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Top Tips for Novelists (1)

The most infuriating advice for would-be novelists has to be ‘Just do it’. Unfortunately, it also happens to be most practical thing you’re likely to hear.

You’d think that those of us who’ve seen several books into print already wouldn’t need to be reminded of this core principle, but we do, we do. It’s so easy to be seduced into other activities: readings, workshops, reports, a mouth cancer awareness campaign, short stories. And that’s before life kicks in, with its accusing “what about me?”, and sets about wrecking the most carefully-laid of narrative plans.

Having recently succumbed to the wiles of a short story, I’ve come to see this as a kind of infidelity. A short story can sidle up to you like an attractive stranger at a bar, murmuring secrets into your ear. Before you know where you are, you’re in the grip of an idea, swept away on currents of language, the thrill of the unfamiliar, the fresh, the other. It’s hard to find yourself washed ashore on the far side of it, certain phrases echoing in your brain and rousing you from sleep at ungodly hours, the fingers of lost paragraphs plucking at the edges of your dreams. It's hard to accept that it’s over, whatever it was. That brief, tempestuous, exhilarating thrill has burned itself out. It’s time to go back to your long-term commitment to your novel-in-progress. You slink back to the desk, contrite, promising reform. You can’t blame your novel if you find it in a sulk: resistant, stubborn. Impenetrable. Telling you to leave, go and find a whole damn library to live in, if that’s what you want.

Never apologise, never explain. But some concessions are necessary, like an overhaul of your attitude, a renewal of your commitment to the more long-term relationship, the novel-in-progress. Give it good reason to stay. Can it trust you again? Are you worth it? If you’re allowed back, there might be conditions. You have to stay in more, pay close attention to the matter in hand, be there when the bulbs blow and the fuses need re-setting, stand ready with the toolkit and the paint if things threaten to come undone. Avoid temptations to stray.

In other words, dear reader, I’m taking a bit of time off from the blog. I have a draft to finish.

But I’ll be back. After the break ....

Arts for change

At least two events this weekend demonstrated that the arts can be effective in bringing about change.

The first Dalkey Book Festival was blessed with the most glorious weather a weekend has seen in these parts for a good long while. Local businesses and local artists came together in an ambitious programme of readings, discussion, literary tours, Italia '90 nostalgia and the unique opportunity to see Ross O'Carroll Kelly let loose on a turntable. Dalkey was packed with cheerful people in brightly coloured clothes, strolling around with melting ice-creams in hand, wandering in and out of shops, pubs, the market. As word spread the crowds grew, so that in the end there was standing room only at some events, with queues forming in the street. Those who were turned away went shopping instead, bringing much needed traffic to local businesses and the Tramyard market. One woman, in a fabulous pair of green Italian shoes, told a packed upstairs room at the Country Bake (where they supplied free coffee and tasties to the audience) that she was glad she’d come to hear Brian Keenan and Martina Devlin in conversation with Kate Holmquist instead of going to Mass. She reckoned she got more spiritual value from the discussion. No one contradicted her.

I’ve been told it was handbags at dawn for people who couldn’t get in to Finnegan’s to hear Maeve Binchy on Sunday morning. Several complained bitterly to the organisers.Considering all the voluntary work that went into planning this three-day-event and seeing it through to its triumphant conclusion, it hardly seems fair to berate the organisers because the festival was a success.

Later that evening, One in Four hosted Ómós, an evening of music, readings and performance to show solidarity with people who experience sexual violence in Ireland (statistically, one in four people, hence the name of the organisation). There was an extraordinary atmosphere in St Stephen’s church (the Pepper Canister), which was packed despite the glorious evening that did its best to lure us all out to play. Inside, there was music, drama, laughter, some tears. ‘Killing the silence’, is how one person summed it up afterwards. 'A beginning,' said someone else.

Wrapping it up, Theo Dorgan (who had steered us through the night) observed that if this sort of thing continues, we just might get our own Republic back. [http://www.oneinfour.org/]

Irish Writers' Centre

The IWC held a meeting for members last night. Jack Harte talked about the progress that has been made in salvaging the Centre over the last year or so, largely due to staggering levels of committment from himself (he didn't say that, but it's true), the other board members, and all the young volunteers who keep it open from 10 am-10pm Mon-Thurs and 10am-6pm Fri/Sat.

The IWC is a development agency for Irish writing. Plans for the future include creating and supporting a platform for prose readings both in Dublin and around the country, a great initiative. While the Centre is open to the public, members are entitled to perks such as free internet access and tea and coffee while they use the resource room, not to mention access to one of the best venues for readings and workshops in town.

Membership costs €50 for the year. I know we're all strapped for cash these days, but the Centre is worth supporting. Why not empty the change jars and invest in its future? It's really a fantastic resource, and members get to have a say in future initiatives.

http://www.writerscentre.ie

In other news:

The first Dalkey Book Festival kicks off on Friday evening and goes on until Sunday night (18th - 20th June). It draws on a considerable pool of local talent (too extensive to fish for individual names - go to their website and see for yourself) and includes readings, performances, walking tours, plenty of discussion and a nostalgic return to Italia '90. Many of the events are free, and Dalkey is already humming in anticipation: www.dalkeybookfestival.org

On Sunday 20th , an evening of readings and music in support of people who have experienced sexual violence in Ireland will be held in the Pepper Canister Church, Mount Street Crescent. The event (Ómós) is being organised by One in Four: http://www.oneinfour.org/events/ Tickets cost €25

Another good cause, well-worth supporting.

Hated Words

The Dublin Writers’ Festival is over. At an event in the Abbey yesterday, Tom Murphy read from his plays. Afterwards, he and Conor McPherson had a ‘conversation’, followed by questions from the audience.

In the context of the vexed question of writing ‘Irishness’, and changing perceptions of what that means, Murphy told us about a conversation he had with Tony Cronin at a party, years ago. Tony Cronin said that his most hated word, growing up, was ‘Manliness.’ Cronin, Murphy went on to explain, had been to boarding school. Murphy’s most hated word would have been ‘Respectability’. It was the notion of respectability that he wrote against, in the early days of his career.

I’m paraphrasing. I hope I have it right. In any case, the two most hated words are accurate –I know because I wrote them down as soon as I heard them. I’d have left right then if I could, because I wanted to think about this wonderful idea of the most hated word.

Straight away, I knew what mine would have been, if I’d been part of that conversation: ‘Control’.

Which explains a lot. (I went to boarding schools too.)

As a tool for investigating the patterns of one’s life, this ‘hated word’ concept could be really useful. I’d love to know what other people’s most hated word is, and what it might explain about them.

Sometimes writing a blog is a bit like talking to yourself. Actually, it IS talking to yourself, but allowing for the possibility that someone might drop in and listen for a while, before wandering off to another keyhole.

Dear Reader, if you’re out there, tell me your most hated word and why.

Louise Bourgeois

The story is breaking on the internet that Louise Bourgeois has died, of a heart attack. What a loss. I thought she'd outlive all of us, and continue making art forever.

Last autumn, during a fabulous residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, I often walked down to the Tuileries in the evenings to put my hands into her expressive piece Welcoming Hands (1996), a series of bronze sculptures set on blocks of granite: pairs and groups of hands and one tiny, solitary, child's hand. They invite touch, just as her great spiders invite entry, as her work compels admiration, as she herself inspired fascination and affection, even in people (like me) who never met her. She was a tiny woman, but a force to be reckoned with. Possibly the most inspiring thing about her, and what made her so important to so many of us was her absolute commitment to her art, and the astounding fact that she continued to make it, into her 90s.

One night in Paris that October, Gail Ritchie, whose residency in the CCI coincided with mine, came to drag me away from my desk, out to see her latest discovery: a new Louise Bourgeois piece, which she had come across by accident in the window of a tiny gallery on rue Jacques Callot. (This was the sort of lucky accident that happened to us quite often in those extraordinary weeks.) It was the Self Portrait (2009), depicting a 24-hour 'clock', with the hands set at 19 - 11, the year Louise Bourgeois was born. We stood with our faces pressed to the glass, like children, and stared, taking it all in. That she was 98, and still making striking new work.

(http://www.galeriepieceunique.com/special/Sept-2009/LouiseBourgeois.htm)

In a recent documentary, Louise Bourgeois says: "My emotions are inappropriate to my size. My emotions are my demons ... It is not the emotions themselves, it is the intensity of the emotions, too much for me to handle ... that’s why I transfer the energy into sculpture." (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMdWNwOWnng)

"My emotions are inappropriate to my size." I miss her already.

A lovely new anthology was launched in the Cervantes Institute in Dublin on Wednesday. To The Winds Our Sails: Irish Writers Translate Galician Poets, edited by Mary O’Donnell and Manuela Palacios, (Salmonpoetry) offers introductions to the work of 10 Galician poets – all women – and the twelve Irish poets who have translated their work into English and Irish.

Great idea.

In her introduction, Mary O’Donnell writes about the extent to which Irish poets have become ‘accustomed to being the focus of literary research and scholarship from abroad’. When she went to Galicia in 2006, to give a lecture on Irish women writers, she became curious about the ‘dearth of information and interest in Ireland regarding Galician poets.’ This anthology is the wonderfully constructive outcome of that curiosity, a collaboration between Mary O’Donnell, the Galician academic Manuela Palacios, and the inimitable Jessie Lendennie at Salmon – not to mention the poets involved, both Galician and Irish.

Speaking at the launch of To The Winds Our Sails, Michael Cronin carried Mary’s observation a little further, remarking on a narcissistic trend in Irish literature, whereby we accept international interest in Irish literature as our due, but do not reciprocate that interest to anything like the same degree. He also remarked on how any debate on the EU focuses on financial, economic and political dimensions but rarely includes the literary, and never extends to an exploration of how European literatures might influence us, as opposed to the other way around.

Of course individual writers engage with international literature, but in a broader cultural sense, I think this observation is depressingly close to the truth – apart from the odd festival here and there – and is certainly worth thinking about. I’d love to be wrong, so if anyone reading this feels motivated to correct me, go ahead, be my guest. With examples, please.

In other news: the Dublin Writers’ Festival begins on Tuesday, 1^st June and runs until Sunday 6^th. The conversation between Tom Murphy and Conor McPherson (in the Abbey @ 4 pm on 6^th) has been billed as a memorial event for Eithne McGuinness, who died after a short illness last December. Eithne, a playwright, actor and short fiction writer, worked on the festival for several years.

Some events have already booked out, so what are you waiting for? For more info, go to: http://www.dublinwritersfestival.com/

Where are the Women?

People who know that I spent ten years+ researching, teaching and writing about women’s writing (especially Irish women’s writing) would be justified in asking this question as they look back through my blog to date (all 6 entries). A survey like the ones I used to conduct on book review pages would reveal an overwhelming predominance of references to men in this blog to date. I believe this is accidental, but I’ll admit that it’s interesting, given the accusations of gender imbalance that I used to fling around with such abandon – and justification, it has to be said.

On the other hand, a blog lends itself to spontaneous, random and occasional observation, so should it be constrained by ideology or bias one way or another? I think not. This blog began in a spirit of responding to whatever stimulus came my way, and that's how I've written it. Nevertheless, being aware of the slippage has brought me full circle, back to Virginia Woolf. Or maybe it’s the slow progress of that room of my own that’s done it, causing me to delve into past essays, articles and stories, teaching and research notes, minutes from various committee meetings, reminding me of past convictions. It could even be the strong appeal of the circular form that brings me back to Woolf, who wrote that ‘ a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.’

... and then there’s Yeats.

A friend who is too shy - or maybe too busy - to leave a comment (re Colum McCann) sends an email reminding me that Yeats said it’s easier to break stones than to write.

And so he did. Here it is, in “Adam’s Curse”

“ ... 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kind of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’ ...

Yeats is a man who’d know quite a bit about the turgid and the overblown; but he’d also know everything worth knowing about the sublime, and about revelation, vision, ambition. But, poor man, he often comes in for criticism. I was on a guided tour of the city once (yes, Dublin – there’s no law against Dubliners doing this; in fact, I’d recommend it - you’d be surprised what you might learn) when the guide began to mock him. Ah, leave Yeats alone, I said. The tourists were surprised. I’d listened with pleasure while various other figures from the national pantheon were derided by this guide, a witty and impassioned person, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I always feel that Yeats needs defending. Being posh and shortsighted and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve makes him an easy target – look at George Moore, comparing him to an umbrella left behind at a party. And let’s face it, Moore didn’t have much to crow about in the physique department.

Another time, I heard a woman giving out yards about Yeats.

Ah, leave him alone, I said - it's getting to be a bit of a habit, this - What have you got against him? He was a terrific poet.

But a terrible person! she said.

How did she know this? She'd read Roy Foster's biography, both volumes, and that was the conclusion she'd drawn from them. So there.

The dead are terribly vulnerable to this sort of judgement; especially dead writers, don't ask me why. Yeats is the very one who wrote, 'Let them be, they're dead and gone ...'

I’ve always had a soft spot for Yeats. His poetry, which is the one thing we know for sure about him and the only thing that matters, helped me through those hidjus teenage years when No-One-Understood. I used to copy his lines onto sheets of paper and carry them around. He had his struggles, his failed loves and disappointments, his wilderness years. But he was the real thing. He came back, time after time, better than ever. We should all be so committed. And so lucky.

By the way, the poet Stephen James Smith has a words-and-music version of ‘September 1913’ that’s well worth a listen: http://www.stephenjamessmith.com/Audio.html

He and Enda Reilly are making an ep of old Irish poetry, including this track.

On viewing the page with loathing

Going through these old boxes of notes is a chastening experience. I’d forgotten how bad my early attempts at writing were. I suppose it’s progress, of a kind, to be able to recognize putrescence in your own work. There are writers I know who hold on to successive drafts of manuscripts in the hope that some day someone – preferably a wealthy university in America – will buy them for their archive. Personally, I’d be more likely to pay to keep mine OUT of an archive – of any kind.

And yet. It’s comforting, as Margaret Atwood says in her introduction to The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 3 (ed. Philip Gourevitch) to know that even the immortals write what she calls ‘clunkers’ from time to time. One of the joys of reading the interviews is, as she points out, the knowledge that ‘I am not the only one who has viewed the page with loathing’ (ix). One of the tenets of any writing workshop for beginners is the reminder that nobody gets it right first time. Talent isn’t everything, we say, we all have an apprenticeship to serve. Even Joyce and Beckett wrote some pretty turgid stuff in the beginning: they had trouble finding publishers. Nobody bought their early books except their families and friends, who weren’t always thrilled about the contents. They had no money. They lived on handouts, they borrowed money and clothes and places to live, felt despair. I think it's safe to say that they sometimes drank a little more than is now considered healthy. It’s not all prizes and book tours and glamorous readings, you know. You learn it by doing it, and that means you have to be willing to embarrass yourself. Over and over again. It takes time. It might take years.

There’s a great story about Pablo Cassals: After a concert, a fan came up to him and said, “I’d give anything to be able to play (the cello) as well as you do.” Cassals said, “I gave it my life.”

Still and all, I don’t feel inclined to offer any of my own personal tat to future readers just so that they can feel better about themselves, thanks very much. There’s something wonderfully exhilarating about shredding it, bringing it to the recycling centre and leaving it there. It’s probably not ecologically sound to be driving all that distance to recycle paper, but there, that’s twenty-first century Ireland for you. And there’s a pleasing symmetry to the notion that my most earnest and clunky confusions will be compacted and recycled, along with zillions of other ideas, statements, queries, opinions and the odd shopping list; that it might even return to my desk in some future ream of paper: virginal, expectant. Ready.

Occasional Revelation

At Cúirt this weekend I was impressed by Colum McCann, whose writing I love. It’s a risky business, going along to listen to someone whose work you admire - they don’t always measure up, in person. I needn't have worried. CMcC said quite a few things worth thinking about, among them being that he has no patience with people who complain that ‘writing is difficult’. Building roads is difficult, he said. Setting up an event like this one is difficult. Everything’s difficult. For him, writing means that you sit in the chair and fight, but ... he quoted DonDeLillo: ‘we are the benefactors of occasional revelation’. And look at the life we get, he said: travelling to festivals and readings, meeting new people. Looking back to an earlier post, about the arts and the economy, and all the talk about financial survival, it is important to remember the unquantifiable benefits of being a writer and a reader, not least being the company we keep, both in our minds and at events like readings and festivals.

CMcC also spoke about the imaginative risks writers take. He quoted Kurt Vonnegut: ‘We (writers) have to continually be jumping off cliffs, and developing our wings on the way down.’

Who needs an audience? (2)

Who needs an audience? (2) (The arts and the economy)

Of course there were other issues raised during the Irish PEN debate that interested me. Here are a few of them:

Declan Kiberd: How many artists in Ireland manage to support themselves without doing other kinds of paid work? Impossible to know, but probably 200 or less. How many people are employed in areas that rely on artistic production, such as publishing, galleries, libraries, arts administration, the universities? Again, it’s impossible to know, but probably 10, 000 or more.

Arthur Lappin: We need to persuade a small number of people (who have enormous power) of the importance of the arts themselves. During the boom we got a lot of buildings, possibly too many (now that we don’t have the money to run them) because we understand buildings: they offer photo opportunities, the laying of foundation stones, ribbon-cutting ceremonies etc. It's harder to explain the importance of the processes of art. We need an 'enlightenment campaign'.

And: what is the reasoning behind continuing massive subventions to e.g. the Abbey, while phasing out funding to established theatre companies like Barrabas? We lose so much through the closure of such companies: vision, experience, people who are willing to take risks with new work, years of growth.

Gerry Godley: We’ve been given an opportunity to move the arts up the food chain of public discussion, engaging with the broader topic: “Renewing the Republic”. (Go to www.ncfa.ie for more)

As for the question of whether or not writers should get involved in the larger national conversation: William Wall, in his Ice Moon Blog : “Irish writers – outsiders no more” points out that writers are citizens, like everyone else. (http://homepage.eircom.net/~williamwall/williamwall/Ice_Moon_Blog)

Who needs an audience?

At a debate on “The Arts and the Economy” last Thursday evening (15^th April), hosted by Irish PEN, one of the speakers suggested that artists need to think about their audience. There was some bristling at this. A woman stood up to declare that an artist’s first engagement is with the self, and out of that comes an engagement with the world. An audience is by the by, she said.

This interested me. I think many writers shy away from considering an 'audience', as if such considerations lessen the artistic value of the writing. But bear with me for a minute: at workshops I always talk about reading, ask people to think about what reading is for, what they like to read themselves and why. A fundamental part of the workshop process is about learning how to read like a writer, but also how to write like a reader. By that I mean going right inside the world you’re making on the page, as far in as it’s possible to go. Drawing Virginia Woolf’s imaginary curtains; creating John Gardiner’s ‘vivid, continuous dream’. But the worlds we build with words – on the page, on a computer screen, to be spoken by actors on screen or stage – would be wasted if no one came along to share them. Why go to all that effort, only to create the literary equivalent of the ghost estates that now litter the country, thanks to the geniuses who ‘lead’ us?

Without writers, there’d be no readers. Without readers, there’d be no writers. Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken.

(For those of you who wonder why ‘Libran Writer’, there’s your answer.)

The debate was well-informed and thought-provoking. Can the arts rescue the economy? To what extent should artists engage with the economy? When will the Revolution begin? One speaker was keen for it to start immediately, with the audience departing en masse for the Dáil; but it was late and everyone was tired ...

The panellists were: Arthur Lappin (film & TV producer), Declan Kiberd (literary critic & Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD), Gerry Godley (musician & broadcaster, spokesperson for the National Campaign for the Arts), Claire Doody (Cultural Odyssey) and Aidan Burke (the Arts Council). Marita Conlon McKenna was the chair. Contributions from the floor came from writers, publishers, filmmakers, and representatives of the Arts Council.

Anyone who hasn’t been there yet, go to the National Campaign for the Arts website: http://www.ncfa.ie

A Room of My Own

This is a good time to start a blog, as we begin to turn our garage into a writing room for me. It’s a thing I’ve hankered after, for as long as I can remember, but in a busy house, packed to the rafters with people and their stuff, it never seemed feasible. The garage is our overflow space. But recently we found woodworm out there, then the roof started to leak. I can take a hint as well as the next person – if we have to take everything out, treat the wood and change the roof, we might as well add a floor, bookshelves and a few electric sockets while we’re at it. The skip has arrived. The clearing has begun.

This process is sure to disturb more dust, cobwebs and ghosts of former lives than any sane person would want. A quick survey of the junk that has to be cleared: stuff that came back with us from the US, twenty years ago. Warped vinyls, toys, a school trunk. Fossils (literally). An inordinate number of boots, not all in pairs. A crate full of rackets, balls, kites, buckets and spades. A wicker rocking dog. And behind the toolbox, the old tins of paint, the rollers and the trays: boxes and boxes of old notes, drafts, unfinished stories, notes from a previous academic life, an abandoned Ph.D. What should I do: read through them? Salvage some? Or take the plunge and junk them without looking?