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?