I’m delighted to have a poem accepted for 2 publications by Arachne Press : A470 and Words From The Brink.
An Irishwoman is Introduced to the Major Roads of Wales will appear in March next year in the anthology A470.
Because I Have Been Complacent About Climate Change will appear in the anthology Words from the Brink and at the Solstice Shorts Festival this December. Continue reading Poems in 2 Arachne Press publications
What I learned from actor, Finlay James’s performance of my poem Watching The Bridegroom in the June 2021 issue of The Honest Ulsterman.
“Get it up on the wall,” Des Jones says of plaster. “You can do what you like with it later.” He’s married to my husband’s cousin, Susan and he’s handled a quare few walls in his time. So I’ve got my book on Place and Displacement ‘”up on the wall’ this afternoon, tens of thousands of words, and I’ll put the finishing touches to it when I’ve had a metaphorical cup of tea. (The illustration is the cross-section of the house from the speculator’s submission to Belfast City Council. It’s the dream of the house before it became a reality, one of thousands of parlour houses built for the expanding city.)
I’ve had to go and have a bit of a lie-down too because the work has covered several years of research and preparation and centuries of event and my head is full of architectural and historical details. I received a Support for the Individual Artist Award (SIAP) from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2019 towards research for this book.
This piece of work started as ‘a bit of context’ for a set of poems I’ve written about the house of my childhood and my experiences of growing up in east Belfast in the Sixties and Seventies. It gave me the opportunity to focus the search for my paternal grandfather which I’ve been carrying out, off and on, since the Eighties when I made a TV documentary which touched on some of the material. My grandfather was almost never spoken of in my childhood and it has taken much careful research, over many years, to tease out his story. I kept everything I came across and, over time, connections have matured, as I have, and I feel I am more able, at this stage, to see the broader picture.
It also became a forensic investigation of, not only the house, but the area, the field in which it was built and the people who put up the money for it, designed it, built it and first lived in it. It’s an account of belonging, and not being allowed to belong. Continue reading On The Wall: Place and Displacement 1st draft
Irish Times Review
A City Burning
Angela Graham
Seren, £9.99
Angela Graham’s debut collection of short stories has been longlisted for the 2021 Edge Hill Short Story prize, and it’s not hard to see why. The film-maker and screenwriter’s move into fiction brings with it an eye for perspective, for the power of the vignette to momentarily depict a whole life. There is a craft in the economy of Graham’s prose, as evocative as it is sparse, and the theme of change resonates throughout the collection, as well as the inherently human fear of it. We are not always prepared for the moment when our lives change for ever, and Graham seeks to capture that sense of knowing and not knowing here, inviting us into an intimacy with her characters that is never forced, and always elegiac. BECKY LONG
I’m thrilled that my debut short story collection A City Burning has been longlisted for the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021. Now in its 15th year, the Prize is the only national literary award to recognise excellence in a published, single-authored short story collection.
It’s great to be among this list of writers:
Previous winners include Colm Tóibín, Tessa Hadley and Daisy Johnson.
The shortlist will be announced in September.
I’m looking forward to taking part in this event, 7pm Tuesday 29th June with three great writers from north and south of the island. Seren Books, the leading literary publishing house in Wales, has many Irish writers on its list and is kicking off its 40th anniversary celebrations with an Irish focus.
Seren Publisher, Mick Felton says,
The line up for this event is a clear reason why we like to publish authors from Ireland.
I’m delighted to be contributing alongside some great poets and swimming enthusiasts, Polly Atkin, Katrina Naomi and Elizabeth-Jane Burnett in this session celebrating swimming and writing. I don’t think both can be done at once but I’m open to persuasion!
I enjoy writing about the sea and especially about being in it. It is an intensely physical experience and I often think of it in terms of an encounter with power.
https://cardiffpoetryfestival.com/2021-event-13/
Here’s the opening of a poem I wrote about looking back on memorable moments in a year as it ends: (pubished in The Bangor Literary Journal)
AS THE YEAR BEGINS
for Gill and Alan
I would like my grave to be
marked not by a stone but glass:
a sturdy panel, windowing my life
in a mosaic of seeing / seeing-through.
Here, in a piece of most particular − almost royal – blue,
won’t you remember
how, from a height,
we watched the unhurried, strategizing sea
re-take the estuary plain,
spreading in ever-widening fans
a rippled, supple mirror for the cloudless sky
and how we plunged
to stride out to its quick
where water, headlands, seal-black cliffs
and sunlight sang on one note?
We knew our luck, that day….
Have you ever read a book about a place you know well and thought No, that’s not it at all!
What are the challenges to an incomer writing well about a place they weren’t born and raised in? Is the perspective of a native inherently more valid? Do the relative merits complement each other or clash?
Sun 25th April 4pm English
Debut Authors: Writing Wales | Sponsored by Mari Thomas Jewellery
Join debut authors, Welsh woman, Angela Johnson and Belfast-born Angela Graham, as they discuss their experiences of putting Wales on the page in their new books, Arianwen, a warm and witty novel set in West Wales, and A City Burning, a confident collection of stories set in Wales, Ireland and Italy.
Arianwen has been described as ‘brilliantly evocative’ with ‘lilting Welsh rhythms and poetic imagery’; A City Burning was named ‘ a book of the year’ by Nation Cymru in 2020, and described as ‘wonderful’ by the Irish Examiner.
I’d like to think ahead to my session alongside Angela Johnson, author of Arianwen.
I was born and raised in Belfast. I’ve had to ‘learn’ Wales. I’ve written stories about Welsh people and places (some partly in Welsh) in my collection, A City Burning. Does my perception differ from that of a native? Yes, I believe it does. Do I get Wales and the Welsh ‘right’? Right by whose criteria? Continue reading Llandeilo Lit Fest: Writing Wales – incomer & native
The Art of Boredom – Writers Lament
Boredom. Tedium. Monotony. Quiet. It’s been over a year since the pandemic exiled us to a repertoire of sofas, armchairs and kitchen-tables-turned-desks. Though the phenomenon of lockdown has been common across the board, few of us have experienced it in the same way. Here, Wales Arts Review compiles reflections from some of the finest writers of Wales on the elusive art of being, rejecting and wishing for boredom.
My piece:
Whenever I’m bored it’s not because I lack options but because none of them appeals to me and their very unattractiveness saps my capacity to manufacture alternatives.
At Christmas, the prize for a cracker-pulling victory is sometimes a tiny spinning-top, like a tubby ballerina revolving en pointe. As a child, I’d set this little toy going in front of a small mirror. Its whirling action instantly doubled in the busy space before the mirror’s bright face. But on the other side of the mirror nothing was happening. Continue reading The Art of Boredom – Wales Arts Review