Nuala Ní Chonchúir's Blog, page 57

CURLEW WRITING CONFERENCE

Highly recommended - the Deppes and Suzanne Strempek Shea are all fantastic writers (and people).

From Annie and Ted Deppe: 'Alumni of any MFA program or other serious writers are invited to attend ~ CURLEW 4 ~ A WEEK FOR WRITERS IN HOWTH, IRELAND, 11-18 OCTOBER 2013. This is NOT connected with Stonecoast MFA program in any way, though we do have a number of Stonecoast alumni signed up to attend. We have a couple of spots left. Workshop a current project, generate new work, and take your writing to the next level, all in a most inspiring setting rich with literary culture. Following on the great success of three previous Curlew Writing Conferences, Annie Deppe, Ted Deppe, and Suzanne Strempek Shea are offering a new week-long conference for serious writers. Prominent Irish authors (to be selected after we see the genre concentrations of the participants) will join us, and we will offer a full week of workshops, writing exercises, seminars, a field trip and readings. Contact teddeppe2@hotmail.com for more information.'

BREWERY LANE WRITERS' WEEKEND

This is a brand new festival based in Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary. My workshop is fully subscribed (waiting list only) but you can always come along to Mark Roper's reading and/or Richard Hayes's talk. For myself, I am looking forward to meeting new writing enthusiasts and to having a nose around Carrick - I have never been there before.

FRANK O'CONNOR AWARD LONGLIST 2013

There is a 75 strong list of books on the Frank O'Connor longlist this year including books by David Constantine, Junot Diaz, Molly Ringwald (yes, that Molly), former winner Ron Rash; Irish hopefuls include Mike McCormack, Emma Donoghue and Alan McMonagle.

The jury is comprised of Cathy Galvin (founder of the Sunday Times S/S Award), non-voting chairman Patrick Cotter, writer John F. Deane and editor Brigid Hughes.

A shortlist of up to six books will be selected in late May and the winner publicly announced in July. The award will be presented at the culmination of the Cork International Short Story Festival in September. 

PEARLMAN REVIEW ON ARENA TONIGHT

I am reviewing Edith Pearlman's stunning new and selected short story collection, Binocular Vision (Pushkin Press), on Arena tonight, RTE Radio 1, sometime between 7pm and 8pm. It will be available as a podcast from Friday.

If I have time (and time is short what with a novel, stories and an essay begging for attention) I will write up a review here also after tonight.

HERE'S LUCY!

My novel - the one due out next year - features two mysterious brown parcels. It also features a woman who is a taxidermist. I love taxidermy; I especially love modern pieces, the anthropomorphised kind.

I have long been looking for a suitable first piece of taxidermy to start a collection and I found it recently (on the net of course).

Her name is Lucy and she's a mouse. She is standing on a vintage box of tansy which is a herbal medicine that features in the novel I am currently writing. I like that she ties the two books together. So here she is, Miss Lucy Luch, made by Nimble Matters:

HUNGRY HILL POETRY COMP 2013

Just in from Hungry Hill in Cork:

'We are delighted to announce the Poets Meet Painters competition 2013 (incorporating a new Mill Cove Poetry Award). As always, this is a competition for poems inspired by works of art exhibited or sponsored by Mill Cove Gallery and Sculpture Garden. The competition will be judged by Leanne O'Sullivan. There will be a first prize of €200, and in addition there will be a Mill Cove Gallery award for a poem inspired by a ceramic work. The closing date is 17 June 2013. For full details of the competition and how to enter, visit http://hungryhillwriting.com/gallery.html. '

PODCAST INTERVIEW - IRISH WRITERS' CENTRE

A few weeks ago the lovely Ferdia Lennon interviewed me for the Irish Writers' Centre's podcast series about writing in general, my writing day, WIPs and my collection Mother America. The wailing gulls in the background are an added bonus - the interview took place up in the gods of the Writers' Centre and the gulls were up from the river.

Ferdia also recorded me reading 'The Egg Pyramid', a short-short from Mother America.

Previous podcast interviews available at the IWC's Soundcloud include Mike McCormack, Mary Costello and Roddy Doyle. Each one worth a listen.

MOTHER AMERICA in MAGYAR

New Island, my lovely publishers, have sold Hungarian rights to Mother America . Excitement! I may soon be BIG in Budapest :) In reality, I just can't wait to see what they do with the cover.

MOTHER AMERICA ON EDGE HILL LONGLIST

The Edge Hill longlist is out, with lots of friends' collections on there, along with Mother America : Tania Hershman's book is on it along with ones by pals Garry Craig Powell, Mary Costello, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack. Here is the list as it appears on the Edge Hill site:

Names on the long-list are as follows:
Celeste Auge - Fireproof (Doire Press). The Irish-Canadian writer won the 2011 Cuirt New Writing Prize for fiction and has won awards for her poetry.Kevin Barry - Dark Lies The Island (Jonathan Cape). Winner of last year's Sunday Times Short Story Prize and in 2007 won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.Carys Bray - Sweet Home (Salt Publishing). Winner of the 2012 Scott Prize, she also scooped the MA Creative Writing category in the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2010.Rebecca Burns - Catching The Barramundi (Odyssey Books). This is her debut collection and, keen to promote creative writing, she sits on the Steering Committee of the Grace Dieu Writers Circle in Leicestershire.Eileen Casey - Snow Shoes (Arlen House). Her prose and short fiction has won many awards including a 2010 Hennessy Literary Award. Nuala Ni Chonchur - Mother America (New Island Books). A full-time fiction writer and poet, living in Galway county, she reached the Edge Hill shortlist in 2010 with Nude.Mary Costello - The China Factory (The Stinging Fly). Published her first short story in the mid-90s and was shortlisted for a Hennessy Prize, but this is her first collection.Brindley Hallam Dennis - Talking To Owls (Pewter Rose). He edits a regular Flash Fiction slot on the Eden Arts Newsletter, Weekly Word.Ellis Ni Dhuibhne - The Shelter Of Neighbours (Blackstaff Press). Acclaimed Irish novelist and short story writer who has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.Emma Donoghue - Ashtray (Pan Macmillan). The award-winning Irish writer who now lives in Canada has been Booker Prize shortlisted.Jon Gower - Too Cold For Snow (Parthian). One of Wales's brightest literary talents, the former BBC arts and media correspondent, has published numerous books, including An Island Called Smith, winner of the John Morgan Travel Award.Tania Hershman - My Mother Was An Upright Piano (Tangent Books). The former science journalist is currently writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University and is founder of online journal The Short Review.James Marytn Joyce - What's Not Said (Arleen House). The former Barna National School principal from Ireland has been nominated for a number of short story awards and has had work featured on BBC Radio Four.Jackie Kay - Reality, Reality (Pan Macmillan). The Scottish poet and novelist has been shortlisted for a number of awards including the first year of the Edge Hill Prize 2007.Adam Marek - The Stone Thrower (Comma Press). Winner of the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship, he was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award.Mike McCormack - Forensic Songs (The Lilliput Press). The Irish author was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1996 and Notes From A Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006.Jon McGregor - This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You (Bloomsbury). The novelist won the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's largest literary prize for a novel written in English.Joseph O'Connor - Where Have You Been (Harvill Secker). Former journalist and Irish novelist widely known for his acclaimed novel Star of the Sea.Ryan O'Neill - The Weight of the Human Heart (Old Street Publishing Ltd). Having taught for several years in Lithuania, China, Rwanda and Australia, the British writer now works at the University of Newcastle, Australia and is fiction co-editor for Etchings.Wendy Perriman - Second Sex (Robert Hale Ltd). Expelled from her convent school for hearsay, Oxford-educated Perriman is the author of 17 novels and six short story collections.Dave Pescod - All Embracing And Other Stories (Route Books). A comedy writer, he has won the Suffolk Short Story Competition and his work has been published in literary magazines and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Jonathan Pinnock, Dot Dash (Salt Publishing). He leads a dual life both as a writer of fiction and non-fiction and running a software development company.Garry Craig Powell - Stoning the Devil (Skylight Press). A fiction writer and professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Arkansas.Wayne Price - Furnace (Freight Books). As Runner-up in the 2010 Bridport Prize and the Scotland on Sunday/Macallan Short Story Competition, this is his first collection to be published. Jane Rogers - Hitting Trees With Sticks (Comma Press). A scriptwriter and Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University she is best known for novels Mr Wroe's Virgins and The Voyage Home. In 1994 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.Cynthia Rogerson - Stepping Out (Salt Publishing). Her short stories have been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio. She won the V.S. Pritchett Prize in 2008 and is a Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Author.Royston Tester - Fatty Goes To China (Tightrope Books). A freelance editor, after immigrating to Canada from England in 1978 his work has been published globally.Douglas Thompson - Entanglement (Elsewhere Press). Winner of the Grolsch/Herald Question of Style Award in 1989 and second prize in the Neil Gunn Writing Competition in 2007.Sam Thompson - Communion Town (Fourth Estate). Teaching English at St Anne's College, Oxford, he writes for the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books and The Guardian.Guy Ware - You Have 24 Hours To Love Us (Comma Press). Having worked with homeless ex-offenders before training as a public finance accountant, he has published stories in anthologies.John Walsh - Border Lines (Doire Press). The London-Irish writer is organiser of North Beach Poetry Nights in Galway and co-director of Doire Press, a small literary press in the west of Ireland.Gee Williams - A Girl's Arm (Salt Publishing). A widely-published poet and a dramatist, many of her scripts have been broadcast by BBC Radio 4. She has won both The Rhys Davies and The Book Pl@ce Contemporary Short Story awards.Joel Williams - Spellbound (Route Books). The English born writer sets many of his stories in Finland where he is based.Tony Williams - All The Bananas I've Never Eaten (Salt Publishing). A poetry and prose fiction writer, he teaches creative writing at Northumbria University, but previously worked as an environmental charity worker and custodian of a disused lead mine. Sue Wilsea - Staying Afloat (Valley Press). Her writing has been widely published and performed, with accolades including being one of nine writers labelled ‘New and Gifted' by the Jerwood/Arvon Foundation in 2010.DW Wilson - Once You Break A Knuckle (Bloomsbury). The 2011 winner of the National Short Story Prize also regularly appears in literary magazines globally.Lucy Wood - Diving Belles (Bloomsbury). With an MA in Creative Writing, she grew up in Cornwall and this is her first work.

DAVE LORDAN INTERVIEW

Dave Lordan is the first writer to win Ireland’s three national prizes for young poets. He is a former holder of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award and previous winner of both the Patrick Kavanagh and Strong Awards for poetry. He has won wide acclaim for his writing and is a renowned performer of his own work, with the Irish Times calling him ‘as brilliant on the page as he is in performance’.
His first short fiction collection First Book of Frags is now available from Wurm Press and will be launched by Seán O'Reilly on the 20th April in Dublin, in McGrattan's, Baggot Street.
I've read the book and it is really an extraordinary set of stories: provocative, innovative and very well written. I found shades of Joyce and Angela Carter in there. I'm delighted to interview Dave today about his frags.

The first thing that will strike anyone is the title, First Book of Frags. It’s clearly a unifying title as there is no story of that name in the collection. Tell us how you came up with the book’s name.
Definition of A Frag
1: A remnant out of which a whole or wholes may be speculated, but not reconstructed. A Frag is not a Fragtal. The relationship(s) of a frag to a whole or wholes is complex and necessarily phantasmagoric. It is possible that there is no relationship: A part with no whole to go to. Nor is a frag required to be internally consistent either structurally or hermeneutically. Its own constituent parts may therefore make no sense, or at least no immediate sense, in relation to one another.
2: A sign and/or element of decay, impending collapse, mutation, transformation.
3: Of or related to Fragging, the mutinous practice of the lower ranks executing their officers. vb reg. To Frag e.g Major Woodburn was fragged last night when the men put a grenade into his pillowcase while he was sleeping.
4: A piece of shrapnel or debris, including organic debris, left over after an explosion.
5: A fragment of any kind.
6: A piece of Atheological scripture or a script based Atheological divining method sometimes employing automatic writing and sense disruption techniques in order to attempt communication with, or attempt to represent, that which and/or those whom cannot concretely exist and must therefore be imagined into being instead.
7:  A literary form drawing on any, some, or all of the above definitions.

You refer to the book as ‘experimental’. The stories are a diverse mix of contemporary and historical, and there is a variety of tones and narrative styles. What they are bound by is the way they unsettle the reader – you don’t shy from the raw, the savage, the dark. Is it important to you as a writer to explore cruelty and to do it in a variety of ways?
The stories are experimental in the sense that I didn’t know what they would turn out like when I started writing them and they aren’t based, consciously at least, on any existing fictional blueprint. All I knew was I wanted to write fiction according to my own logic and wishes (I don't really know or trust anyone else's), and I think I have succeeded in that. I’m glad you found the Frags unsettling. I’m not here to comfort people or put them asleep with  lullaby. I think a writer has to be someone who warns and awakens, even if it’s cold and hard labour we’re awakening to. Although I think this book unsettles more by what it makes its readers laugh at then by anything else. 
The story ‘Fucking Titanic’ is very moving. Were you influenced by last year’s Titanic-mania, or was the story an antidote to that? What about the title? 
It's an angry title. I was angered by the pageantry. Pageantry dishonours the dead and obscures them. If the dead could speak there would be no more pageantry or commemorations. So the piece is an anti-pageant, a counter-parade, if you will. The  film maker Eamon Crudden has made an inspired scratch video of it which you can watch here, and the text is online at Irish Left Review.
You teach creative writing in a variety of settings (schools/adults/third level etc.). How does that add to (or take from) your own practice? When do you get to write? 
Teaching and writing are completely different in many respects. I do both, and I enjoy both. I write when I get a chance and when I feel moved to write. The best thing about teaching is helping other people find the words and the ways to say what they want and need to say creatively, the best thing about writing is doing things your own way and in your own words. So I guess that commitment to exploring and encouraging free creativity is what links the two practices for me.
You recently held the Ireland Chair of Poetry and are known as a performance poet with a social conscience. When it comes to performing your fiction at readings etc. how will performance feature? Do poetry and fiction performance differ hugely? 
They don’t differ hugely in my case. The fiction has grown out the poetry for me. I enjoy performing my work and always give it everything I’ve got. I'm lucky to receive countless and constant invitations to read my work in all sorts of venues and festivals and so on and I alsways to my best to repay the compliment of the invitation with a show that everyone will remember for a long time. I really enjoy entertaining people and I love interacting with audiences, whether it's irritating them or uplifting them I am. 
Which fiction writers make you think, ‘Yes!’?
Joyce, Barthelme, Cervantes. Faulker, Bolano, Borges, Acker.....experimental modernists in general
Any advice for aspiring writers?
Yes: Get High.
Writer Dave Lordan