My Next Big Thing

 My Next Big Thing

Thank you to my neighbour and award-winning writer, Celeste Augé, who has invited me to the on-line blogging chain called The Next Big Thing: a series of questions about a writer’s forthcoming project. I’m not sure where it started but the idea is great fun. As well as helping you to focus on work in progress it is also a way for readers to get a sense of your work. And you get to tag someone else. A worthwhile New Year’s resolution. My next big thing is my third short story collection. It's great to be another link in the literary chain.

.

What is the working title of your book? 
Hellkite.  It  encompasses the overall theme of the book as there are a number of cruel characters in it. It also picks up on the bird motif which flies in and out through the pages.

Where did the idea come from for the book?  
With a minimum of sixteen stories, ideas come from diverse places. They come unbidden, from an image, a foreign city, a chance encounter with a stranger or a dream fragment. These images hook into me and will not let go until I start to put flesh on them; they become a living thing; they take up their beds and walk.

What genre does your book fall under?
 I don’t think it will be found on the self-help shelf.  More like self-destruct.  These are character-driven stories so they would be in the literary fiction genre.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?     One of the stories called Frost Heave which was a winner in the Willesden Short Story Competition 2012 has a dark, laconic character called Folan. Night and the bitterness so much in his mouth that Folan could taste his own liver. I think after watching him in Taken, Liam Neeson would be my man. I have a really strong image of him holed up in the hen house with his shotgun cocked waiting for the mink to come slinking by to bloodlet his chickens. Folan is taking no more.  Poor Mink! 

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
The hearts of men

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?  
This collection has been five years in the making. I published The Weight of Feathers in 2007 and have published two poetry collections in the meantime: An Urgency of Stars (Arlen House 2009) and my collaboration with Connecticut poet, Lisa C Taylor, The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House 2011).  It’s time these birds stretched their wings.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
 I have no idea. I will leave that up to the reader.

 Who or what inspired you to write this book?
The characters who keep turning up and knocking at the door of my imagination. That,  and my love of the short story genre.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?  
Because most of the stories are from the male perspective, where few of the female hellkites end up smelling of roses, it was a particular challenge to write. 

When and how will it be published? 

Galway County Council has been very supportive of the collection over the last two years and has awarded me a grant and a residency to work on the stories to get them to this point. My publisher, Alan Hayes, one of the best publishers in the land, has been very patient with me and come hell or high water it will appear at the end of this year from Arlen House.

I’m delighted to be able to tag Jacqueline M Loring and Lisa C Taylor who will blog on 16^th January.

Jacqueline M. Loring poet and screenwriter, New Mexico, who was winner of the Doire Press International Chapbook competition 2012 for her debut poetry collection: The History of Bearing Children.

 

Lisa C. Taylor, poet and teacher from Connecticut. Shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize and nominated for the L.L. Winship Pen New England Award, Lisa has four collections of poetry, her most recent, Necessary Silence, from Arlen House will be launched in the US in February 2012.

. 

What I looked at, what I saw

I was returning home from Dublin to Galway, on the bus that links cities from east to west. I was so busy reading about poetry that I didn’t see the lines calling out to me as head bent I whizzed by them. The book told me about watching and listening, yet I didn’t see the stanzas of fields that had no stones and so they planted trees for boundaries, girded them with alder and hawthorn, or sometimes staked with sheep wire, to keep the animals in.

I must have missed a dozen poems on that journey while busily turning another page: The rook that preened his fan of wing so close, only a pane of glass between us; the rush of grass in a meadow; the wave of a sycamore by a rusted gate, elderflower fruiting. I failed to see the crone of beech across a ditch, all gnarled and withered, bent over, leaning into futility.

There were trees sawn back, holding their amputated arms to the sky in surrender, cows sitting, waiting for the rain. So engrossed was I in the rudiments of verse making, I failed to notice the lean fragments of stone emerge somewhere between Athlone and Ballinasloe, then home beginning to form in the build up of its dry stone walls.

I lost them all, while the book I was reading ‘on freeing the writer within’ told me that the question was: not what I looked at, but what I saw.

 

Stanzaberry

When I first visited my friend Lisa C.Taylor in Connecticut some years ago, it was October and Mulberry Road was a paint box of the richest colours. There was one tree outside her front door that caught my attention every morning. No one could tell me what it was called so I wrote the following poem in order to name it.

STANZABERRY

for Lisa and Russ

You bribed the leaves to hang on till I came

so I could read them in the way

they have come to shape you,

otherwise you would have to climb each tree

stitch them back up there,

match each leaflet and lobe to its own.

But they clung on for me to see butter melt,

claret spill onto branches just above my head,

persimmon leaves flaunt their brilliance

all along the Fenton river, the Grist Mill,

Horse Barn Hill, where I heard Canada geese

spearhead their going in a startle of blue.

Here I learned the argument of squirrel

that tight-roped its way across the limb of tree,

malachite lichen on the house-side of trunk,

autumn rushing ahead of me on the road, while

each morning in the warm nest of my room

I woke to the New World,

carrying dawn to my window

in a rose glow, blush, uplift of light,

− a shrub that you had no name for −,

but I have crossed an ocean to see it, so

I call it giftberry, carnaberry, stanzaberry.

Now thanks to Marc Kronisch, I have this beautiful photograph and an identification. Garden lovers will recognise it as Euonymus alata. It's common name is  Burning Bush.  It's poet name: Stanzaberry. Thank you Marc.  It is published in The Other Side of Longing (Arlen House, 2011) my collaboration with Lisa.

INSTAR

           Instar

Before your daughter gets to the stage,

where she is the nothing between egg and bird,

take her to the edge of the mountain

light a fire, daub her skin with charcoal,

feed her bitter berries, the milk of dandelion.

Teach her the lore of the fox,

the wisdom of weather. Wish for her:

a spare button for her jacket,

loose change in her purse,

the taste of moon on her tongue,

a lake to mirror her eyes,

St Jude when things seem hopeless,

St Anthony when she is lost,

St Cecilia when she needs to sing,

to keep from missing

the sure heart rhythm of the womb.

Scorned as Timber Beloved of the Sky

  

This photo taken near our home by Peter Moore reminds me of the  work of the great Canadian artist, Emily Carr.

“Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky” is one of my favourite oil paintings by her. This little old lady ‘on the edge of nowhere’ as she called herself, started her life painting people, first nations villages and totems. She ended up expressing on canvas the great forests and vast skies of her beloved British Columbia where she was born in 1871.

‘Scorned as Timber’ was painted after a visit to a great forest in 1935.  The canvas is dominated by a tall spindly pine tree. It is one of the badly shaped trees rejected by the woodcutter in favour of the pencil straight trunks that had long since been turned into telephone poles, houses, churches. This useless tree is surrounded by trees stumps, that Carr referred to as ‘screamers’.  These ‘screamers’ to her were the cry of the tree’s heart before it gave that sway and dreadful groan of falling.

This lone pine sends its branches up out of the forest. It reaches towards the heavens with a corona of bright light radiating from it and filling the canvas like a great symbol of hope.

In many ways this ‘scorned one’ is a portrait of Carr herself. Like the lone tree she made her way as an unconventional artist, struggling against adverse criticism. She always strove for what was above with no one to support or encourage her. Her unfailing belief in her own art meant that by the time she came to paint the tree with its bright circle of hope, she was widely recognised as one of Canada’s most significant artists.

 Search her out.

Shoreline Arts Festival

SHORELINES ARTS FESTIVAL
PORTUMNA Sept 20^th-23rd

BOOK BRUNCH

Saturday Sept 22^nd

Upstairs @ Dysons Restaurant Portumna

11.30-1.30pm

€10 (including brunch)

A call to all you book worms, book thieves, library lizards, book eaters, secret kindlers……

Share a Book You Want the World to read:

You have a 5 minute window of brunch time to convince those around the table that YOUR choice of book MUST be read!

Join in A Bookish Quiz and be in for a stack of prizes.

Share the obsession! Be with other people who love books too.

Booking Recommended

Call Ruth @ 086 339 2810

www.shorelinesartsfestival.com

Andreas Nossmann

Memories of a Residency

‘This afternoon has gone mad with figs and heated sounds,’ the poet Lorca wrote and so it has. This blast of Irish heat over the last few days reminds me of my first international residency, Fundación Valparaiso, in Mojacar in the southeast of Andalucia that I had the great fortune to experience some eighteen months ago. It provides food and board and a working space to artists every month for ten months of the year. 

 I was given the room named after Lorca, with sleeping area, workspace and balcony that looked up towards the pueblo with its white, cubed houses stacked high on the side of the mountain. Sebastian was in the garden, cutting down the almond trees. Their blackened trunks, destroyed in  the previous year’s fire were being reduced to logs of almond fuel. His chainsaw whined in the hot, Spanish air. Blue fell through my open window.

There were eight of us, six visual artists, one composer and me, the only writer. People  travelled from as far apart as the Ural Mountains in Russia to Vancouver Island in Canada and many countries in between. We met up for pre-dinner tapas and took the first tentative steps towards fellowship. We were served cockles and mussels and squid, its ink dark enough to write with.  We broke bread together, pan, brot, chleb. A gecko took the last rays of heat from the wall. I could hear the crickets singing each to each.

Morning came, gilding the tiles of my floor, and from across the balcony, Iris the Slovak composer had already started the first notes of her new composition.  I headed out into the world of figs ripening, red peppers drying on the path. On the dusty walkways around the residency I saw the devastation of the fire of the summer before that swept down from Holy Mountain and consumed the valley.  The pomegranate tree held up charred arms still bearing its exploded wine apples, their claret jewels turned to ash. The branches of an almond tree clutched onto their last, sooty harvest. I cracked one impermeable shell; the nut still firm though held an aftertaste of conflagration.  At a neighbouring house, a scorched, skeleton cactus tried to make good its escape, by pushing its only green prickly shoot through the iron bars of the gate.  I walked back to my room and wrote.

In studios opening onto the arid landscape I got a glimpse of how this terrain informed my companions’ paintings that they pinned to the walls of  their studios, dogs, stones, scorpions.  Searching for a common language, we worked with whatever words we had in common as our minds became alive to the possibilities, the difficulties of communication.  How did I get across what I wanted to say: please, bitte, por favor.  Thank you, danke schön, spasiba. The wind came up at midday, shutters slammed shut.  Ideas blew away; I ran after them and tried to tie them down in my room that looked out on the mountain with its rich Moorish past.  Hungry for stories, for images, the words came, eating up the blank screen. They crept out of shadows or flew in on the wing of an egret to drop temptation at my hands. With the urgency of fire I wrote as I had never written before. I set alight an idea across that arid landscape of page, and watched the white swallow it up. ‘This is no small gift,’ I said to myself, ‘this space that I have been given.’