Blog

In Praise of the M6 - by Mary Costello

Submitted by stingingfly on Wed, 11/01/2012 - 16:32

Writers stumble on ideas and inspiration in the oddest of places. We rarely seek them, or expect them; mostly they come unbidden and the surprise is never greater or more welcome than when we’re wandering in a creative wilderness. Travel has always inspired writers and for some it is essential. James Salter, in a Paris Review interview in 1992, said that travel is the writer’s true occupation and there is no situation like the open road. (Incidentally during that same interview he calculated that he’d drunk eighty-seven hundred pre-dinner martinis in his life.

Kevin Barry – Some notes from midwinter

Submitted by stingingfly on Thu, 22/12/2011 - 11:45

I write this from the shaded entry of a megalithic tomb in the Bricklieve Mountains of south County Sligo. It is evening of the winter solstice and the last of the thin daylight is dying now across the limestone bluffs. I batter fretfully at my scarred and ailing Macbook, anxious to preserve the moment, with the greyish-blue light of the screen showing by my side the lip of the tomb, in the dark recesses of which some among our ancients lie resting, and waiting.

The tombs are up the side of the mountain from my house by the lake, and they are as close as we come in the vicinity to an attraction. Ravens caw gothically as they circle overhead, as though auditioning for a Siouxsie And The Banshees video sometime around 1983. Swathes of grim moorland open out and descend to the west, in the direction of Ballymote, our polestar metropolis: two streets, a square, and the Travellers market of a Thursday.

Editorial Statement, Dave Lordan

Submitted by stingingfly on Fri, 09/12/2011 - 15:54

Great and memorable writing addresses itself idiosyncratically to questions of general relevance, questions society asks itself out of a pressing necessity. Depending on how we answer and/or explore them, these questions shape how we perceive, express and organise ourselves, others and the cosmos we inhabit.

Sarah Maria Griffin reflects on last week's RIA conference which asked 'Can Creative Writing Be Taught?'

Submitted by stingingfly on Wed, 12/10/2011 - 13:08

I am always late for things, often finding myself in taxis racing towards wherever it is I should have been five minutes ago. Sometimes, if the driver is particularly charismatic, they ask where I am going. Or if the conversation goes on, they ask what I do. I usually pause heavily and think very hard about saying I am a chef, or a nurse, or I am studying law. Then I tell them the truth, just to see how they react.

Helena Nolan on starting over

Submitted by stingingfly on Sat, 08/10/2011 - 12:35

This time of year awakens the longing inside of us. Old aspirations are dusted off and re-examined; our lives begin to dissatisfy; we are restless. Maybe it’s something to do with the leaves turning—that sense of time passing, of our own mortality. Or maybe it’s that back-to-school or college feeling, the one we grew up with, preparing for each September, the milestone month, when our true calendar began. So now, each passing year, as we tick off the opportunities missed, we feel September pressing at our backs, urging us to take one more chance, to resurrect our dreams.

I picked up the phone and called. The woman on reception was helpful; she found a suitable slot and booked me in. Starting in September—the familiar words were back on my lips. This time there was no booklist, no uniform, no one to take me there or show me round. I simply finished work one evening and took a bus to a part of the city I hadn’t visited for a while. There, in a building of faded grandeur, I joined a group of equally nervous adults and signed up for my first creative writing class. Standing round the battered boiler, waiting my turn to make tea, I realised I hadn’t signed up with a group like this since starting my first job, over twenty years earlier. It was scary but invigorating too. Here were new people who knew nothing about me; it was a chance to reinvent myself. Maybe I could begin to think of myself as, dared I say it, an aspiring writer? I was 39.

The Twinkle in Edna’s Eye

Submitted by stingingfly on Mon, 19/09/2011 - 18:38

Edna O’ Brien told the audience gathered for the Frank O'Connor Award ceremony at the Metropole Hotel in Cork last night that she had gone to Mass yesterday morning. Maybe she goes every Sunday, or maybe this was a once-off and she was praying to win. She was her usual eloquent self as she accepted the award for her short story collection, Saints and Sinners, graciously showing concern for the other five nominees, Colm Tóibín and Yiyun Li among them, but admitted to being delighted for herself. She is not accustomed to winning awards, she said, so she has no qualms about winning this one. Writing is her fortress and, the award (worth €35,000) will allow her to continue to write with ease.

Edna always mesmerises. She has a presence, a touching vulnerability. When she says she did ‘a little pondering’ I know that one minute of an Edna ponder is worth an hour of most others’. She is in person, like her writing, open and trusting, searingly honest, gleeful, mischievous too. At a National Library lecture on Yeats a couple of years ago she briefly alluded to his Steinach procedure, saying he became the ‘gland old man of letters’ and then flashed us a gamey little wink. On Saturday night she read a story called ‘Old Wounds’ from the collection to an audience enthralled by her vibrant theatrical delivery. She’s eighty now, still tall and elegant, needing a little assistance but with the same twinkle in her eye. The festival director, Pat Cotter, looking boyish in her presence, linked her tenderly onto the stage, and for the duration of the story, stood behind her with his hands on the back of her seat, very still, meek, cherubic.

Events roundup: September 10th - 25th

Submitted by stingingfly on Fri, 09/09/2011 - 17:45

Kathleen Murray and her summer holiday affair (with the New Yorker)

Submitted by stingingfly on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 15:00

I was on holidays for the last two weeks in Glencolumcille and Kilkee and have not been writing. Lots of reading going on but no writing and no kindles. I spent time with sisters and brothers-in-law and friends and cousins and second cousins and aunts from Canada and Atlanta and London, and I thought someone would be bundled up on the beach behind a wind breaker with their kindles but no, just lots of books.

Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture got a thumbs up, Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane was a big hit in Limerick-by-the-sea and my cousin said Emma Donoghue’s Room was unputdownable at home in Winnipeg; children left waiting at the school gate and piano lessons abandoned. A significant part of Maggie O’Farrell’s and Patrick Gale’s works was read, verdict mixed but the later books are better apparently. I read Molly McCloskey’s memoir about her brother, Circles Around the Sun, and found it fascinating and thoughtful.

I get a pile of New Yorker magazines every year before my August holiday from the Fly Boy. It’s my summer holiday affair, sneaking up to my bedroom to finish an article, or sitting on the beach, leaving disappointed children to their half-built sandcastles so I can finish a story.

Dave Lordan on prehistoric raves, the Irish Spoken Word scene, and why it's best to have no plans...

Submitted by stingingfly on Wed, 31/08/2011 - 12:22

Tens of thousands of years ago tribes from all over South-Western Europe gathered annually in the area now known as Lascaux to engage in music, dancing, singing, drumming, whistling, howling, screeching and sex-magic – that is, in all the then conceivable kinds of artistic and bodily collectivism and individual expression. The cave paintings were perhaps only the jaded afterthoughts of these prolonged collective derangements during which Living Transcendence was the unashamed goal of all. Everyone’s intention was to break through the quotidian and the visible and on into to a realm of hallucination, enchantment, vision.

These Pre-historic mass-raves were the original festivals. Every festival since has been their more or less cracked, more or less warped reflection.

The free festival movement of the 1960s, which inspired Woodstock and The Isle of Wight, re-popularised the experience of letting go and losing your head while all about you are losing theirs and loving every second of it.

Later on, in the mid 1980s, great convoys of urban refugees known as Crusties or New Age Travellers – communities of resistance born out of Tory-inflicted social disintegration – took to the road. These convoys were mobile autonomous zones within which the free party movement came again into the reformed body of the rave.

That’s the short history of how, at the age of 15, I came to be, for the very first time, stocious-dancing in a smoke-filled tent in a field.

Mary Costello's New York Diary - Part 3

Submitted by stingingfly on Fri, 26/08/2011 - 11:57

Friday 12th August

Inmates

Yesterday the guy next to me couldn’t settle. He left his desk repeatedly, called the elevator, disappeared for an hour, returned, adjusted the air-con, made coffee, sighed.  There is nothing to be done. We all have days like this.

I went out to Starbucks with another writer. Two years ago she left her job in the corporate world to write a novel. She’s in the Gotham Writers’ Group. She lives on 106th Street and walks all the way down to 47th each morning, passing through Central Park, down 5th Avenue, crossing at lights, in the thick of the crowds and the traffic. She thinks about her novel as she walks. By the time she gets to the Centre, she’s with her characters, ready to be immersed. She breaks for lunch at 2. She works till 6.

Saturday 13th August

Falling

When I left the Centre yesterday I took my 20-year-old niece, who’s here for the summer, to the Guggenheim and then she took me to a vintage shop in the Village whose Turkish owner finds her Irish charm so appealing that he knocked $30 off a ring for her last week.

'Tell me about this writers’ place,’ she said to me over a beer on Carmine St. 'What did you do today?'

I looked at her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I got there about 10.30, the first to arrive. The place was boiling. I went over to turn on the air-conditioning. The switch is on the wall right next to the desk holding the printer and a notice-board. I needed to go up on my tippy toes to read the settings and I put my right hand out on the desk to steady myself, just for balance, you know...'

Pages