ever read before. Or, if it is, it leans more towards yoga philosophy, maybe crossed with Julia Kristeva, than any novel I can think of. Like taking mind-altering drugs, there's a shift, or an opening, on reading, after which there's no going back - nothing is the same again.

Nobody Wants To Hear About Your Dreams

So why do so many of us put them in our books? Mea as culpea as anyone, though I do try and limit them to one per book. But no one can stop us blogging about them. . .

I dreamt about a cartoon-like caterpillar, shades of Alice in Wonderland, or Gary from Sponge Bob, only this one was encased in a translucent cube about a centimetre high. And it was a serious dream: the creature in the cube - or maybe the cube was part of the creature - needed to escape, and somehow I was responsible.

Don't go yet - there is a point to this post.

I've started reading Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., in which 'a well-to-do Rio sculptress enters the room of her maid, which is as clear and white as in an insane asylum...There she sees a cockroach...'  - though I haven't got there yet; in the opening pages we are strictly in G.H's consciousness, and she is 'searching... searching... trying to understand', as is the reader.

Then - no segue - there's my new must-watch TV programme, Nature's Weirdest Events, in which we were treated last night to images of midge larvae - would you look at his little face.

My subconscious mind appears to have combined the maid's bedroom, and the midge, and made - to sleeping me - a quite gripping story. There's the unique character we care about (we do!), there's danger, and rising tension (literally; my cube critter was on an escalator and it was about to reach the top, the bit where you get sucked into the machinery...).

And that's my point. Stories are created by the coming together of disparate ideas, conscious and subconscious. It's just a matter of catching them in the act.

GENERATION to be published by John Murray

Good news!

My debut novel, GENERATION, will be released in July 2015 by John Murray Publishers as one of the launch titles for its new list, John Murray Originals (they published Darwin's Origin of the Species. Originals - geddit!). Here's The Bookseller. And here's a bit from Bookbrunch:

GENERATION (world rights from Ger Nichol at the Book Bureau) is a first novel by Paula McGrath, whose writing has appeared in Mslexia and elsewhere, and who recently completed an MFA at University College, Dublin. Richards said: "Generation is a short novel that contains a huge amount. It takes place over three continents and three generations, and shows how the repercussions of decisions taken by parents play out in the lives of their children. Like Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart, it is told from a revolving perspective, as one character picks up the thread from another. It is ambitious and gripping; formally inventive but always approachable." 

There's a cover design competition too, so if you're that way inclined, or know someone who is, take a look here.

I've been hugely enjoying the editing process with Mark Richards, my editor, and I am very excited about his plans for the book. And of course all thanks for placing it in such a good home go to the indomitable Ger Nichol of The Book Bureau.

The Anti-Room at the Dublin Book Festival

I'm slow off the mark writing about it, but the Dublin Book Festival outdid itself this year. Smock Alley was decked out to the nines, and with the lovely Peabody pop-up coffee shop and the handily placed beanbags, not to mention gallons of wine, the punter's every need was catered for. Not least was the line up of panels and launches, which made it very hard to decide what to go to and what to have to ruefully miss.

One I wasn't able to pass on was the Anti-room panel, headed up by Sinéad Gleeson and Anna Carey, with Léan Cullinan, Mary Costello, and Anna McPartlin. Of the three, I have only read Mary Costello's work (and loved it, as do many others, as evinced in her Bord Gais Book Award), but I was eager to hear about the issues surrounding women's writing in 2014. 

In the mid-nineties, I wrote a master's thesis on Edna O'Brien. I'll spare you details (mostly because I can't find the thesis), but the thrust was that reviewers were more interested in her eyes and hair and porcelain skin than in her books. A few weeks ago, I was disconcerted to read this Irish Examiner description of Mary Costello: 'Author of quite brilliant collection of short stories published two years ago, in her late 40s, Mary is attractive with her long blond hair, and luminescent eyes, but there’s a separateness about her...'. So it was no surprise that the discussion was depressingly familiar. Women might be the biggest book buyers, and read books written by both sexes, but men prefer to read men; reviewers tend to be men; these men prefer to review the books of other men; journals publish more men; etcetera. Same old, same old.

These gorgeous bookmarks are available from badaude.typepad.com; proceeds will go towards sustaining the #ReadWomen campaign beyond 2014. 

But the picture is not completely bleak. We should take heart from the very fact of this panel's existence in the Dublin Book Festival, and from the size of the crowd who attended the event. The panelists spoke about how inspired campaigns like #ReadWomen affect women writers, and how they feel about women-only prizes, such as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (no need for them, in an ideal world, but in the meantime...).

At another event the same morning in the National Gallery, it was small comfort to hear about the shiny, pink cover, featuring a 'Kylie Minogue lookalike' dancing around her Hoover, that was presented to Roddy Doyle for his grimly themed Paula Spencer. Fortunately for him, he was in a position to decline.