Bye Blogger!

You've served me well, but I'm fecking off to Wordpress now like the ungrateful wench I am.

I'll continue my blogging adventures here:

WHERE I'M BLOGGING FROM

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Prick Up Your Ears

Apparently a stage version of Prick Up Your Ears, based on the Joe Orton biography, is opening in London in September starring Little Britain's Matt Lucas.

I actually think Lucas will do a great job, but the film version, starring Gary Oldman and Alfred Molina, is so dear to me I baulk at any remake.

And for some reason, while I will go to see a film based on a play, I don't see the point of going to a play based on a film, as surely all you're doing is constricting the action. (On that point - anyone go to see the stage version of The Shawshank Redemption in the Gaiety recently? Any good?)

Hyland fling

MJ Hyland's latest, This Is How, got quite a bashing in both the Times and the Tribune this weekend.

Has anybody read her last novel, the Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down? I've never read any of her stuff, but bad reviews of esteemed writers - rightly or wrongly - always makes me more interested in the work in question ...

Assorted bits

John Banville is visiting my native Tipp next month to launch the Tipperary Reads festival in Thurles library on Saturday 11 July. I'll have emigrated by then - boo.

The summer issue of The Stinging Fly is out now.

After the kerfuffle over the 2008 short story competition, the Willesden Herald has guaranteed that a winner (and nine runners-up) will be chosen for this year's. Judge is Richard Peabody, first prize £500, opens 1 September.

Write This is accepting submissions for its new issue, asking for "stories of the intricate, violent, beautiful, destructive and nasty relationship between man and machine." Closing date is 1 August. They pay (not sure how much, though).

Packing up

I'm now home in Tipp for a week before heading to New York, so spent the end of this week packing up all the rubble I've accumulated and cleaning the house in Dublin in the hopes we'll get back our deposit.

But don't think that excuses my completely forgetting to attend the Man Booker International Prize panel discussion in Trinity, which featured winner Alice Munro and chair Colm Toibin. Man.

I only remembered when I opened yesterday's Times and read Eileen Battersby's report.

Claire Keegan wins Davy Byrnes Award

LINK

Claire Keegan was last night announced the winner of the €25,000 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009, at a presentation in the Dublin pub made famous by Joyce.

Keegan’s winning short story, 'Foster', was chosen from a shortlist of six writers by American fiction writer Richard Ford. Ford was not present, but Caroline Walsh, Literary Editor of The Irish Times, read from his winning citation, in which he praised the writer’s “sparkling talent”.

“'Foster' puts on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent. It tells a conceivably simple story – a young child given up to grieving foster parents and then woefully wrested home again.

“Claire Keegan makes the reader sure that there are no simple stories, and that art is essential to life.”

Ford wrote of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality”.

Walsh presented the award, organised by literary magazine The Stinging Fly and administered by Declan Meade, in association with The Irish Times, and sponsored by Davy Byrnes.

Accepting the prize, Keegan (41) told the thronged room that on the day of the February deadline to submit entries, it snowed in Wexford, where she lives, and she couldn’t get her car out to go to the post office. Thus she walked across the snowy fields until she found a postbox, and had dropped the envelope into it before belatedly tormenting herself by wondering how the postman was going to collect it that day. But clearly the Wexford postmen are undaunted by a few snowflakes, and her story duly made it to Dublin in time.

What will she do with her winnings? “I might buy a new desk,” she confessed modestly. “I have two sort of half-desks taped together at the moment, so I might go mad and buy a new one.”

Keegan, whose rural upbringing on a Wicklow farm has consistently informed her sensibility as a writer, has published two collections of short stories, Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007). She studied at Loyola University in New Orleans, the University of Wales, and Trinity College Dublin. Among her many previous awards are the Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor himself.

Runners-up Mary Leland, Molly McCloskey, Eoin McNamee, Kathleen Murray, and Susan Stairs were each presented with €1,000. The competition attracted an entry of more than 800 stories, 30 of which were selected as a longlist for Ford to adjudicate.

This is the second time Davy Byrnes has sponsored the competition: the first was in 2004, and the winner on that occasion, Anne Enright, has since won the Man Booker Prize.

Gay googling

A quick plug:

YouTube is sponsoring the 2009 Dublin Pride Festival, an annual celebration for the capital's LGBTQ population and their supporters. The party starts on Wednesday June 17 and culminates in the main Pride Parade on Saturday June 27.

Additionally, Dublin Pride has created a dedicated YouTube channel - www.youtube.ie/dublinpride. Now Dublin's 'Gayglers' - Google's LGBTQ employee society - are calling on people everywhere to create and upload videos to Dublin Pride's official channel, and broadcast your pride to the world. The most original posted videos will receive a selection of Google goodies.

Channel visitors can also view and discuss clips from the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and the GAZE Film Festival. Google and YouTube have always sought to create a corporate environment that encourages everyone to contribute to their full potential in both the workplace and the wider community. We are present this year at over fifteen Pride festivals around the world.

On behalf of all Google staff, the Dublin Gayglers are donating €3000 to BelongTo, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the support of LGBT young people in Ireland.

Reeling in characters

Anyone else find that your characters can run away on you at times? Lose their coherency, do things you'd rather they didn't?

The long thing I'm writing at the moment has about six prominent characters. I know the main two fairly inside-out, but the others ... I think I have a grasp of who they are, but reading back over the story I realise that I have them behaving in contradictory ways, just to move the plot forward. And not in a cool humans-are-full-of-contradictions way. In a this-character-sucks way.

So what I'm mostly doing now is writing up character profiles. Observing their traits in the most essential bits of the story, and tweaking their behaviour in the more throwaway scenes so that it all seems more consistent. It's slow work but kind of satisfying.

My secret shame

I've never read Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Still, Patrick Freyne (my vote for second most brilliant Irish arts journo, after the Times's Donald Clarke) had an interesting article in the Tribune about the book's 60th anniversary today.

This, coupled with this fascinating Guardian Book Blog post about how Orwell might have copied the plot from Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, has convinced me that it's gonna have to be next on my reading list.

NYC lit journals

Some interesting New York-based literary journals I came across while job-hunting online. (I leave in three weeks. Christ.)

Conjunctions
Dossier
Epiphany
Fiction Magazine
Hudson Review
Literal Latte
n+1
New York Tyrant
Tin House

Story #8

Just rediscovered this old writing exercise from my BU creative writing class.


Put the Book Back On the Shelf

You love books. You love to make them yours, to inscribe your name and the year on the flyleaf. You’ve done this since you were a child.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that was your first great love. It was more of a comfort blanket than a story to you. When I took you on a tour of Cadbury’s for your seventh birthday you were so disillusioned. What was up with the assembly lines and where were all the Oompa Loompas?

You love the veined creases of the spine; the way the pages on which you spilled coffee crackle when they’re dry. You love to jot notes in the margins; love to smudge the print of a new copy with your knuckles.

You were a secretive, angsty teenager. A little cliché with a journal and a scowl. Catcher in the Rye was your Bible.

Cheap paperbacks are your favourites. You’re not big into the first editions or stately-looking hardbacks. You don’t like to own books you’re afraid to damage.

Sometime in your early twenties you discovered gothic romance. And homoeroticism – Rebecca, The Picture of Dorian Gray. You came out to me not long after. I was almost ready to tell you at that point.

You’re amused by haughty covers with gushing reviews and shortlist accolades: books that are anxious to tell you how “groundbreaking”, “engrossing” and “transcendent” they are before you’ve even opened them. You sneer at them, rather endearingly.

But The Great Gatsby, you said, taught you everything you needed to know about writing. How to be profound and yet simple. How to create people, real people, who were maddening but loveable.

You talk about the intimidating floor-to-ceiling shelves in your father’s study. The blandly-bound books with gold lettering on their spines. You’d sit and gaze in wonder at them, thinking that maybe you should start to write. Thinking about what it would mean to leave your thoughts trapped between the pages for all time.

Your book launch is on Friday. I have the advance copy on my locker. I'm on page 157. I hope it has the life it deserves. The life you want for it.

You used to lie on your bedroom floor and read. Lie and prop yourself up with your arm, your ear suction-cupping your hand, listening to the thrum of your own pulse. Then switch over to the left arm when the right went dead.

The Beautiful People

Really enjoyed today's New Irish Writing in the Tribune - 'The Beautiful People' by Sara O'Loughlin. Okay, so it does that thing I was giving out about (omitting quotation marks), but it's a simple story told well, with a clever twist, and written nicely 'on the body'.

The author's only 20 or 21, and is going to do a Writing MFA at Sarah Lawrence College later this year. Oooh, would love to do that. I'm sure I can find some kind of writing group/class while in NYC, though.

Davy Byrnes shortlist

Congratulations to these six lucky devils, who are all in with a chance to win a hefty €25,000:

Claire Keegan - 'Foster'
Mary Leland - 'Living In Unknown'
Molly McCloskey - 'This Isn't Heaven'
Eoin McNamee - 'The Road Wife'
Kathleen Murray - 'Storm Glass'
Susan Stairs - 'The Rescue'

The line-up and the legacy
Info on the award's history and the six writers.

Irish, incidentally
Judge Richard Ford's thoughts on the shortlisted stories.

The winner will be announced on 22 June.

Thanks to WomenRuleWriter for the headsup.

Threefer two

Damn that Waterstone's. I ducked into the shop on Dawson St today, because I was hungry and the cafe there has this lovely quiche thing, and was physically unable to walk past their three-for-two tables without buying anything.

In the end, I got ...







... but was also tempted by Joseph O'Neill's Netherland, Kazuo Ishiguro's Noctures and Deirdre Madden's Orange-shortlisted Molly Fox's Birthday. I guess I could have gotten four for six, but my book-buying is already slightly out of control.

Dialogue and quotation marks

I've just finished reading Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (dystopian novel about the religious right in the US taking over and establishing a brutal, Bible-inspired regime) which I found rather brilliant.

However, it was annoyingly inconsistent when it came to inverted commas around dialogue. In some chapters they were there, in some they weren't. It was a little confusing at times, particularly when the comma-less dialogue and the narrator's observations were in the same paragraph - hard to separate them.

Anyone know of any reason, grammatical or artistic, why a writer would choose to do this? Chuck Palahniuk does it too, so it's not just an Atwood quirk.