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Dec
05

NaNoWriMo – The Final Roundup – by Grace Tierney

My annual novel-writing adventure is over. I finished my last chapter and 51,398 words on the 29th of November, which means I’ve won NaNoWriMo for the third time. Many other writers in my region have won too. 40,000 people worldwide wrote a novel in a month this year. Even those who wrote a few thousand words have won the challenge in my opinion, for daring to try.

As ML (municipal liaison) for Ireland NorthEast I’ve spent the last couple of days celebrating with my writers and planning for next year.

We held an online Thank Goodness It’s Over Party (TGIO) just after midnight on the 30th. I got to dance the jive with an imaginary Pierce Brosnan at that one! We held our real-world TGIO on the evening of the 1st of December. We chatted about our novels, what we plan to do next, and ate lots of chocolate.

Planning for next year is two-fold. As ML, I’m planning an October Plot Party in 2012 where we’ll plan our novels. A teacher in my region who runs a creative-writing club is hoping to run the NaNoWriMo Young Writers Programme too. The younger writers set their own word count goal (usually a bit smaller than 50K so it doesn’t compromise their schoolwork) and then dive in. It’s an amazing way to support the writers of tomorrow.

With my writer hat on I’ve been thinking about what I learnt this month. In 2007 I learnt I could write daily. In 2008 I learnt outlining in advance really helps me. In 2009 I won for the first time and became ML, but had to recognise my story didn’t work. In 2010 I learnt that I loved writing younger characters and discovered the limitations of having a ghost as a character. This year I learnt that I need more action in my plots. Also I had huge fun trying a new genre (children’s adventure fiction).

Are you tempted to join us in NaNoWriMo 2012? If so, jot it in your diary for October 2012 (for outlining and research). Then sign up today at www.nanowrimo.org so you get the introductory emails next year. We’d love to have you aboard!

Now excuse me, but I need to start printing my Nano children’s novel for my kids’ Christmas present. Then I need to finish and revise my 2010 Nano novel…before it’s November, again.

Grace Tierney (www.gracetierney.com) writes in Meath. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She is the Ireland North East organiser for Nano (www.NaNoWriMo.org). Now that Nano 2011 is over she’s revising her second women’s fiction novel (started in Nano 2010). She blogs about unusual words at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/.

Nov
28

Frank X. Buckley’s Address on November 24th.

In the first place I would like to thank Jack Harte the current chairman of the Board of the centre who’s commitment to it in recent years is unparalleled and who initiated this celebration. He was among the first to advocate a centre for Irish writers. In 1991 he negotiated with Mat McNulty a joint project, An Irish Writers’ Centre. Mat was then in the process of setting up the Dublin Writers Museum next door. For some time Jack had been concerned about the facilities and services available for Irish writers. He founded the Irish Writers’ Union in 1987. He secured from the government a commitment to make a building available for such a centre and got a promise of some funding from the National Lottery too. Jack came forward again in 2009 when the Arts Council ceased to support the centre and it was in danger of foundering. His skill and determination has given it new life.

It is more than twenty years since I first became involved with the project that was to become the Irish Writers Centre. Mat McNulty whom I knew through Skal, the fellowship of people working in the Irish tourism and hospitality industry was responsible for drawing me in. As CEO of Dublin Tourism he had already put his mark on Malahide Castle, The Martello Tower in Sandycove, associated with Joyce’s Ulysses, and Shaw’s birthplace in Synge Street and helped to save them as part of our cultural heritage. But he was especially interested in the Georgian period, its buildings and furniture. These two beautiful Georgian buildings were in peril. They had been vacated some years previously by the VEC who had moved their marketing school to larger premises on Mountjoy Square. Their peril proved an opportunity for Dublin Tourism to restore the buildings and to give them a new future in the Dublin Writers Museum and an Irish Writers Centre. It was Dublin’s year as European City of Culture. The project would provide “a hub and a centrepiece to make access to our rich literary heritage more accessible and more tangible”. Dublin needed and deserved a museum to honour its many writers of world renown and the whole of Ireland would benefit from a centre to promote its writers and help improve their craft.

I was excited by the possibility of assisting the project by lending some paintings to complement the building and enrich the experience of visiting it and working in it. The humane influence of the paintings would help to transform an empty house into a home for writers and contribute to the efforts of the team which was being assembled to work here. Dublin Tourism had managed the restoration of the buildings. Its subsidiary, The Writers Museum, next door was involved in the development. In those days before the Centre was up and running there was a very close connection between the museum’s building and the centre’s; an interconnecting door on the second floor opened to a push and the director of the museum oversaw this building
too. That is how the paintings came to be given on loan to Dublin Tourism – Dublin Writers Museum but with the intention that they were to be placed in the Irish Writers Centre. The loan became a gift when a few years later I had become ill and faced my own mortality. I believe now that my involvement in that giving contributed in no small way to my management of the illness and thereafter to resume collecting paintings again.

The pleasure of collecting has many aspects. There is the chase, the search, the finding, the badgering, the bargaining, the negotiating of terms, the acquiring. There is the delight in the acquisition, its installing at home, enjoying its presence. There is the study and understanding of its background, its style, its creative process, the acquaintance with the artist, sometimes developing into friendship. But then there is the added delight if sharing one’s pleasure with friends and others, in sharing paintings which have become precious and personal. Those who really enjoy art invariably wish to expand their appreciation and introduce others to the experience. have been greatly enriched by those who have generously influenced me in the past and I’m immensely grateful to them for that. These beautiful paintings have given me great joy over many years and it has meant even more to me that I have been able to share them with the people who frequent the centre. I am grateful for that too. I hope that they will inspire many more in they future as the centre goes from strength to strength.

Towards concluding may I also be bold enough to suggest to the Minister responsible for the Arts, Minister Dennehy, that he might look to the vacant derelict buildings on this side of Parnell Square to restore and develop them as the major centre for services to Irish literature. The old parliament buildings serve their present function very well and thousands of people, Irishmen and tourists, visit them every day in the course of their banking, business and private to enjoy and admire them and appreciate their history.  I find it a welcome distraction in dealing with my own sorry finances when I
go there.

And then finally, I would like to thank Sarah Symes and her colleagues, all of whom work voluntarily here who have organised the event. I offer a special word of thanks to the artists whose works form part of this collection, the first paintings I purchased and among them those who have participated in the evening, those who responded to the paintings in poetry and prose; and you who have come and by your presence have honoured me greatly. You make me realise all the more that in giving I am really the recipient. Thank you.

Frank X Buckley

24 November 2011

Nov
22

NaNoWriMo – Week Three – Going Crazy by Grace Tierney

A writing friend accused me yesterday of borrowing Hermione Grainger’s time-turner in order to write this much in one month. I would love a time-turner!

I’m just back in the door from our region’s Sunday Night Write-in. I wrote 550 words, which is a help as yet again I’m behind on word-count. I’ve got 28,788 words written. I’m 5000 words off target.

Those are 28,788 words I probably wouldn’t have written this month without NaNo. It’s ten thousand more than I wrote in 2007 when I tried NaNo for the first time. But it’s not enough. This time last year I had already passed the 50,000 word finish line. My final word count was 74,000 words in 2010. But I wasn’t working part-time in 2010. I wasn’t training to become a Beaver scout leader. And I didn’t have mid-term or my entire immediate family falling ill during November either.

That’s the problem with a month-long writing challenge. Life happens during the month, whether you like it or not.

I asked my writers tonight to sum up their week three. “Like a cyclone”, “mental – but good”, “hellish”.  So much for my theory that week three is a dream, an easy run-in to the final finish-line. That only works if you’re well on top of your word count, and most of us aren’t.

However spirits remain high. We’ve cheered on the writers who’ve passed the halfway point this week (well done Maera, Barroc, Scribblerbug, MariaM, MariaH and others). We’re all still confident that we can manage the 50K by midnight on November 30th. In fact I’m going to host a “woo-hoo, we did it” chat on our regional NaNoWriMo forum just after midnight, as I’m convinced I’ll write up to the wire.

That deadline is the whole point of NaNo really. Having a deadline makes you write. Every reporter knows that.

So tonight we worked out how we’d like to celebrate finishing NaNo. We’ll be throwing a traditional Thank Goodness It’s Over Party (or TGIO) on the 1st of December. It’s a social gathering, where for once we don’t write. We’ll swop war-stories of late-night writing, ignored housework, and runaway plots. We’ll rejoice that the month is over and think about the draft completion, revisions, and editing which lie ahead for those of us who write year-round.

December 1st is just ten days away. Thanks to tonight’s brain-storming – as a writer I have clues to lead my heroes to the treasure and the final showdown with the grave-robbers, and as a Municipal Liaison for Ireland NorthEast I have a time, date, and venue for our TGIO parties, both online and virtual. Ten days. 20,662 words still to write. Me, my laptop, and my imagination. Wish me luck.

Grace Tierney (www.gracetierney.com) writes in Meath. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She is the Ireland North East organiser for Nano (www.NaNoWriMo.org) and actually enjoys the challenge of writing 50,000 words in just one month. After Nano 2011 she will complete her second chick-lit novel. She blogs on unusual words at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/.

Nov
16

NaNoWriMo – Week Two – The Art of Catch Up by Grace Tierney

Haven’t started yet? Way behind on word-count?

Me too. Which is why I tried all the Nano Tricks this week.

  1. I went to the Write-In

This is an in-person meeting of writers from the same region where we sit around, chat a little, and write a lot. It’s like a date with your novel. The Nano statistics elves claim attending write-ins massively increases your chances of writing 50,000 words.

It worked. I clocked up 1,240 words, handwritten. I discovered everybody else has already scoffed the chocolate I put in our kick-off-kits for consumption after passing 50,000 words. I met a twelve year old who’s writing a novel. She’s marginally too young for official Nano (participants must be 13+ to register) but she made me jealous of her amazing plot and writing confidence.

  1. I followed my own advice

I finished my target word count before writing this blog post, because just for November, novel-writing comes first.

  1. I promised myself a prize

There are a few perks of “winning” Nano. The one I like the best, apart from the amazing feeling of having done it, is the Createspace offer. This American print-on-demand company print a copy of your book, privately, for you to have on your shelf as proof of this crazy adventure. This year they will charge postage, but they are giving five copies which is just enough for my two kids, my two godsons, and one for my shelf. Perfect Christmas gifts. It’s not limited to your Nano novel or to 50,000 words. It could be your self-published poetry collection, a double-spaced draft copy for you to edit on, or simply one to lend to people who don’t “get” this novel thing. Writers in my region have done all of the above.

  1. I joined The All Ireland Word War

The provincial team with the highest average word count wins. Writing – a team sport. Who would have predicted that?

  1. I fell in love with some characters, a wild pony, and an evil Garda

In my story, I mean! My outline is filling up. The story is starting to take over. Ideas are popping into my head at odd moments. This is the power of writing every day.

  1. I challenged other writers to race me via the forums

I wrote 5,940 words today. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before. But now, finally, I’m on target with 15,000 words so far. This is priceless.

Week two is when many writers quit Nano. Halfway is so distant. All I can say is that week three rocks. You’ll be on the downhill slope. Just slog on through week two. It gets easier, honest.

Grace Tierney (www.gracetierney.com) writes in Meath. Her work has been published internationally in print and online. She is the Ireland North East organiser for Nano (www.NaNoWriMo.org) and actually enjoys the challenge of writing 50,000 words in just one month. After Nano 2011 she will complete her second chick-lit novel. She blogs on unusual words at http://wordfoolery.wordpress.com/.

Nov
03

NaNoWriMo – Week One – Yes, it is possible by Grace Tierney

“You’re doing WHAT?” is the most common response when I mention that I spend my Novembers writing 50,000 word novels.

The second most common response is “I started writing a novel once”.

National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org), or Nano to its friends (and there are more than 2,000 of those in Ireland this year), is a 30 day challenge to yourself to write 50,000 words of fiction in just 30 days. There’s no prize except the most important one – knowing that you can do it.

Chris Baty started this crazy idea in America in 1999. It has since become a worldwide challenge to writers from age 13 upwards.

This is my fifth year. In 2007 I wrote 17,000 words, with two pre-schoolers underfoot. I was hooked. I completed and revised that chick-lit novel afterwards and it’s out seeking a publisher at the moment. In 2008 I managed a more respectable 35,000 words and began to feel that 50K was actually possible.

But 2009 was when I dove right in and signed up to be a Municipal Liaison (regional organiser) for Ireland NorthEast (http://www.northeastnovellists.wordpress.com). I encourage writers across my area (Meath, Louth, Cavan, and Monaghan). I host writing parties, hand out Nano stickers, moderate our online forum, circulate pep emails, oh yeah, and try to write 50,000 words in my spare time.

Amazingly, despite the ML volunteer job, I crossed the finish line, along with nine other writers in my region. One of whom was only 15 years old. The feeling was immense, plus I’d learnt I could churn out 2,000 words of rough draft in just two hours, especially when I wrote every day. By 2010 that meant I cruised to 75,000 words.

Since then our still small region has grown to over 200 writers (other regions in Ireland cover Dublin, Galway, Northern Ireland, NorthWest, SouthEast, and the catch-all Elsewhere). This year we have sub-groups in Dundalk IT and young writers in Waterstone’s Drogheda.

But back to week one. I’ve started, which is the hardest part. I’ve a patchy outline for a children’s adventure story and some character notes. But I’m already behind on word count (only 2,093 vs. the target of 5,000 by today). Having extra work and volunteer commitments and kids on mid-term break is not helping. Add in a vomiting bug (him) and a chesty cough (me and her) and I’m in trouble. But once they return to school and I can write in the mornings again, those words will accumulate. I’ll keep you posted.

It’s only day 3. There’s still plenty of time to join us. You need ideas, words, and a few hours. Write on the train. Write in the waiting room. Write during your lunchbreak. Stop watching those soap operas for a few weeks. Imagine characters during your shower. Scribble notes on receipts. Let a novel take over your brain this month. You won’t regret it.

Oct
23

The Lonely Voice: Short Story Introductions, Winners Announced!

 

We are delighted to announce our October winners of The Lonely Voice: Short Story Introductions, our ongoing monthly short story event for emerging fiction writers. They are (in no particular order): Mary Rose McCarthy, Carol Brick, Sheela Armstrong, and Maebh Ni Chathalain. Congratulations all! 

Come along to the Irish Writers’ Centre at 7pm on Wednesday, October 26th where you can enjoy a glass of wine in our reading room and hear these writers reading their prize-winning stories. This is a free event and everyone is welcome! It promises to be a great evening.

Our judge this month was John McKenna, author of ‘The Fallen and other stories’ (1992), which won the Irish Times First Fiction Award, ‘A Year of Our Lives, (London Picador, 1995), ‘The Last Fine Summer (London, Picador, 1998), ‘Things You Should Know’ (New Island, 2006), ‘The River Field’ (New Island 2007) and ‘The Space Between Us’ (New Island 2009). A big thank you to John for reading the entries and providing critical feedback for the winners.

John had the following to say about the winning entires:

We Came Home by Mary Rose Mc Carthy – I thought this story worked really, really well and what I liked most about it was the nuanced way the writer managed to strike moments of great softness and then moments of harshness. This isn’t always easy to do well but it was done beautifully in this story. The narrative voice is also strong and definite – yet full of subtlety-  and all without being overbearing.

The Outsider by Carol Brick – A wonderful piece of writing about love and loss and memory and returning. The narrative voice caught me from the first paragraph and one of the successes of this writer’s work is his/her ability to take you under the skin and behind the eyes of the narrator and let you see and, more importantly, feel the remembered joys and the ongoing loss in her life.

Weeds by Sheela Armstrong – Again, the narrative voice is strong, clear, effective and beautifully realised. There’s an air of bitter-sweetness in this story. A wonderful clash of the individual and society but also the discomfort of a child caught between a strong and determined parent and the perception society has of that parent. Landscape plays an equally important part in the story and its inclusion is captured with subtlety and skill.

Forgotten Bodies  Maebh Ni Chathalain / Maebh Culhane – A brave, challenging, beautiful and brutal exploration of the relationship between a body and its owner/ dweller. Written with strength and grace and honesty – and a refusal to bow to the lure of the sentimental or the maudlin. This story makes for uneasy reading in absolutely the best sense of that idea – it dares us to stay with it and to see things through to the end.

John also had this piece of general advice to offer:

“Good wishes to all of the writers – I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of the stories, those chosen and those shortlisted - and I wish them every success with their work.

One word I’d like to offer to the writers - DISCIPLINE. Every day – for whatever time you have – twenty minutes or three hours – write. Treat your writing seriously, it’s not a hobby, it’s a vocation and a job. Be disciplined.”

Aug
24

Another one of those the book is dead posts (sigh)

I mentioned in my last post that I spent a number of years out of Ireland when I went back to college and studied for a Masters and then a PhD in Creative Writing. This involved spending time in a variety of rented (and borrowed) accommodation, usually surrounded by books and always by the sort of creative clutter I appear to require in any writing space I inhabit. The number of books surrounding me seemed to increase mysteriously and exponentially over the four or so years I was away; when first leaving Dublin, I only brought with me those books that seemed vital to my creative process: Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town, my collected Kavanagh, all the Kerrie Hardie collections I had to hand and Raymond Carver’s A New Path to the Waterfall, to name a few. But added to these were the results of all the visits to second hand bookshops, antiquarian booksellers and charity shops that crossed my paths in Norwich, Paris and Bangor (quite the jetsetter, was I). I seem to remember owning several copies of Richard Ellman’s masterful biography of James Joyce (the most common book to turn up in a second hand store, I discovered), a copy of Mrs Beeton and several beautifully bound copies of obscure Victorian poets and novelists.

I came to inhabit the new places I lived through familiarising myself with their bookquarters; Norwich may have disappointed on so  many other levels, but that little area around the cathedral, where antique shops jostled with booksellers along the narrow medieval streets, remains one of my most vivid memories of the city. Paris was all about the second hand, English-language bookstores; I was spending four months in a top-floor apartment with no television and only French-language radio, so I fell upon the Red Wheelbarrow and, naturally, Shakespeare & Co, with all the fervour of a gourmand having finished the Atkins Diet. I read voraciously and indiscriminately, and the piles of books grew higher and higher around my desk by the window. Of course, when, after four months, I had to leave the little deux piece with several scores of bags of books (and a few clothes), family members and friends were called upon to provide a mule service and bring cases of them home. To my eternal shame, I never called upon the one friend of a friend who’d kindly brought a batch home with her to retrieve those books. How cavalier was I with what I thought was an inexhaustible resource.

But how things have changed. I read this yesterday  and discover that the days of books are not only numbered, they are actually in the minus sign already. The advent of digital technology, the proliferation of electronic media, has put paid to the art of book printing for ever, so it would seem. We are now embracing our e-readers, our kindles and our iphones, and forgetting for ever the dusty smell of old paper, the velvet rub of aged leather binding. And this notion profoundly depresses me; I’d have never have gotten the feel for Norwich or Bangor or Paris if I’d been wandering around, head down in some screen or other. Technology has its uses, but its tyranny is to take our eyes and senses away from the world around us, and to focus us into a small narrow square of plastic and flashing cursors. The book, on the other hand, has the tangible link with everything that has gone before it – previous owners, the atmosphere of the second shelf down in the rare books section, the faint whiff of whatever coffee stained the fly-leaf.

And yes, I am aware that by writing this blog (and not trying to publish a pamphlet somewhere to post on the gates of Trinity College) I am participating in the electronic media phenomenon that is threatening to make my beloved books extinct. But this little screen I’m typing into is still surrounded by books and magazines, the floor around me is still covered with volumes that have been exciting me for decades, for months, for days.

I’d love to hear from others about their favourite bookshops, or best book finds – you’d never get the same charge from a kindle, unless you accidentally dropped a cup of water on one!

Good reading

Nessa

Aug
04

Writing Home: Irish Writing at home and abroad

Beaumaris and the Straits

Belinda McKeon, whose fine first novel Solace has just been published by Picador, has a fascinating piece on today’s Irish Times about the process of writing the novel, entirely Irish and Ireland-based, whilst living in Brooklyn. You can read it here: http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0804/1224301812213.html

Reading her article, McKeon brought me back to the only time I’ve lived abroad for a prolonged period, which was during the years 2002-2006, when I went back to College, to do a Masters in Creative Writing and, because it felt like a natural progression at the time, a PhD. My ‘abroad’ was no further than the UK, first Norwich, then three gloriously happy years on the island of Anglesey. But although it wasn’t very far in terms of nautical miles (a mere 2 hour ferry journey), it was far enough in imaginative terms to allow me to engage with my own culture in a very different way than had I been still living there among all that was familiar and thus unseen.

McKeon talks about listening to Irish radio, following Irish twitter feeds and even reading the online version of the Longford Leader on one occasion – this helped her to build the fictional world she was creating, not by researching it, but by recreating the emotional atmosphere that would help her to reconstruct her own version of an Irish world. James Joyce would have recognised that instinct, meticulous re-creator of an 1904 Ireland that he was, although in his case it was more a matter of plaguing the little brother to send him theatre programmes and details of who won the 1904 Gold Cup.

I didn’t want such familial or even technological aids, for that matter. When I was writing my verse novel, In Sight of Home, it was the dual vision of the here and there, the echoes of one culture in another, than captured me. In North Wales, the echoes of Ireland were everywhere; on Anglesey, the stone-walled fields of grass and granite were very reminiscent of Wicklow’s grazing planes; place-names had similar origins, for example the Llŷn peninsula originated in the same god Lugh who gave Leinster its name. That peninsula, the closest point to Ireland and beloved of the great Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, is littered with townlands named after the marauding Irish who swept over the 27 miles of the Irish Sea to take hostages and booty. There’s even an early Christian church named for St. Patrick (Llanbadrig on Anglsey), although closer examination reveals the five possible Patricks for whom it might have been built.

So the book I wrote was very much about reflections, of understanding oneself and one’s culture better through the mirror of another experience, another culture. Here’s a poem, taken from In Sight of Home, which tries to give voice to that:

The landscape is patient,
permits my slow
discoveries.

I turn a bend,
a buzzard leads me,
wing-span wide enough
to fill the windscreen
as he beats the air,
then sweeps away seawards.

I test out place-names,
my tongue still mutinies over
u’s and w’s, hellish double ells.

And proof the eye
will fool you:
standing on Mynydd Mawr
looking towards Wicklow
you might be on Bray Head,
looking back at Lleyn.

Someone speaks,
a different music soars,
reminds you that the ground
you stand on is not your own,
though it might
lend itself a while.

The first lambs out,
and it only February.
Here, where I write,
there’s a new vase,
the first daffodils
coaxing the sun.

As I result of my own time ‘abroad’, I’ve become intrigued about how Irish writers respond creatively when finding themselves living in other places, and, equally, how writers from other countries react when coming to live in Ireland. I’ll be discussing that further in my next blog entry but in the meantime would love to hear from anyone who has had a similar experience.

See you next time

Nessa

Jul
29

Emer Martin meets Tea in San Francisco on Sunday Afternoon

Tea in San Francisco on a sunny Sunday Afternoon

San Francisco is not a city that is the centre of anything in the art world but it does attract many people who care deeply about the arts. This is only one of the city’s contradictions. It is a city that not just tolerates otherness but embraces it. San Francisco is a cold foggy city perversely perched on a peninsula in Sunny California as if poised to pounce out of the Continent and do its own thing. And it does. Away from the mass media radars of New York and LA, talent can be developed and flourish without being tamed and packaged as soon as it squeezes out into the consciousness of the world. There is genuine counter culture here in a way there can never be in many of the so-called Art Mecca’s. This city’s sensibility is raw, infuriating, radical, painfully self conscious, gender bending, contrary, pierced-tongue–in– cheek.
You can get cut on the edges.
When you slice yourself in San Francisco the blood might be a different colour than you expect.
You could bleed rainbows here.
I am about to meet a quintessentially San Francisco writer whom I have always been inspired by. A writer who has lived and wrote on the edges in a unique and compelling way. She writes like a woman – in almost diary form. She is a talented writer with a generous spirit and boundless energy who routinely brings people together. You won’t find her published by any mainstream publisher, because she couldn’t be packaged for the tediously safe New Yorker market or the titillating soul sucking female People Magazine market. This writer is not and will never be mainstream – hers is a voice as underground as the mysterious Cenotes that flow in delicious chilled darkness under the tropical Mexican peninsula in which she spends each summer writing.
I am confronted with big black iron gates, a buzzer and a keypad with cryptic instructions, thank God for cell phones, I call Michele Tea, and after a few minutes she appears smiling with tattooed limbs behind the iron gates to let me in. Upstairs in her cool new apartment she makes green tea and slices a pear for me. A few years ago I came across Michelle when I read with herself and Irvine Welsh at the Edinburgh Castle in the Tenderloin. I was pursuing a Masters in Fine art in San Francisco State and one of my friends and fellow students,who had impeccable taste, was in the process of becoming a man. He was never impressed with anything I did until I gave him a flyer inviting him to my reading with Michelle Tea. “Michelle Tea is my hero.” He said simply. I took note of his approval and wasn’t disappointed. Michelle was a unique and talented spirit and her work was challenging and wild. I remember us standing outside the door after that reading and watching a prostitute ply her trade in a wheel chair. We agreed that it was a very San Francisco image. Baffling, sad, dark and funny all at the same time.
This city makes me shiver and lures me in all at once.
It’s hard to meet a native. We’re all blow-ins. Or maybe only the blow-ins talk to me. But Michelle has become San Francisco in a very good way.
Though born in Massachusetts she personifies the best of this small fiercely individual city. Her work explores queer culture, feminism, race, class and the sex industry all through her own personal experience. She is the poet laureate of the queercore community. A community that grew up in the mid eighties worldwide, but especially strong in SF, that fuses punk with queer politics.

Michelle and I swap books. She gives me Rent Girl which rescues me from the Franzen book I’ve been trudging dutifully through. Rent Girl is an illustrated memoir of Michelle’s days when her girlfriend announced that she was a hooker and, Michelle, who was one broke baby dyke followed her into the world of paid sex. Frankly, I’ve never understood people’s shock at prostitution, in a way we all pay for sex one way or another. There’s no such thing as free love, especially here, 40 odd years after THE Summer of Love turned into a bad acid trip.
Rent girl is a wise and funny book, a very graphic novel. There is a part where the narrator surmises that it is much less effort to be a hooker than to be a stripper. Strippers, she claims, have to give so much of themselves in the performance. Hookers can lie back and let their minds wander. That’s an insider perspective, something I would have never guessed. And I love learning new things that surprise me.
This is not the sort of fiction you’ll find on the front shelves in Eason’s. If it weren’t for the small presses Michelle Tea’s voice would not be heard.
Michelle is a legend in the underground world and I’m struck when I meet her at how grounded and focused she is and what easy company. But not surprised, for the last few years she has run, RADAR, a reading series in San Francisco, (just voted the Best Literary Night in the SF Guardian’s Reader Poll) and has set up and got funding for a writers’ retreat in Mexico near Tulum. Now she’s branching out in a yet a new direction.

“RADAR will begin publishing in 2012 as a Sister Spit imprint with City Lights! I’m lucky my friends are really good writers. I’m always reading their stuff and with their kind of material they’ll never get published so I wanted to do something more for them. We can do only a few books a year. I’d love to do more.”
“Pretty much ALL my experience has been with small publishers, or midsized, and it’s been varied but mostly good. I’ve had help with publicity with some publishers, and not with others. San Francisco is home to City Lights, McSweeney’s, Manic D press, MacAdam/Cage.”
So what are you working on now?
“I was going to write something completely new when I got to Mexico. I’m doing another fictionalized edit on this book that I’ve written that’s given me such a problem. I was in a relationship and the one thing my partner asked was that I wouldn’t write about them. But I did. We’ve broken up and I’ve fictionalized it but I don’t know if I should go on with it. They would be pretty upset. We’re both known in the counter cultural world, so I don’t know if I can do it. Maybe I should just write something new when I’m down in Mexico and put it aside. There are different story lines in it. It’s fiction and it’s in the third person but the main character is called Michelle, and she’s a female small press writer. But she has an affair with Matt Dillon. All this crazy shit which is clearly not true. I don’t want to hurt anybody…. It’s weird to have written a book you can’t show.”
“You should just go for it,” I advise. “A man wouldn’t hesitate. It’s very female of you to put it in a drawer and never let it see the light of day.”
She nods vociferously and says” Yes, yes.” She writes my advice down.
As Oscar Wilde says, I always pass on good advice because I’ll have nothing whatsoever to do with it myself.
“There’s parts of the book I can just concentrate on…. like being a drug addict alcoholic, and writing about that, you know kind of like those memoirs people love to read, and maybe to be successful with them you have to be famous or a man because readers like to watch you fall, but if you’re queer, female, fucked up, and broke people just go eewwww.”
On that note of fucked up memoirs I bring up the strange story of Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy. JT LeRoy was a fake identity concocted by an American writer Laura Albert. Sarah and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things came out ostensibly as the work of a young male prostitute drug addict who had been repeatedly abused as a child. Laura Albert sent her partner’s sister, the 18 year old Samantha Knoop out in a big wig and glasses to hide under desks while other writers did his readings. She was pretending she was a terminally shy writer. She only communicated by phone. The hoax was eventually exposed by the New York Times in 2006 and left a lot of people angry.
Albert claimed it was a veil not a hoax. She had her defenders. At first is looked like a brilliant literary coup but then a more sinister side to it was revealed. Albert was a master manipulator who, as her alter ego JT, befriended many sympathetic celebrities and public figures over the phone and really drew them into his life made them care about him. Many talk about how he knew just what to say to engage with each person. This was all very intriguing and entertaining for those of us on the outside but I hadn’t realized that Michelle was one of those who felt betrayed and used by it all.
“I was involved in that, I was one of those she called and manipulated, she was adopting this persona – a young, HIV positive, homeless, sexworker, drug addict and she knew I’d be sympathetic to that, and I gave a lot of time and energy on lengthy phone conversations. I was like – What Can I do for you? – She really fucked with me; I was doing damage control on the phone with this person. I was giving a lot of care, I thought I was talking to a very damaged genius kid and I was generous with my time and emotions, and I was giving a lot of myself, a lot that I wouldn’t have been giving to this fucking 43 year old con-artist woman. What did she get out of it? How twisted was she?
It wasn’t just me; she was on to Dave Eggers. She hustled him. He works with kids and is very generous. She knew that. He gave her a bunch of computers. I don’t know what she wanted from me. I didn’t have anything. She hustled people in the counter culture world who she knew would have compassion and who she knew would be tender towards that particular character and so she embodied that. It was very creepy.
It would have been interesting if it was this hoax to show how memoir is prized over fiction in our reality TV culture, which it is, in the current industry, but it was so much more gnarlier than that.
She’s facebooked me twice trying to befriend me, saying – Michelle we need to talk – But I’m like, I don’t even know you, you are crazy, we haven’t had a relationship, that was a chimera.
What’s funny is that I ended up being friends with the girl who played JT Leroy in public. This girl Savannah Knoop. She went out into public and acted all shy. She was only 18 and she didn’t understand the implications of it. She was getting her photo taken for Vanity Fair and being interviewed by Tom Waits, all this glamorous shit.
She is a very masculine girl, she’s queer, she’s boyish so she was pretending to be a boy who was a transgendered female, a boy who was born a boy who was living as a girl, but she was really a girl pretending to be a boy who was living an a girl. Her story is interesting.”

She shows me Samantha’s book. GIRL/BOY/Girl. I am struck by her open heartedness. She was obviously hurt but Michelle talks about other people’s work in a way that most writers don’t. Most writers can’t bear their contemporaries unless they’re deeply dead or trapped in a remote prison and only available through obscure translation. Michelle gives much of herself to other people’s talent. A rare trait indeed. She continues to talk about Samantha Knoop.
“I’m pretty sure there’s a film in the works. It would be a great story. So much to it.
I had such a fucking chip on my shoulder about it all, I thought fuck all those bitches, but when I met her she was a real person, smart, and an artist and really talented. She was so young when it all happened. I wouldn’t have got it at all at 18 either.”
I remark that all teenagers are sociopaths. She writes that down too.
“Do you have any teenagers?” She asks.
“No, but I was a teenage sociopath. I woke up at 21 and realized with horror at what I’d done to people.”
We swap teenage sociopath stories.
“I did all this weird shit. I felt invincible when I was younger. I felt immortal.” She says.
We talk girly talk. I’ve just got a haircut from a hairdresser named Sunshine and came out of the hairdresser looking like an American. I realize that’s why Americans look like that – it’s the fucking hair! My partner took one look at me and commented. “That’s interesting – is that what you asked for?”
We also agree that if someone calls your work “Interesting” it means they hate it.
“Yes, yes.” She nods. “Or if they call it “strong”. My agent just called my book ”a bit strong”. It opened in a van with me smoking crack. She was horrified. Now it opens with me writing about smoking crack in a van and knowing my agent would hate me for starting my book smoking crack in a van.”
Michelle Tea then reads my cards. She’s been reading Tarot cards since she was 15.

“I wanted to read Tarot cards but the apartment I was living in was so crumby I just didn’t feel I could bring people there. It wasn’t professional. But when I was considering this apartment, I never paid that much for rent, but I did a Tarot card reading and I got the wealth card. So I can subsidize my rent with it. It’s steady it’s nice; I don’t really have time for it but its ok, not overwhelming. That’s how I like it.”
I tell her the last reading I got I pulled the death card and they always say that it doesn’t mean death but I don’t buy it.
I pull the joker. She tells me it’s her favorite card. There’s a guy in a joker costume walking off a cliff with a big cat eating his leg.
I’m not so sure.
She takes my picture for her blog. I’m glad I’m blogging this month so that I can bring news of writers such as Michelle to other readers far away from these streets. It feels good to be able to support a voice that I think is vital.
I linger at her door; we’re still talking walking down the stairs. We are swapping Mexican Shaman stories. I want to go to Mexico with her and meet more wild Shamans in the jungle, or just out on the rip in San Francisco and end up in a heap somewhere. But Michelle is so together she’s actually off to a book club, so I wander off by myself and sit on a church step and start reading Rent Girl.
This isn’t chick lit, sex-in-the-city bullshit. Michelle is the real deal. Check it out.
I never really dress up warm enough for San Francisco in the summer but my afternoon has left me feeling warm. I’m glad there are people like Michelle Tea in the world. I’m glad there are the small presses to put her work out there. I don’t get up off the church step till I’ve read the whole book and as I get up the world has shifted as it always does with good books. I’m no longer back in my old Lower Haight San Francisco stomping ground. I am on the edge of a cliff. I walk off as a tiger eats my leg.

Emer Martin is a Dubliner who has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and various places in the U.S. Her first novel Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year 1996 in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. Houghton Mifflin released Breakfast in Babylon in the U.S. in 1997. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel was published internationally in 1999. Emer studied painting in New York and has had a sell-out solo show of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin. Her new book is Baby Zero, published March 07. She has just completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007. Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives in the jungles of Co. Meath, Ireland.

Jul
21

On Publishing Poetry and Short Stories

On Publishing Poetry and Short Stories

by Ailbhe Darcy


This summer I published my first collection after ten whole years of printing out poems, writing cover letters and slapping stamps on self-addressed envelopes. More often than not, throughout those ten years, the whole sorry lot would land back on my doormat screaming rejection. It’s a slow, hard road to publication and easy to feel alone on it. It’s equally easy to feel like you’re going nowhere – not to mention mad. Most writers have experienced such a limbo, Ciaran Carty assured us at the Irish Writer’s Centre on the 2nd of July, only to amend his words. Limbo, he said, is “a state of existence which will merit neither heavenly bliss nor the forms of heavens after death.” Better to call the unpublished writer’s realm purgatory than limbo, because there is some hope.

Carty, who has been the editor of New Irish Writing since 1988, was at the Centre as part of a very successful information day on publishing poetry and short stories. The frustration, the hope, and the pleasure of the journey – that is, of the act of writing itself – each vied for a place as the dominant note of the day’s talks and question-and-answer sessions. The editors present – as well as Carty, we heard from Declan Meade, editor of The Stinging Fly and founder of the press of the same name; Rebecca O’Connor, editor of The Moth; and Jessie Lendennie, founder and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry – all emphasised the enormous numbers of submissions they receive for the enormously limited space they have to fill. There is a woeful lack of outlets for unpublished writers in Ireland, Carty told us.

If there were moments during the day when an onlooker might seriously question the wisdom of attempting to get published at all, these were effaced by the reverence with which both Kevin Higgins, as a poet, and Kevin Barry, as a fiction writer, spoke about their belief that no poem or short story is ever finished until it finds an audience. It is the reader, not the writer, they suggested, who inks that final full stop. Still, Kevin Higgins warned us to surrender the notion that publication is a magical gateway to everything being finally all right, or that Declan Meade is a god who can tell you once and for all whether or not you’re a writer. The writer’s lot remains lifelong one of anxiety: forget being ‘discovered’ and seeing your name in lights; you will never even be sure that there’ll be a next poem for you to write.

Kevin Barry touched on a similar theme when he spoke about fiction as a burbling or a percolating that happens in the back part of the writer’s brain, to some extent out of the writer’s control. Once you realise this lack of control, he said, you can worry less about making the next story come. You can even recognise that the bad days, the days you can’t write, are often the days when the most percolating is going on. But this realisation is also terrifying, he admitted, since there’s nothing you can do about it if the writing simply doesn’t come. So you have to make a deal with your subconscious: you’ll be disciplined – you’ll make yourself available, at your desk with your pencil sharpened, for a certain amount of time each day – and then if the stories do come you’ll be there to welcome them. Kevin Barry himself writes first thing in the morning. Most writers, he told us, eventually become morning writers, exploiting that hour when, as Don De Lillo put it, they are still “puddling in dream-melt.”

Both Barry and Meade stressed the importance of putting a new piece of writing away in a drawer and giving it time to mature before thinking about sending it out for publication. While Meade acknowledged the usefulness of deadlines as a motivational tool, he warned that writing to a deadline could mislead you into thinking that a piece was finished just because you’d achieved the word count and put down the pen in time to catch the postman. He, Rebecca O’Connor and Jessie Lendennie all gave the impression that a lot of the work they rejected was rejected for this reason: it simply hadn’t been worked on enough. You can publish too early, Ciaran Carty agreed: he published a story at the age of fifteen in the Evening Herald called “The Devil’s Advocate” – it was his first and only published short story.

In general, then, the advice throughout the day was to move slowly, putting one foot in front of the other on that long road. Publish in magazines and get out to open mics, said Kevin Higgins; work up to longer readings. Eventually people will start coming up to you after readings and asking where they can buy your poems or stories. Then you’ll know you’ve created a need. Even then you should continue to move slowly, beginning to think of the poems or stories as a group and gradually building on them and selecting from them.

Throughout the process, all the editors reminded us, be sure to get the ABC’s right: don’t, for example, send your poems to a magazine that exclusively publishes short stories. Read the submission guidelines. Check the website before you email an editor with an irritating question. Tricks for evading rejection-induced despair include sending work out to more than one magazine at a time, so that you weren’t waiting for that single envelope to land on your doormat. Assume you’ll be rejected. Have somewhere else lined up to send the poems, the minute they arrive back. Key to getting out and about, Kevin Higgins suggested, is being easy to deal with. If you’re invited to give a reading, turn up. Don’t be late. And don’t forget your glasses.

Very important: hanging around getting drunk with writers will not make you a writer.

Finally, if there was an unexpected subtext to this fascinating day, it was this: have sympathy for the editors. The working lives they described were filled with struggle. But their words, all day, were overflowing with their passion for the job. For the writing.

Ailbhe Darcy launched her first full collection of poems Imaginary Menagerie this summer with Bloodaxe Books. In 2009 she published a chapbook-length collection with tall-lighthouse called A Fictional Dress, and poems of hers have also appeared in two Bloodaxe anthologies: Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (ed. James Byrne and Clare Pollard) and Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (ed. Roddy Lumsden.) She has published work in magazines in Ireland, Britain and the US. This year she completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and she continues to work towards a PhD at the university. She co-edits Moloch, an online journal for new art and writing.

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