The Irish Literary Times

Samuel Beckett left strict instructions for his 'one-mouth' play. Don't act. And you can never go fast enough. Easier said than done, writes actor Lisa Dwan

PORTOBELLO BRIDGE

 

Twice a day I carry my soul over water.
The seedy canal blackened by car exhaust.
When first I came to the footbridge
at the lock, as a child
with fishing net and pinkeen pot,
it was through Little Jerusalem:
the avenues of exile,
past the synagogue that is now the mosque...

Maggie O'Farrell's sixth novel is another class act, writes Viv Groskop.

During the heatwave of summer 1976 a devoted husband and father of three gets up from the breakfast table and goes out to buy a newspaper. He doesn't come back. Robert Riordan was recently retired, but still there was nothing to suggest to his wife Gretta that he was unhappy or about to do a disappearing act. Gretta is adamant that she has no idea where he is or why he has gone. Robert and Gretta's grown-up children descend upon the family home to scratch their heads and console their mother. 

Season Of Yeats - a new festival bringing the story of two of Sligo’s greatest sons to life with 10 days of Music, Theatre, Exhibitions and the Spoken Word We welcome you to the first Tread Softly…, a new festival bringing the story of two of Sligo’s greatest sons to life with 10 days of Music, Theatre, Exhibitions and the Spoken Word. We sincerely hope you, both visitor and resident, will find events and activities to brighten up your summer and make your Sligo experience all the more enjoyable.

A group of 23 TY students from St Mary’s Holy Faith, Killester are launching their very own book of short stories.

Through the medium of Fighting Words, a creative writing centre in Dublin, the class developed their writing skills and wrote short stories with the help of authors, Roddy Doyle and John Banville. The students attended the writing classes one day a week since the start of the school year, compiling short stories on a wide range of topics, including parental divorce/separation, death, runaways and tales of mystery and adventure.

Shauna Gilligan's first novel is called Happiness Comes from Nowhere. I'm delighted to chat to her about her writing time, it might spur me on a little as I've written nothing for days....oh the shame :)

 Welcome to the blog Shauna, you're working on a phd as well as your own writing - so how many hours (or minutes!) do you get to dedicate to fiction in an average week, or is there an average week?!Thanks for having me on your blog, Niamh.Yes, I’m doing a PhD in Writing (University of South Wales) and I’ve got my Viva Voce on June 12th (that’s the oral exam where you defend your PhD thesis) so I’m nearly there with that one, thankfully! 

Colum McCann on journeys of inspiration, his intensive research process, and his new novel.

The annoying writerly adage says to write what you know. Great – if you possess a particular passion for accessing the extraordinary in the humdrum. Terrific – if your past is rich with enough adventure or incident to provide a lifetime of inspiration.

But what if it isn’t?

This is the problem that Colum McCann confronted in the summer of 1986, when he came to America, to Cape Cod, with the intention of writing a novel. It’s a problem he has been constructively solving ever since, over the course of two story collections – Fishing the Sloe-Black River (1994) and Everything in This Country Must (1998) – and five novels – Songdogs (1995), This Side of Brightness (1998), Dancer (2003), Zoli (2006), Let the Great World Spin (2009), which won the National Book Award, and the forthcoming TransAtlantic.

In an innovative move that is exactly the type of entrepreneurship we need to be fostering in Ireland, a group of Ballymun secondary school students have published a new novel ‘In Pieces’ for reluctant teen readers.

Strumpet City was a bestseller when it was first published in 1969. RTE’s dramatisation of the book was possibly the station’s most successful production. Since then it has had many republications, and buoyed by its selection for Dublin City Council’s One City One Book initiative, it is again selling well.

What makes the book and its story so enduringly popular? It has a lot to do with the fact that it is a rollicking good read. The story has a lot going for it. The servant and master relationship it portrays are as alluring to the Downtown Abbey generation as it was to theUpstairs Downstairs one of yesteryear.

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Critically Acclaimed author Kevin Barry tells a witty and imaginative tale of a series of apparitions across Dublin, that bring the old writers of the city crashing into the lives of modern Dubliners.

William Crawley presents a special edition from the UK City of Culture, Derry-Londonderry. William Crawley speaks to Roy Hattersley about his latest book 'The Devonshires' and local authors Brian McGilloway and Claire Allan review new publications from Paul Lynch and Maggie O'Farrell.

Kinahan also discusses the feisty women who brought us into the 21st century and the idea of accepting our own mortality

 

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Deirdre Kinahan is an internationally produced Irish playwright whose well-known works includeHue and Cry and Bogboy. Her most recent play, These Halcyon Days, is currently playing at theIrish Arts Center in New York City.

These Halcyon Days is a sweet and funny story about a friendship that forms between two people who meet while in a nursing home. Though the two have different backgrounds and opposite reactions to their present predicament, Patricia and Sean's bond is real and helps both of them deal with the strain of their last days. TheaterMania spoke with Kinahan about her inspiration for the play's two main characters and why, for her, the story is personal.

Seán Lysaght’s speech from the launch of The Blue End of Stars
at Ballina Arts Centre on 17 July 2012 

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a privilege to be here this evening to present Michelle O’Sullivan’s debut collection of poems, The Blue End of Stars. There is always a special focus of attention when a new writer appears in book form for the first time; this is all the more the case when the book in question carries the Gallery Press imprint. The Gallery Press has been in existence now for over forty years and has established itself as the premier publisher of poetry on this island.

When I got the news a few months ago that I would soon have a Gallery neighbour in Ballina, I looked through some poetry journals to find examples of Michelle O’ Sullivan’s work; in a back issue of the Poetry Ireland Review I found two poems beside her name, and I read the following line:

the sea thrives on a wick of desire

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Taije Silverman, Max McKenna, and John Timpane joined Al Filreis to discuss William Butler Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” [text], surely his most famous early poem (written in 1888; published in 1890) and a staple of his poetry readings into the 1930s. Yeats’s father had read Waldenaloud to him; Thoreau's pastoral simplification had been alluring for him as a teen, when he fantasized living on an uninhabited island in Lough Gill (near Sligo) — Innisfree. In the poem, the speaker, now longing for an orginary Ireland “while I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey” of the city (presumably London), expresses his desire to build a small cabin on the isle and, like Thoreau, to plant rows of beans and “have some peace there.” The romantic torque generated by such Irish/English splitting produces at the same time a brilliant but makeshift, extra-cultural — one might almost say, dramatically dislocated — prosody.  The striking sound made by this poem is a topic that draws special attention from our three talkers.

MICHAEL Harding thought he had failed at everything in his life - he was, in his own words, “a failed husband, a failed priest, and a failed writer.”

Donegal

It was to Donegal, in the most northwestern tip of Ireland, that in the 1990s I headed, in order to build a house. The very placenames so rough and musical, the country dotted with lakes and hemmed in by the mountains of Errigal, Muckish, Blue Stack, Doonish West, and Snaght.

Stephen Rea and his wife, Dolours, were the ones who led me there, Stephen in his wry Belfast way saying, “It’s the best of the north and the best of the south without the fuck-up of either.” In this he was gloriously mistaken.

The venture would have its excitements and its obstacles, dramas and melodramas, and the getting of a site at all necessitated a wiliness to interpret that no might possibly mean yes and that any yes was equivocal.