Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 22

Banshee!

Once upon a time there were three writers. They had often discussed the possibility of collaborating on something wordish in the future. Someday. Someday down the road.

Then one day they decided, helped by Twitter and pizza, that it was time to make that someday happen. They wanted to see a new literary journal in Ireland – partly because some great journals were closing, partly because there were some exciting new ones emerging, partly because there were some longstanding ones still doing great work, and partly because they had opinions and thoughts and things they wanted to see more of in lit journals.

We opened up submissions to Banshee this March, and were overwhelmed with both the quality and quantity of material we received. Issue 1 is just about to go to print, featuring an amazing collection of fiction, poetry and essays from Irish and international writers. If you’d like to buy a subscription, you can do so now – and get a few other extras. And do join us for launches in Cork and Dublin this September. So. Excited.

Bits and pieces from around the internet

What I’ve been reading lately, a mix of rage-inducing pieces, writerly insights and other bits of interest:

everything you needed to know about poetry cliques but were afraid to ask
literary goddess Anne Enright on Irish writing
why fangirls are mocked for what they love, but sports fans are validated (hint: the patriarchy!)
Persephone and punishing women for their desires, with a cocktail recipe
Ireland and its ongoing awfulness at supporting survivors of sexual assault
Ireland and its ongoing awfulness at supporting pregnant women
anxieties about the much-discussed ‘beach body’
as kids’ media gets more complex, are we forgetting the actual kids?
YA legend Sarah Dessen also saves lives – seriously
critical reviews versus attacking authors in kidlit-land
why abortions are good for women and society
some kind of satirical point being made here about censorship, perhaps
why the Catholic Church is not great about the gays
an Irish sex worker talks about the industry and asks us to listen
when pornography is a problem (and when it isn’t)
the trouble with telling people you’re bisexual
the science of ‘Inside Out’ and All The Feelings
YA writer Holly Bourne on teen mental health and relapses
on renting in Dublin (doom)
an amazing Babysitters Club/Buffy crossover fanfiction that will crack. you. up.

I feel like this is an eerily accurate snapshot of my brain most weeks, actually.

Book-review post!

Mix of MG and YA here…

Hayley Long – Sophie Someone

Sophie lives in Belgium, and doesn’t quite know how her parents have ended up there. There are some things that don’t seem quite right – the way her mum stalks Facebook profiles of people in England she’s sure they don’t know. Or the way someone seems to recognise her dad one day, even though he pretends he doesn’t know who they are. And shouldn’t she have a birth certificate of her own? Once she investigates, she realises that there’s a dark secret in her family’s past – and the only way to uncover the truth is a trip to England, whether her parents know about it or not. Aside from the mystery element, part of this book’s charm is the secret code Sophie uses to tell her story, a shorthand that may take a while to get used to but very much reinforces the sense that this is a teenage girl telling us a story she’s still trying to make sense of herself.

Candy Harper – Perfectly Ella

Ella’s the middle child among her sisters, all of whom have vivid personalities and skills. Even the new baby, her new half-sister, has the advantage of being new and cute. Ella’s not sure what her own role is – not in her family, and not in school, where her two best friends are squabbling. This is a sweet story about finding your identity, perfect for readers 9+.

Cathy Cassidy – Fortune Cookie

Jake Cooke – Cookie – has just discovered he has a whole family he never knew about, five girls who seem to have a picture-perfect existence. His own family life isn’t going too well – his mum’s always struggling, and a disaster in their flat convinces him that his mum and younger siblings are better off without him. If there’s any place that seems worth escaping to, it’s the Tanberry-Costello house, where chocolate treats are crafted and dreams seem to come true. And it seems the only way Jake can get in touch with his birth father – and demand the money to help get his mum out of a tough situation. This final book in the Chocolate Box series ties up some loose ends, as well as offering us some insight into what the world looks like to an outsider; like all of the books it offers hope without dismissing the difficulties young people have to go through.

Some advice for the gifted almost-adult

(This post has been brought to you by spending the past three weeks teaching high-ability students aged 15-17 at CTYI, and lots of chats with their parents about What To Do In College and What Next. Also from ten years of working with gifted students and other such things.)

Hard work will get you further. Hard work is not a sign that you are inadequate or not smart enough. Hard work is often something you are not used to, because you haven’t learned all the learning skills at the right time, because you learned earlier and/or differently to most of your peers. But don’t undervalue it or think it’s indicative of something not being for you.

Find something you’re passionate about. Make it as big a part of your life as you can. But be prepared for the things related to that, or the things that you have to do to facilitate your passion, to be things you don’t 100% love. That’s okay.

You don’t have to give 100% to everything. Adults don’t – and when we try to, it leads to chaos. But this doesn’t mean opting out of everything you don’t love or even like. Maybe there’ll be exams in topics you don’t care about, or assignments you just have to power through. Give yourself a set amount of time to do a good job within, and then move on.

Deadlines are good. They really are. It’s always easy to say something could’ve been better if you’ve had more time. It’s partly why so many people leave things ‘til the last minute. Presume that you are always working within a finite amount of time. For the things that you care about, you’re doing the best you can within the time that you have. That’s all you can do.

Sleep is important. This needs no further explanation.

In much of the working world, your experience matters as much, if not more, than your academic results. Particularly for anyone in the Irish system, which is so wretchedly exam-obsessed, college is a great time to legitimately spend a decent amount of time being involved in societies or clubs or whatever. If you can get part-time work it is also a marvellous thing.

There will always be people better than you. There will be moments when you feel utterly out of your depth. Alarmingly, these are good learning moments. The hard work thing above will get you through a lot of this.

It’s okay to quit something if it’s not for you. It’s okay to quit something if it involves sacrifices you’re not willing to make. Be honest with yourself: are you being scared or lazy or just letting go of something it’s not worth struggling for?

You may hear sometimes about the importance of gifted education in terms of developing talent for industry, or for the good of society. You owe no more to the world than anyone else. Gifted education is first and foremost about providing an appropriate level of education to a group that doesn’t get it in mainstream settings. It is not your job to save the world.

But don’t be complacent. Education should be a right, but it’s not one everyone gets. Even though you probably have a sense of how the world should be, we live in the world as it is. You don’t need to take every opportunity that comes your way, but acknowledge them as opportunities. Choosing between a couple of cool opportunities is a gift, not a dilemma.

You don’t need to go to college, but if you’re the type of person who spent your summers enthusiastically learning as a teenager, you’ll probably find it’s a good fit for you and will help you in the future – whether you go straight out of school or somewhere down the line.

Be nice to your parents, especially if you are planning any kind of career in the arts. (This is good advice for everyone.)

Be kind. (Also good advice for everyone.)

There is no excuse for telling anyone your Leaving Cert results – good or bad – more than a year after the fact. None.

Book review: Tender

Just the one this time, because I had a lot to say…

Belinda McKeon – Tender

I keep thinking about this book. It’s one of those books that falls into the ‘wary of because of hype’ category for me, although in this case the hype was to do with McKeon’s first novel, Solace. But there were good murmurings about this, and even though I feel like we dwell far too much on the past in Irish literary fiction, the slipping back to the 1990s wasn’t at all unpleasant. I’m not that much younger than the characters, though a few years makes a big difference at that age; this was a time that I’d lived through as opposed to being something known only through the elders’ stories. And it’s a world I know, if hazily; Catherine, the main character, is studying English and History of Art at Trinity and the courses she takes in her first couple of years are utterly faithful to the English Lit curriculum of the time. There’s college parties and then slipping into the adult world, and society hacks and charismatic artsy types (people I knew of, but never knew, as an undergrad).

But more than those little cultural familiarities is the utter honesty of the novel. Catherine is naive. And intense. And imperfect. When she meets James, he’s the best friend she’s ever had. And he’s gay, and she’s delighted in some ways – the cultural cache of it being something she uses, although not consciously, in her college life. She’s not a selfless kind type – she’s obsessed. And in love. She is in love with this boy who will never love her back – which is not to say that intimacy between them is entirely ruled out. The tiny details of this are just glorious – I have never been madly in love with my charismatic and sometimes annoying gay best friend but I feel like I have. This is heart-on-the-page stuff, not in the sense of being biographically true necessarily (and I know McKeon has alluded to this in interviews) but being emotionally true, and human, in all the messiness and selfishness that youth brings with it. (And non-youth, too, if we’re honest.)

As the novel progresses we move closer to a historical event that I wasn’t quite sure we needed, though in retrospect I think it does fit; we also jump forward to ‘now’ and see how the characters are in the alleged ‘real world’. I wasn’t mad about this, and I don’t think we needed quite so much of it, or for it to be quite so tidy, but the ending is gorgeous. And I’ve thought about it, and discussed with people, and the novel as a whole has filtered into my consciousness more than most books ever do. Oh, Catherine, I think. And then, oh, James. And oh, all of us, and the people we love and how badly we love them sometimes.

Book-review post!

Just the one this time, because I had a lot to say…

Belinda McKeon – Tender

I keep thinking about this book. It’s one of those books that falls into the ‘wary of because of hype’ category for me, although in this case the hype was to do with McKeon’s first novel, Solace. But there were good murmurings about this, and even though I feel like we dwell far too much on the past in Irish literary fiction, the slipping back to the 1990s wasn’t at all unpleasant. I’m not that much younger than the characters, though a few years makes a big difference at that age; this was a time that I’d lived through as opposed to being something known only through the elders’ stories. And it’s a world I know, if hazily; Catherine, the main character, is studying English and History of Art at Trinity and the courses she takes in her first couple of years are utterly faithful to the English Lit curriculum of the time. There’s college parties and then slipping into the adult world, and society hacks and charismatic artsy types (people I knew of, but never knew, as an undergrad).

But more than those little cultural familiarities is the utter honesty of the novel. Catherine is naive. And intense. And imperfect. When she meets James, he’s the best friend she’s ever had. And he’s gay, and she’s delighted in some ways – the cultural cache of it being something she uses, although not consciously, in her college life. She’s not a selfless kind type – she’s obsessed. And in love. She is in love with this boy who will never love her back – which is not to say that intimacy between them is entirely ruled out. The tiny details of this are just glorious – I have never been madly in love with my charismatic and sometimes annoying gay best friend but I feel like I have. This is heart-on-the-page stuff, not in the sense of being biographically true necessarily (and I know McKeon has alluded to this in interviews) but being emotionally true, and human, in all the messiness and selfishness that youth brings with it. (And non-youth, too, if we’re honest.)

As the novel progresses we move closer to a historical event that I wasn’t quite sure we needed, though in retrospect I think it does fit; we also jump forward to ‘now’ and see how the characters are in the alleged ‘real world’. I wasn’t mad about this, and I don’t think we needed quite so much of it, or for it to be quite so tidy, but the ending is gorgeous. And I’ve thought about it, and discussed with people, and the novel as a whole has filtered into my consciousness more than most books ever do. Oh, Catherine, I think. And then, oh, James. And oh, all of us, and the people we love and how badly we love them sometimes.

Book-review post!

Books for adults that you might have heard about…

Jennifer Weiner – All Fall Down

I adored this book, a look at addiction to prescription medication. Allison Weiss seems to have it all – handsome husband, beautiful daughter, dream job, perfect house in the suburbs. In reality, the husband is selfish and distant (the extent of his ick-ness is not entirely appreciated by the text, I think), the daughter’s a brat, the ‘dream job’ involves being subjected to online harassment (in the way that women having thoughts online seems to promote), and her dad’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. Allison’s frustration and stress comes across all-too-authentically, and her use of prescription painkillers – first from her doctors, then ordered online – begins to seem understandable, even as it spirals out of control. Loved this. Well worth reading.

Judy Blume – In The Unlikely Event

New Judy Blume for adults! Joy! Loved this. The story takes place in the early 50s, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and is based on three real plane crashes that happened close to each other at that time, mysterious and unsettling. The central character is fifteen-year-old Miri, though we step inside a number of different heads, and the discussion around the plane crashes echoes the way adults talk to kids about all important issues – or rather, don’t. The period comes alive through all the tiny specific details, and the overall feeling is one of immense sympathy for all the characters. A delight to read.

(Related: myself and a number of other kidlit and writerly types talked to Sarah Bannan about why we love Judy Blume…)

Paula Hawkins – The Girl On The Train

Rachel drinks too much. She knows this. Every morning she takes the train to London and every evening she takes it home, to continue the fiction that she is still employed. And out of the window, where the train regularly stops, she sees the road she used to live on – the house where her husband still lives with his new wife. She sees another house, too – where a seemingly-perfect couple live. She names them, imagines their lives, and then one day she sees the wife kissing another man. The next week, the newspapers reveal that this woman’s gone missing – and Rachel is the only one who knows about this kiss and a possible suspect. She also knows she was in the area that evening – and can’t remember what happened. This is a gripping read, though not as amazingly-omg-breathtaking-brilliant as its ongoing presence in bestseller lists might suggest, and ticks several boxes for me (non-chronological storytelling, difficult women…).

Spoilerish thoughts:

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I’ve been thinking about this in relation to Gone Girl, another Big Hit, and its polar-opposite heroines. Amy is the kind of cool girl (or snarking-about-cool-girls cool girl) we think we want to be, until we realise, oh, jesus, no, that’s a step too far). Rachel is not – she’s a mess, and she’s been hurt, and she’s what we don’t want to be, but also fear we are (too sensitive, too melodramatic, too much). And she’s dealing with the turned-up-to-eleven version of what happens when there’s the man you love who’s keeping something from you or has wronged you and there’s some minor horror that really you’re overreacting about, that you’re gaslighted (gaslit?) about. And she’s validated in the end. This is not as gorgeously-written as Gone Girl, but I do think culturally it’s doing something that we seem to need or want, and I think that’s why it’s been doing so well. (That and success tends to breed more success.)

Book-review post!

And some more YA…

Sarah Dessen – Saint Anything

Dessen’s twelfth book has been pitched as darker than her others, but for me Dreamland will always be that book. In this latest, Sydney deals with being an invisible girl – the one in the shadows in her family, as attention is paid to her charismatic and troubled older brother Peyton. The novel begins with Peyton sentenced to jail time after a car accident that left a kid paralysed; Sydney’s haunted by the thought of this kid, while her parents are more concerned with how Peyton’s getting on. When she makes friends with a family that includes a supportive new friend, Layla, and potential love interest, Mac, she sees their problems too – an ill mother and a recovering addict sister – and starts to process what’s going on in her own life. There’s also a really intriguing subplot about a creepy guy, a friend of Peyton’s, who’s hanging around and not doing anything that pushes the boundaries just yet – but who Sydney finds unsettling. A great read for Dessen fans – I’m not sure it’s her Best Ever but it’s damn good.

Alyssa Brugman – Alex As Well

This book broke my heart. I liked it, but found it horrifying. The central narrator is fifteen-year-old Alex, who’s been raised as a boy but now identifies as female – and what she has never been told is that she was born intersex and the meds she takes are hormones to make her more ‘male’. The mother, in particular, is an utterly awful parent; we see her yammering in parenting forums and people basically supporting her total lack of supporting her kid, and it’s all just a little unsettling. It’s an interesting but not especially in-depth look at gender issues and terrible parenting.

Liz Kessler – Read Me Like A Book

Ashley’s never particularly liked school, but when her new English teacher, Miss Murray, comes along and encourages her talent for debating, it opens a number of doors for Ash – including her interest in women. This coming-out story was fifteen years in the making and is a great addition to the UK queer YA canon. (Interview with the lovely Liz forthcoming in Inis magazine later this year.)

Lisa Williamson – The Art of Being Normal

I adored this. Everyone presumes David’s gay – only his two best friends know the truth. David identifies as female, but has never openly dressed as such or used his female name of choice. New kid Leo just wants to stay out of trouble, but ends up sticking up for David after an incident involving David’s secret notebook – and an unlikely friendship forms. The narration splits between the two characters and explores gender identity alongside bullying, friendship, family and being yourself. This is… I think perhaps the best way to explain what it is for trans YA reads is that it’s its Boy Meets Boy – an important, optimistic read that goes beyond coming to terms with your own identity and instead focuses on what next, and what other things are going on in people’s lives. Highly, highly recommended.

Book-review post!

And now some YA for ya…

Julie Murphy – Dumplin’

(Thanks to Edelweiss for the review copy.)

Willowdean is a small-town girl in Texas, the kind of place where not much happens – until the annual beauty pageant rolls around. Her mother’s a former winner and obsessed with it, like pretty much everyone else – but Willowdean, nicknamed ‘Dumplin’, is the kind of fat girl that no one would ever dream would enter. There’s a lot more going on in this book – Will is grieving her aunt, and starting up something with her coworker Bo – but the pageant is what it all centres around, especially when Will decides to enter, along with a group of other misfits. (Sidenote: I think everyone who reads this wants a sequel about Hannah Perez.) It’s smart and feminist and optimistic without getting preachy – Drop Dead Gorgeous with heart.

Sophie Kinsella – Finding Audrey

This is one of my favourite YA books of the year – a really funny book about mental health issues. Audrey’s been out of school since a bit of a meltdown, but that’s not really what’s caused her anxiety – it’s her ‘lizard brain’, and she’s trying hard to get better. Her therapist suggests she make a film about her family, which is where most of the zaniness comes from: her mum’s a compulsive reader of the tabloids and is convinced Audrey’s brother Frank is addicted to computer games, and the war between these two is hilarious and authentic. She’s also trying to be more social, which includes a date to Starbucks with her brother’s friend… This is a lovely, uplifting read that nevertheless addresses the reality of mental illness and the idea of recovery as a process. Most pleasing indeed.

Alice Oseman – Solitaire

Tori is a snarky, isolated teenage girl bored with school and life – very realistic, in other words. But the arrival of an old friend and a new boy, along with an internet presence called Solitaire that seems set on disrupting the school, things change. I liked a lot about this, especially the handling of Tori’s brother, Charlie, and his own issues, but it ultimately didn’t wow me as much as I’d expected.

E Lockhart, Sarah Mlynowski & Lauren Myracle – How To Be Bad

Road trip stories are not necessarily my favouritest thing ever (they are such an American genre, and I do not get them, entirely) but I did like this back-and-forth novel. The three narrator – Jesse, Vicks and Mel – all work together, but they’re very different. Jesse and Vicks have been friends for ages, while Mel is the new rich girl who’s just moved to town. They all have things they won’t talk about, and they all have their own idea of what a ‘good girl’ is, which is challenged over the course of the novel. I zipped through this.

Book-review post!

A quick roundup of some of those ‘books for adults’ you might have heard of…

Doreen Finn – My Buried Life

A disclaimer: Doreen was in a workshop I taught years back and wrote gorgeously; she’d send around her excerpts and we’d be all there seething in envy at the prose. Also, she’s lovely. So I am biased about this book, her first to make it out into the world, and not only that but it’s about a poet-academic-type woman returning to Ireland after her mother’s death and dealing with her past, including her brother’s suicide and her own troubled relationship with alcohol. Eva, the main character, is not necessarily likeable, but she’s immensely relatable; the subject matter isn’t especially original but it did, more so on reflection, strike me that this is the story we typically hear from the male perspective. This is a troubled, alcoholic woman coping with the sins of the fathers and the changing society, and the prose is – as indeed I suspected – terrific.

Maire T Robinson – Skin, Paper, Stone

This is another one from New Island’s Fiction Firsts series – good year for Irish literary women, this is. Young people in Galway, linked in different ways, and mainly focusing on the love story between PhD student Stevie and tattoo artist Kavanagh. Wonderful portrait of the city, even though I’d have loved more on Stevie’s doctoral research (looking at sheela-na-gigs) – she is the most intriguing character in the novel, and I was more fascinated by her than the others. Looking forward to seeing what Robinson does next.

Fionnuala Kearney – You, Me and Other People

This debut focuses on what happens when a marriage breaks up, and the secrets that keep unravelling. The narration is split between songwriter Beth and her husband Adam, who’s been having an affair; Adam comes off as an asshole right from the beginning (judging Beth for swearing – like, dude, you keep cheating on your wife, what’s with the superiority complex?) and even though we learn a lot about the traumas of his past, I couldn’t quite warm to him or to Beth either. Some of the plot twists were a tad familiar, too. Not a bad read exactly, but not one I’d be urgently pressing into people’s hands either.

Sinead Crowley – Are You Watching Me?

(Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.)

This is just out in the world now, the second in Crowley’s series about Sergeant Claire Boyle, now juggling a six-month-old baby with investigating what’s going on at a drop-in centre for unemployed/retired/homeless men, and how that relates to the threatening messages its public face – the young-with-a-troubled-past Liz – has been receiving. Liz is a really intriguing character and her backstory is handled well; she’s utterly indebted to the owner of the centre, Tom, who seems as though he might be behind the mysterious death of one of the regulars… Plenty of twists and turns here, with the mystery angle well balanced with Boyle’s strained home life and the difficulties of having a demanding job and a small child. I hope we get to see more books in this series soon.