Eamonn Sheehy's Blog - Posts Tagged "fastreads"
Writing 'Summer In The City State': North Africa captured in image from Ceuta to Tangier
While my forthcoming book Summer In The City State has been a labour of text - writing and rewriting, correcting and revising - the images I framed on the trip itself are frozen, suspended and clear.
Anyone who writes can attest to the struggles of conveyance. It comes in stages. First you are happy to get words down, and mould them into some sort of clear, engaging
form. You work on different scenes and try to transpose the excitement living in your imagination onto the white space before you. The seasons change, summer into winter, but you keep pushing on with the process. Then comes the feeling of eureka - towards an ending. And with it, the warm self-affirming feeling of achievement. It's cosy for a while.
The second stage eventually turns up on the scene. The clouds move in, the sky darkens and you are entrenched in some weeks and months of word-thrashing, cliché culling and sentence decapitation. It is violent and disorientating. You start to tire, the focus becomes poorly. SELF DOUBT. Coffee binges. Concern.
One way out was to stand back and look. Assessing my own principles of writing and more importantly my ethics of nonfiction. When it comes to writing, for me its the gloss - stripe that shit down. And for the area I am writing in - this is nonfiction, memoir, culture, immersive journalism - call it what you want. So I had to get some things straight in my head and stop stalling the ball. Nonfiction is reality, and reality cannot be reformulated. The story happens and you tell it. This is where the culling and thrashing comes in. I cut out the fluff. 'No filler all killer' as the punks used to say. Eventually the calm returned and some sense of, albeit shorter, form was achieved.
The images - a series of photography captured from the initial stages of the journey, aboard a ferry across the Mediterranean to Ceuta, through the cities of the Rif Mountains and on the streets of Tangier - had solidified into their own micro-story. I sifted through some three hundred plus pictures. The people and places photographed did the work for me. The location of Ceuta and Tangier. The natural environment. Bingo.
And once I discarded 'the fear', the hesitation of combining a written narrative with a photographic form - I began to see that it all 'works'. The book now in its complete form, is not a 'travel' book in the traditional sense (despite possibly falling into this category in your online bookstore). It is a capture of my perspective against a backdrop of tumultuous times for many living on the border regions of North Africa and Southern Europe. It is a test of my own perceptions and levels of acceptance. It is a study of social tension and escape.
Here are some of the images from 'Summer In The City State'.
Paperback and digital formats will see the light of day on 8th April 2016. But you are free to contact me about getting an advance paperback edition, or just click and pre-order digital formats now:
http://www.migratetothefringe.com/blo...
Anyone who writes can attest to the struggles of conveyance. It comes in stages. First you are happy to get words down, and mould them into some sort of clear, engaging
form. You work on different scenes and try to transpose the excitement living in your imagination onto the white space before you. The seasons change, summer into winter, but you keep pushing on with the process. Then comes the feeling of eureka - towards an ending. And with it, the warm self-affirming feeling of achievement. It's cosy for a while.
The second stage eventually turns up on the scene. The clouds move in, the sky darkens and you are entrenched in some weeks and months of word-thrashing, cliché culling and sentence decapitation. It is violent and disorientating. You start to tire, the focus becomes poorly. SELF DOUBT. Coffee binges. Concern.
One way out was to stand back and look. Assessing my own principles of writing and more importantly my ethics of nonfiction. When it comes to writing, for me its the gloss - stripe that shit down. And for the area I am writing in - this is nonfiction, memoir, culture, immersive journalism - call it what you want. So I had to get some things straight in my head and stop stalling the ball. Nonfiction is reality, and reality cannot be reformulated. The story happens and you tell it. This is where the culling and thrashing comes in. I cut out the fluff. 'No filler all killer' as the punks used to say. Eventually the calm returned and some sense of, albeit shorter, form was achieved.
The images - a series of photography captured from the initial stages of the journey, aboard a ferry across the Mediterranean to Ceuta, through the cities of the Rif Mountains and on the streets of Tangier - had solidified into their own micro-story. I sifted through some three hundred plus pictures. The people and places photographed did the work for me. The location of Ceuta and Tangier. The natural environment. Bingo.
And once I discarded 'the fear', the hesitation of combining a written narrative with a photographic form - I began to see that it all 'works'. The book now in its complete form, is not a 'travel' book in the traditional sense (despite possibly falling into this category in your online bookstore). It is a capture of my perspective against a backdrop of tumultuous times for many living on the border regions of North Africa and Southern Europe. It is a test of my own perceptions and levels of acceptance. It is a study of social tension and escape.
Here are some of the images from 'Summer In The City State'.
Paperback and digital formats will see the light of day on 8th April 2016. But you are free to contact me about getting an advance paperback edition, or just click and pre-order digital formats now:
http://www.migratetothefringe.com/blo...
