Lost Between : Writings on Displacement an anthology

Lost Between was launched in the IWC recently to a full house. It is a beautiful collection of stories and poetry written by a group of Irish and Italian writers. I was a part of the first group of writers that went to Italy back in 2012. It was a fantastic experience. Some of the group recently had their stories translated into Italian. The second group of Irish writers headed over last year to successfully continue the project bringing it to a whole new level with Lost Between published by New Island. The introduction is written by Catherine Dunne and Federica Sgaggio who spear headed the project. As New Island writes "The individual works stand proudly by themselves to leave a lasting impression, and when read together they emerge to form a diverse, soulful and evocative collection that will charm and inspire."
You can listen to Catherine Dunne talk about the project recently on Arena.

Buy it here.

Maynooth University Summer Writing Institute

I took part in the inaugural Maynooth University Summer Writing Institute last year and it was a fantastic experience. If you teach creative writing it's well worth applying for. I really found the experience incredibly beneficial, I got a lot from it and subsequently the class that I teach did too! There was an array of teaching styles and approaches and it was very inclusive. Places are limited so get applying!

National University of Ireland, Maynooth Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland  The Writing Centre Centre for Teaching and Learning Múinteoireachta agus Foghlama

Maynooth University Summer Writing Institute

In July 2015 Maynooth University will host its second week-long writing institute on campus.  The institute was originally designed in consultation with a range of teaching and learning networks, including Maynooth University Early Childhood, the Further Education Support Service, the Reading Association of Ireland and the Irish Network for the Enhancement of Writing.  The institute draws from the US National Writing Project model and is designed to provide an opportunity for teachers, from all education levels, to meet, share good practice, and learn more about writing and the teaching of writing.

 At the institute you will look closely at your own writing and student writing, explore issues and ideas in the teaching of writing, work toward becoming teacher leaders and share classroom practices or activities. 

The institute will take place daily from 10.00 a.m. to 3.30 p.m. from Monday 20^th July until Friday 24^th July inclusive. 
The institute will be free to all participants but places will be strictly limited and allocated across the education levels.
If you are interested in attending this event please contact us for an application form.  The completed form should be submitted to us before Wednesday 20^th May 2015.  All applications must be made by email to writingcentre@nuim.ie. All shortlisted applicants will be contacted by Wednesday 27^th May 2015. 
All queries about the project should be directed to the writingcentre@nuim.ie

 

 

 

 

 

                                               

Rainbow Journeys Launch on Irish TV

Dublin Matters 23 | Irish TV

Rainbow Journeys

 

Delighted to launch Rainbow Journeys at Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Social Inclusion Week at 11am Friday 17th of October in the Concourse of Dun Laoghaire town hall.

Rainbow Journeys, is about getting an opportunity to hear unheard voices. It began life in May 2014 when a group of eager and intrepid writers came together in the NCBI office in Dun Laoghaire. The goals were – to write about our lives, the paths taken, the revelations, the lessons learned and bring to light the everyday wonder of our lives. There were thirteen brave service users in all. Unfortunately one of our team passed away during our journey, Anne Barnes, and we proudly dedicate the CD to her.

 

Produced and Edited by Niamh MacAlister,

Co-ordinated by Aleksandra Okupinska,

Sound Engineer: Alan White,

Photographer: Anna Nowakowska



Writing and Walking

Taken from the New Yorker

 

Why Walking Helps us Think by Ferris Jabr

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”

Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources than man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.

Siri Hustvedt

I recently saw Siri Hustvedt in Smock Alley Theatre during Dublin Writers Festival. I am in awe of the woman. Intellect seeps out of her pores. What amazes me is how lightly she carries it. Her breadth of knowledge doesn't weigh her down with pretentiousness. She spoke of the complex theories and ideas wrapped up in her new book "The Blazing World". Her eloquence is an inspiration.  I've started the beautifully written book but already I've had to stop to research books and artists she's referenced. I managed to track down "On the problem of empathy" by Edith Stein (another amazing woman, a Jewish philosopher who changed to Catholicism and later died in Auschwitz, Phenomenology was her modus operandi.). Although I'll be saving it for another day. I love how this isn't just a book to be consumed but that it gets me reaching out into a spiders web of another book, after another book, after another. I can't recommend it highly enough and I'm not even half way into it.

Here she is being fabulous in a recent short interview from The Guardian.

Siri Hustvedt is the internationally bestselling author of What I Loved, The Summer Without Men and The Enchantment of Lily Dahl. Her latest novel, The Blazing World, is a brilliant, provocative novel about Harriet Burden, an artist who, after years of being ignored, conducts an experiment: she conceals her identity behind three male fronts in three solo exhibitions.

What's the message here? Does the world hate women? Or do women need to try harder?
I really do not want to use the word "message". This is a much more complex story. Harry – the artist Harriet Burden – is right that there is a "masculine enhancement effect". The arts are often thought of as "sort of feminine" and science as masculine. These divisions are underlying our perceptions. There are a number of other positions and perspectives that are meant to complicate the reader's understanding of this story. There is no message. There is nothing simple about this. The act of reading the book mirrors the content of the book. It is meant to be a game and a puzzle. You can't think of Harry's story as simply a feminist parable. Even though had she been a man her work would have got more recognition.

Where did the idea for Harriet come from? Could it happen in real life?
There have been art hoaxes and they're mentioned in the book. I suppose it could happen. But the kernel of the idea was a woman hiding behind male masks as an experiment. I wanted a book that felt refracted. So you have this intimate, bold voice from the notebooks [Harry's diaries] but all these people commenting on the same story. Which, of course, changes the story.

What made you choose the polyphonic structure?
I knew it was going to be many voices. Part of it came out of a desire that I always want to do something I haven't done before. I began to think of this as my "multiple personality disorder book" because I had to have all these different voices and inhabit them. There is a lot of unconsciousness involved in summoning those voices and sometimes they surprise you. It's not a situation of absolute control.

The art world was the backdrop for What I Loved. Why return to it?
I continue to write essays about art. The visual is always part of my work and it gives me immense pleasure to make up the words of art and create them verbally rather than build them.

Do you consider that your own work is ever judged a certain way because you are a woman? (A German reviewer once said that he "knew" her first novel, The Blindfold, was written by Hustvedt's husband, novelist Paul Auster.)
This is extremely difficult to answer. This is why sexism can become so riddled. Many writers will tell you they think women writers are treated differently. I get asked: "What advice do you have for young women writers?" I answer: "Would you ever ask a male writer, 'What advice do you have for young male writers?'" Women are in an unequal position and so giving that advice makes sense. But really these are unconscious forms of sexism.

When did you first know you were a writer?
The fantasy arrived when I was 13. I was in Reykjavik for a summer and it never got dark. There was a whole library of English books and I was a great reader. I suddenly had access to books that were too hard for me before. Lots of Dickens. Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights. Jane Austen. I couldn't stop. I read the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I read some Mark Twain. While reading David Copperfield in the middle of the night – probably because of the light I had insomnia for the first time – I looked out of the window and thought, "If this is what books can do, this is what I want to do." I published my first poem in The Paris Review in 1980.

What's your favourite waste of time?
If I have open time and I'm in Manhattan, I'll just walk to wherever I'm going, even if I could get there faster on the subway. I just love walking the streets of New York.

Writing for the Ear

I've spent the last four Fridays teaching a creative writing class called "Writing for the Ear" to NCBI service users in Dublin. The aim of the course was that each person write a short piece about an event in their life.  Something from their childhood, something that's happening now, something that affected them or their perceptions and how it changed them. Designed to suit all levels of writing; from the experienced to the novice. I covered how to get started, engaged listening and reading, the narrative arc, language use, editing, critique and constructive criticism.
Listening to other people's stories on StoryCorps and Sunday Miscellany gave us lots of inspiration

I had the most amazing time. It was such a privilege to be able to help each participant write their story and listen to the finished pieces. It was especially great to hear, not only the stories of people who had never written before but, how much they enjoyed doing it!

I'll act as producer as each participant records their story in the NCBI studios. Once the finishing touches are applied we will have a CD book which we hope to launch at the Dun Laoghaire Social Inclusion Week in October, 2014. So keep an eye out on my blog for updates.
In the long term I hope to oversee an archive of stories from unheard voices. Stories that you would never have heard otherwise. Personal experiences and stories that will enrich your own life once you've heard them. I know that sentence sounds grandiloquent, but believe me once you've heard the stories you'll agree.

If you have any enquires about this project please feel free to contact me!


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Letters

 

Even though I've never received a love letter, I love letters and all things epistolary. I like sending a card for a birthday or a thank you. There's something ceremonial about it. Choosing something beautiful, a pause to think about what to write before committing it to paper, sticking on the stamp, sliding it into the green mouth of the post box. The sense of appreciation at the other end as the hand written card is picked out of the nestle of bills, take away menus. It usually contains something nice, something uplifting, a connection with a loved one. It brings good to a bad day.

I refuse to believe in the death of the letter. Put quite simply: I don't know anyone that doesn't enjoy receiving one! For me there has never been a more perfect moment to have letters in our lives.

I was delighted to be a part of the recent Love Letters Exhibition in the Centre for Creative Practices. It was a fantastic showcase of letters discovered in a biscuit tin, love letters, love poems, family letters. An all out homage to the greatness of the letter.

So go on write it, you won't regret it. You never know, you might even get one in return.

 

This article was originally published on vogue.com

 

In This Digital Age, Where Have All the Love Letters Gone?

by Jami Attenberg 

 

I want to talk about the death of love letters for a moment. Let’s trace my personal history. Notes passed in class or slipped in lockers, “S.W.A.K.” Dispatches from a foreign boyfriend I’d left behind after a year abroad: pre-stamped aérogrammes, blue envelopes, handwriting tiny enough to fit within the prescribed space. (I briefly was engaged to this man, or as engaged as one can be when one is 20 and a pothead and a creative writing major.) There was a broke, computer-less boyfriend in the Midwest who couldn’t clean the litter box or graduate from college, but could get it together enough to write me long letters. And, of course, postcards from favorite girlfriends, a different kind of romance: Wish you were here, my favorite, beautiful pet.

Sadly, e-mail has triggered the decline of the handwritten note; I have seen its near-disappearance in my lifetime. I do not mourn the death of the printed letter in a snobby, East Coast, patrician way—“Where have our manners gone?”—but because I love objects, I love paper, and I love something that I can hold to my chest for a moment. Still, I bear no grudge against the e-mail form itself. There is room within it for full sentences and complete thoughts. The breaks between paragraphs offer white space—a moment of clarity, a pause to breathe. Tell me how you feel and I’ll listen. One might even put a “Dear” at the beginning and a “Love” at the end.

Lately I’ve watched e-mails be replaced by texts, which can be cold and insensitive, or at least confusing. Last summer I dated a man who started out strong, e-mailing me lovely, long notes. We were getting to know each other; he had compliments to give. But then we started texting as a matter of convenience, and soon enough, he never e-mailed me again. Why e-mail a full emotional statement when, instead, you can text a totally insignificant and ambiguous half-considered phrase? He was a bit of a sociopath anyway, as newly single men in their forties can sometimes be. But still, What did he mean by that? I wondered again and again, scrolling through a hurried message. There are only so many things you can blame on autocorrect.

Recently a friend from San Francisco messaged me in a panic. She was texting with a man she had been seeing. They were trying to plan their next date while he was at brunch. She said something sweet; specifically, that it didn’t matter what they did, she just wanted to see him. He replied that his food had arrived and gave her a “Hmmm” and a smiley face. She was devastated. What did the smiley face mean? What did the “Hmmm” mean? What did the smiley face and the “Hmmm” mean together? There was an ellipsis, too. An ellipsis is a giant ocean of possibilities.

This exchange never would have happened over e-mail, let alone in a letter. Had they been e-mailing, he would have just eaten his food and waited to reply. Then again, maybe she should have let him eat his brunch. Then again, maybe he shouldn’t have been texting during brunch. How would he have responded if, instead, she picked up the phone and called him? If he had to deal with truth and sincerity and real emotion?

I would love a phone call from a man. I would love to hear the sound of his voice. I used to be scared of phone calls because you can’t see the other person’s expression. I wanted to know if they were smiling or not. Now I long for tone. Tone would be so sexy. I long to know if I’ve charmed a man, if I’ve made him laugh. LOL, you seem insincere to me sometimes. Real-life laughter would please me, would flatter me.

Texting also makes it easier to be a little naughty—perhaps too easy. Time flies when you’re exchanging emoticons. You type faster than you think. Suddenly you’ve not only agreed to the most deviant of behavior, but you’ve also suggested acts you’ve never articulated before and perhaps have only heard about in a movie. (Never mind what kind of movie.) They happen fast, fast, fast, these texts. Perhaps the end of romance spells the beginning of sex. Few people say “sweetheart” when they’re sexting.

This past winter, a long one for all of us, I e-mailed with a man I once had a brief affair with. He lives in another city, halfway across the country. He liked to e-mail me from his Laundromat. I liked to picture him sitting next to the whirring machines, the balletic rotation of the whites, darks, and colors. I swear I could smell the detergent through my computer screen. We would talk about our creative projects, and he would tell me I was great and talented and beautiful. Once he told me I was “hot stuff.”

Eventually we exchanged our street addresses so that we could send each other letters, but we never did. We never made it that far. It would have meant something to the both of us that I don’t think we were ready for: the permanence of a letter.

Disclosure: A few small details have been changed for privacy.

Jami Attenberg is the author of four books of fiction, including The Middlesteins. Her next book, Saint Mazie, is forthcoming in 2015.

Per Petterson on death

Difficult to write about, as a reader I find I am usually left feeling bereft after I read about it.  Not because of the inherent fear of it but because someone else's interpretation of it is so far off the mark of my own.  Until I read this from "I Curse the River of Time" by Per Petterson. Heart-breaking.

"But when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but dying itself I could not comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone forever, and the one you were, is the one those around you remember. Then that must feel like someone's strong hands slowly tightening their grip around your neck until you can breath no more, and not at all as when a door is slowly pushed open and bright light comes streaming out from the inside and a woman or a man you have always known and always liked, maybe always loved, leans out and gently takes your hand and leads you in to a place of rest, so mild and so fine, from eternity to eternity."

Mark Cooper Pamphlet "The Inner Sea"

The multi-talented Mark Cooper has some great poems in this beautiful little pamphlet alongside Joe Franklin and Hugh Greasley. I am biased because its theme is the sea, my most favourite thing of all. Have a read of it here.

Dacia Maraini reads at the Botanic Gardens!

 

Come one, come all! It promises to be a lovely afternoon ...

 

 

Winners of the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award

Was that a week ago already?! I had a fantastic evening in the French Ambassadors Residence last Tuesday for the announcement of the winners of the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards. The sun actually shone and there was a wonderful feel of Spring in the air. The place was abuzz with glamour, cocktails and canapes.
Ruth Quinlan triumphed in the First Fiction category with her story The Healing. Love that it mentions Braille!
John O'Donnell won the category of Emerging Fiction with his short story Shelley.
Poetry and overall winner was Jessica Traynor  for her two poems Aubade and Ebay Auction.
Big congratulations to them all!
Looking to submit your own work to be in with a chance for next year? All necessary information here.

Ted Hughes Poetry Prize Winner

The genius of Paul Muldoon

Extracts taken from an interview with Paul Muldoon in the latest issue of The Moth

"Most of the things I do, including writing poetry, I would say, are sort of hobbyistic. It's not that they're not important. I mean, if you are a trainspotter or a stamp collector it's not that these things aren't important to you. There's this theory that if you're not consumed by the idea of being an artist you're probably not a very good one.  I just don't know about that. I know lots of people who are consumed by the idea of being an artist who are useless. They're really dreadful."

"I don't run around thinking about myself as a poet. It's like meeting people at dinner parties and, you know, somebody says 'Well I'm just a housewife.' You sort of think, well, really, I don't know about that ... I would never introduce myself to anybody as a poet. I'd just never do it. I mean, if someone comes up to me and says, 'Hello, I'm a poet,' I sort of think, my God, where's the door?"

The Next Big Thing ... (blog tagging thingy)

How the Next Big Thing blog hop works
An author answers ten questions and then tags authors to do the same thing the following week on the same day, which in this case is a Thursday.

The force of nature June Caldwell tagged me in her post and so here is my attempt ...

1) What is the working title of your next book?
"A Body Apart" is the title of the book I'm not yet finished. So technically speaking it is my 'next' book. If I knew the title, let alone the content, of my actual next book I'd be laughing. Anyway back to the book. A journey, in the mythic sense, of a girl/woman/lady (this is no time to be politically correct) as she attempts to discard the skin of her current life to make way for something that does not yet have a shape, and how scary that is.

2) Where did the idea come from for the book?
How easy it is for a life to close in around you when your mind and your body are at odds. How easy it is for a person to disappear into the chasm that that conflict creates in a life.
I also went on one of those terribly cliched around the world trips. And it was fantastic in every way.  The journey itself wasn't so much the influence as the cahones it took to leave what I had to leave and head off by myself to do it.

3) What genre does your book fall under?
Whats that now?

4) What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
Am currently fostering a girl crush on Emily Blunt so I'm sure she'd be delighted to do it.

5) What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Fear is the maker of us all.

6) Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
I can only hope that one day my work and I might have the opportunity to be represented by an agency.

7) How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
Two years.

8) What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
I know what I want to say but I don't think I can bring myself to say it out loud.

9) Who or what inspired you to write this book?
Everybody writes from a place of their own experience. How else could you do it?

10) What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?
There is a very awkward and ungainly sex scene about three quarters in.


Phew .....
I here by tag my fellow St. Andrews Alumni. Kristin Livingston and Mark Cooper.
Kristin writes Young Adult fiction and puts me to shame by having already written loads more books that I will ever write in my lifetime.
Multi-talented Mark is in the bands Distant Signal and Uffmoor Woods Music Club. He is also a fine poet, short listed for, too many to count competitions, including the very prestigious Eric Gregory and Bridport.

The Art of Letter Writing

the project http://www.moreloveletters.com/

Irish Book Awards 2012

Voting closes at midnight this Sunday (18th) so be sure to stick your oar in where it counts.
Vote here.  Five lucky voters will also be in with a chance to win some book tokens.
Support great Irish writers!


Heres the short lists:

Argosy Nonfiction Book of the Year

• The Good Room by David McWilliams
• A Kick Against The Pricks: The Autobiography by David Norris
• Country Girl by Edna O'Brien
• Everybody Matters by Mary Robinson
• Just Mary by Mary O'Rourke
• Atlas of The Great Irish Famine by Crowley, Smyth,Murphy

Eason Novel of the Year

• Astray by Emma Donoghue
• Dark Lies The Island by Kevin Barry
• Ancient Light by John Banville
• The Light of Amsterdam by David Park
• Where Have You Been? by Joseph O'Connor
• Hawthorn & Child by Keith Ridgway

Eason Popular Fiction Book of the Year

• A Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy
• This Child of Mine by Sinéad Moriarty
• The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes
• The House on Willow Street by Cathy Kelly
• One Hundred Names by Cecelia Ahern
• This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon
• Better Together by Sheila O'Flanagan
• The Charm Bracelet by Melissa Hill

International Education Services Best Irish-published Book of the Year

• At War with the Empire by Gerry Hunt
• And Time Stood Still by Alice Taylor
• Triggs by Paul Howard
• Tyringham Park by Rosemary McLoughlin
• Atlas of the Great Irish Famine by Crowley, Smith, Murphy
• Isn't It Well For Ye? The Book of Irish Mammies by Colm O'Regan

Ireland AM Crime Fiction Award

• Vengeance by Benjamin Black
• The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O'Bryan
• Too Close For Comfort by Niamh O'Connor
• Red Ribbons by Louise Phillips
• Broken Harbour by Tana French
• Slaughter's Hound by Declan Burke

Lifestyle Sports Sports Book of the Year

• My Olympic Dream by Katie Taylor
• My Journey by Jim Stynes
• Cliffs Of Insanity: A Winter On Ireland’s Big Waves by Keith Duggan
• The Bull by John Hayes
• Memory Man by Jimmy Magee
• The Great and the Good by John Giles

Specsavers Childrens Book of the Year, Junior

• Guess How Much I Love You: Here, There and Everywhere by Sam McBratney (illustrated by Anita Jeram)
• Oh no, George! by Chris Haughton
• Adam's Greatest Inventions by Benji Bennett
• This Moose Belongs to Me by Oliver Jeffers

Specsavers Childrens Book of the Year, Senior

• Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian by Eoin Colfer
• The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket by John Boyne
• Zom-B by Darren Shan
• Rebecca's Rules by Anna Carey
• Leave it to Eva by Judi Curtin
• Skulduggery Pleasant: Kingdom of the Wicked by Derek Landy

Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year

• The China Factory by Mary Costello
• The Crocodile by the Door by Selina Guinness
• The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
• Tyringham Park by Rosemary McLoughlin
• This Is How It Ends by Kathleen MacMahon
• We Have a Good Time Don't We? by Maeve Higgins

Avonmore Cookbook of the Year

• Cake by Rachel Allen
• Kitchen Hero: Great Food for Less by Donal Skehan
• The MacNean Restaurant Cookbook by Neven Maguire
• Domini at Home by Domini Kemp
• Eat Like an Italian by Catherine Fulvio
• Irish Countrywomen's Association Cookbook by Irish Countrywomen's Association

John Murray Show Listeners' Choice Award

• Just Mary by Mary O'Rourke
• Run Fat Bitch Run by Ruth Field
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• The Paris Wife by Paula McLain
• All In My Head: The Autobiography by Lar Corbett
• Broken Harbour by Tana French

Selina Guinness The Crocodile by the Door

As I made my way up the stairs of the deserted Guinness Store House I wondered what the night time view was going to be like from The Gravity Bar.

I had been invited to the launch of Selina Guinness’s debut book The Crocodile by the Door published by Penguin.

I’ll put it out there immediately I am a past pupil of Selina’s. Through out my four year degree she guided me through the mire of Irish Literature. But not only that; she was instrumental in securing Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill for our final year creative writing module, which was to set me on a path I have been walking ever since. With Selina’s gentle but persistent encouragement I later went on to do a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. Hands down one of the best years of my life.

The city lights twinkled below us as they stretched out over the city. Tibradden House, of which the Memoir is about, was well hidden in the swathes of black night as the city petered out towards the mountains.
When Harry Clifton took to the podium to introduce Selina he spoke of the mystery and majesty of the creation of a sense of place. How a place like Tibradden and a book like The Crocodile by the Door are so defining, not only for the people directly involved but also because it stretches so far beyond that and into the outer reaches and corners of a community, a city, a country.
The room stocked full of a myriad of friends and family listened to Selina’s heart felt words of thanks of which were suffused with perhaps a small lingering seed of disbelief that it had all worked out. Thankfully for us readers it did.

I am only a third into the book but am already enthralled with not only the fluidity and elegance of the prose but also the unrestrained and beautiful honesty of experience that has governed the experience and the writing. Because in life, that is all we have.

Already the book has been short listed for the “Sunday Independent New Comer of the Year Award” in the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards. Vote Here.
No doubt it is only the first of many well deserved successes for the woman, the book and the house.

"Out damned spot" ...

So my life is in boxes in three separate locations and I can't help but feel like I'm back at square one. Which of course isn't true but I have a nagging feeling that I've been coasting for the last few years. But what could I have done differently? Don't we come to things when the time is right for us to have it in our life? Or is that just a complete fabrication we tell ourselves, to placate, to smooth down the feathers. Are we not where we want to be simply because we didn't work hard enough? I know, I'm being too hard on myself.

All of the stupid question marks that start floating up, like unsettled dust, over my head, staring down at me with blitheful menace as soon as you remove 'the stuff'.  But the hugest mark of all that is up there is invisible because it is more ingrained in me than anything else I know .... what is it that I want?  .... And the awful truth that I'll probably never be able to answer that.

But at least there are the words. And a small comfort in escaping my own life for the terrible life of my character. Because hers is definitely worse and it, if only for a limited time,  makes me feel a bit better about my own.

In the midst of it all I came across this. AL Kennedy was one of the guest tutors, for the fiction side of things, on my course in St. Andrews. I never saw her or even heard her speak. But she was much revered and feared in equal measure by the short story ladies. Lara tried to persuade me one day to sneak into a talk that AL was giving but her reputation preceded her and I remained in the relative safety of my poetry workshop. 

Anyway ....

As August is in the process of disappearing behind me I find that the unsettled feeling is settling slightly. And I hope that in the kick up of the dust that it throws up something that I had forgotten about, or something I didn't even know was there, or if I'm lucky something brand, spanking, new.

"Wherever I am. Onwards."

Truth versus Fiction

Great Article from by Irish Author Keith Ridgway from the The New Yorker.


Everything Is Fiction

Posted by Keith Ridgway

I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing. I tell them at the beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.

I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

Something, obviously, is going on. I manage, every few years, to generate a book. And of course, there are things that I know. I know how to wait until the last minute before putting anything on paper. I mean the last minute before the thought leaves me forever. I know how to leave out anything that looks to me—after a while—forced, deliberate, or fake. I know that I need to put myself in the story. I don’t mean literally. I mean emotionally. I need to care about what I’m writing—whether about the characters, or about what they’re getting up to, or about the way they feel or experience their world. I know that my job is to create a perspective. And to impose it on the reader. And I know that in order to do that with any success at all I must in some mysterious way risk everything. If I don’t break my own heart in the writing of a book then I know I’ve done it wrong. I’m not entirely sure what that means. But I know what it feels like.

I do no research. Given that I’ve just written a book that revolves around two London Met police detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I made some guesses. I suppose that they must investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might be like. I’ve seen the same films and TV shows that you have. I’ve read the same sorts of cheap thrillers. And I know that everything is fiction. Absolutely everything. Research is its own slow fiction, a process of reassurance for the author. I don’t want reassurance. I like writing out of confusion, panic, a sense of everything being perilously close to collapse. So I try to embrace the fiction of all things.

And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

So I love hearing from people who have no time for fiction. Who read only biographies and popular science. I love hearing about the death of the novel. I love getting lectures about the triviality of fiction, the triviality of making things up. As if that wasn’t what all of us do, all day long, all life long. Fiction gives us everything. It gives us our memories, our understanding, our insight, our lives. We use it to invent ourselves and others. We use it to feel change and sadness and hope and love and to tell each other about ourselves. And we all, it turns out, know how to do it.