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
26 stories set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy, from the end of World War 2 to the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘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 The Irish Times
‘The stories entice and intrigue… highly recommended‘ Graham Reid
‘What fires the attention is Graham’s mastery of language and her ear for local speech of both the poetic and prosaic kind. Her experimentation with Ulster Scots in particular points to a new talent in Irish writing…’ Dr Frank Ferguson Northern Slant
‘This is an exemplary collection illustrating the creative possibilities of the short fiction form.’ Jane Fraser The Lonely Crowd
‘Short, sharp and sometimes shocking, these wonderful stories truly pack a punch.’ Sue Leonard The Irish Examiner
‘Angela Graham’s collection of short stories A City Burning … has a voice that feels completely new and fresh. With stories set in Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy it’s a broad ranging collection but what I particularly loved about it… was its nuanced and beautifully observed view of the human condition. Graham’s language has a searing quality yet also a humour about it that is genuinely hard to forget long after reading. Very highly recommended – I can’t wait to see what she does next.’ Kate Hamer, The Lonely Crowd
‘The prose is elegant with a clarity of voice and purpose… The use of Welsh and Ulster Scots in some of these stories brings a vivacity to the page… poignant and haunting stories lingering in the mind long after the book is closed.’ J.L.Harland
‘Angela Graham’s debut collection A City Burning announced a confident, stylish new voice in short fiction.’ Jon Gower Nation Cymru
‘a fine writer… Some of these stories are short, jewel-like and almost Mansfield-esque in the way their protagonists achieve their epiphanies, reflecting Graham’s poetic training but also perhaps, in their reliance on visual imagery her career as a film-maker.’ Aidan Byrne Planet
‘the most striking element of Graham’s collection is the clarity of voice. Though each of the twenty-six stories employs a decidedly different perspective … Graham’s authorial command remains honest, insightful and impressive. The quasi-cinematic focus given to each story … gives the collection intriguing multiplicity and serves as a testament to Graham’s talent for interpersonal perception. The focus on linguistic exchange in A City Burning is also notable; English, Welsh, Ulster Scots, and Italian all converge to create a narrative that is both highly contextual and elegantly told. ‘ Gemma Pearson, Wales Arts Review
‘These stories show us what the genre does best: the ‘snapshot’ of a moment which reveals a life or a culture in a moment of transition or realisation, what James Joyce called an ‘epiphany’.’ Prof Diana Wallace University of South Wales
‘Graham’s background is in T.V. and film, and it shows in the writing… Her prose often has the deceptive simplicity of film, the tidiness created by the screen’s frame as well as that profound immersiveness… Each story is like a short film: its own world unfolding inexorably in front of our eyes yet retaining its power to surprise and shock.’ Sarah Tanburn The Cardiff Review
‘honest, searing, insightful and very, very good’ Inez Lynn New City
A Book of the Year 2020 for Nation Cymru and for The Lonely Crowd
Longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021.
A Writer’s Bursary from Literature Wales supported the development of this book.
Available here @SerenBooks £9.99 paperback £7.99 e-book
Ding Doon Tha Mairch Dykes – a quotation from a collection of poems by Stephen Dornan heads up this article by me in The Irish Times of 3rd March 2021 here
In 2017 I received a SIAP Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland towards research for a novel set in NI. One of the most striking currents in the air was the turbulence around issues to do with language, with Ulster Scots and Irish. The Stormont Assembly collapsed partly because of apparently irreconcilable pressures around the way people speak; how they write; their cultural ‘reading’ of the land itself.
Language and land – two permanent pieces of the NI puzzle. Language embedded in land, in heart, in psyche.
I noticed also some important shifts in population presence within Northern Ireland; the move from city to country; the changing ownership of land and property; demographics impacting on communities.
From these arose a contemporary story, but it could only be told, I felt, through English, through Ulster Scots, through Irish.
I didn’t find it hard to access materials in Irish or to access advice but when it came to Ulster Scots, although I had that in my inner ear from my father’s side of the family (as I had Irish from my mother’s), it was a much tougher enterprise to gauge its contemporary use, to inflect this according to age, area and class. Some of the reasons for this are mentioned in my article.
I am enormously grateful to each person who has helped me along the way, in both Irish and Ulster Scots.
I am absolutely delighted that, in these few years, there has been an opening up in the Ulster Scots field, a writerly energy that wants to be expressed across forms and registers. Again, the article touches on this but there would be much more to say and report.
I would like to see, in Irish publishing, particularly among journals and magazines, a greater readiness to consider publishing – alongside English – Irish and Ulster Scots too. The Bangor Literary Journal published a pair of sonnets I wrote in Ulster Scots and English. The sky didn’t fall in.
I wrote a story partly in Ulster Scots for my collection A City Burning. The publisher, Wales-based Seren Books, was interested in the calibre of the work, its intelligibility, its coherence and the Ulster Scots earned its place on those terms.
There are challenges to trying to get Ulster Scots (a) written and (b) published outside specialist publications. Where is the material? Who is to judge its competence? Can Ulster Scots recover itself enough to flourish today?
These are questions appliable, in varying degrees, to any minority language or dialect.
Certainly, no one gains from setting one form of expression against another; or from over-zealous gate-keeping about standards (though these must exist or expression gets catastrophically unmoored from its roots); or – most insidious of all – who is to be allowed to write in Ulster Scots.
That last was the pressure that threatened most powerfully to hold me back. But I have finished the first draft and it has been a wonderful experience to live with the characters, and particularly the Ulster Scots speakers, seeing the world through those eyes, speaking with that tongue.
But perhaps the time has arrived when a new set of questions can be asked: Why not in Ulster Scots? Why not me? Why not now?
The Header illustration is a page from the passport of Éire / Ireland: Ulster Scots words, by James Orr
It’s good to share good things and there are very good things to share from this year’s Writers’ Symposium (14th January) curated by Jan Carson, presented by Eastside Arts Centre and sponsored by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
‘Prophets, Makers and Risk-takers: A Showcase of Writing from Northern Ireland’, this one-day event was an exemplary resource for writers. I will highlight just three sessions.
The Keynote Address was ‘”This Must Be the Place”: Mapping Contemporary Women’s Writing from Northern Ireland’ by Dr. Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (Queen’s University Belfast, Institute of Irish Studies).
Watch it here
This talk exemplified for me a striking feature of the whole day – the advancement of a sense of community for writers in Northern Ireland. The sessions worked against isolation or exceptionalism, fostering a spirit of solidarity in the facing of challenges or success.
Dr Sheratt-Bado’s talk provides a context for writing by women in Northern Ireland, or rather, something much more personal and powerful than that, a sense of family. Here are sisters who have walked the road that we are on. Famliar or new faces and voices. Wonderful!
I bet many of us wondered who we might add to the list. I thought of Marjory Alyn (‘The Sound of Anthems’, St Martin’s Press, 1983; Hodder & Stoughton, 1984) a trenchant novel inspired by the White City estate in North Belfast; a great read alongside ‘Hearthlands’ by Marianne Elliott (Blackstaff Press, 2017).
and, with a little category bending, Welsh novelist, Menna Gallie whose ‘You’re Welcome To Ulster ‘ (Gollancz , 1970) is, arguably, the first ‘Troubles Novel’.
Jan Carson’s session of practical advice for writers could hardly have been bettered. She covered a wide range of topics with a robust practicality and surely no one who heard her would be left in any doubt that promotion of one’s work is part of a writer’s toolkit, if it is done with confident humility, sincerity and a collaborative attitude that thanks people for help and helps in turn.
There can also be no doubt about how hard she works at this aspect of the craft. It inspired me to do a review of my own promotional efforts. I decided to identify one thing that I was aware needed attention. I applied the kind of constructive, problem-solving, let’s-do-this-together analysis that I picked up on in Jan Carson’s approach. I worked out what I could do. I discussed my idea with my publishers and, a couple of weeks on, we’ve made really good progress on the issue.
I also particularly enjoyed the panel discussion on CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN
NORTHERN IRISH WRITING chaired by Emma Warnock of No Alibis Press with Nandi Jola and Mícheál McCann.
From this session I took away an appreciation of how the obstacles writers face are very much experiences that are common to most writers, rather than being failings experiened by unworthy ones. We can all be confident that it is likely that any problem we might have has been faced, and overcome, by some other writer. Again, that sense of community came through.
See the event Programme here
and the Video Showcase of Writers:
Jan Carson has reflected on the event in a blog: here
Thank you to everyone concerned for a great event.
I’m from East Belfast: hubba tha yooniverse
My collection of 26 short stories A City Burning (Seren Books) set in Northern Ireland, Wales and Italy was published in October 2020.
Maria Isakova Bennett celebrates Poetry Day Ireland 2020 by the creation of a collaborative poem made up of lines she has selected from poems specially written on that day with the sea as a theme. I chose to write about Broughanlea Townland where I live near Ballycastle.
Her beautiful stitching work enhances the presentation of the lines as they create, together, a harmony of sea sounds.
Collaborative Litany – Time To Write Around The Coast of Ireland 2020
My poem, FULL CIRCLE, BROUGHANLEA TOWNLAND, COUNTY ANTRIM is part of the work I am doing on Place and Displacement for which I recieved a SIAP Award from the arts Council of Northern Ireland in 2019.
Maria hopes to arrange a reading involving all 34 contributing poets around the coast of Ireland when circumstances allow.
This lovely project brings together poetry and embroidery, two things I’m very keen on. I have plans for a stitched seascape!
My blog for The Irish Literary Society: irishlitsoc.org
Why is it so hard to find writing in Ulster Scots among contemporary publications? Has it gone for good or is it poised to make a come-back?
Up to the mid-twentieth century it was commonplace to find Ulster Scots poetry and prose in literary magazines or in newspapers but now it is exceptional. Although there is a body of Ulster Scots work appearing in specialist sources this work often deals with the past. In contemporary creative writing, Ulster Scots is all but invisible. A language without a lively, multi-genre, modern literary and cultural presence is one that is struggling. The degree to which Ulster Scots achieves such a presence is a litmus test of feasibility and relevance, even of its existence as a spoken medium.
In the last census in 2011, there was, for the first time, a question about capacity in Ulster Scots. Based on the census returns, the Ulster-Scots Agency states “there are approximately 140,000 people who have indicated some ability in Ulster-Scots.” However, the number claiming a capacity to speak, read, write and understand Ulster Scots is only 0.9 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland. The spoken language is under pressure and the gap between the spoken and the written word has been allowed to widen.
Ulster Scots is the speech that developed (or whose development intensified) as a result of the in-migrations of Lowland Scots to Ulster from the early seventeenth century…
Read the full piece here: https://irishlitsoc.org/writing-today-in-ulster-scots/
About: The Irish Literary Society
The Irish Literary Society was established in London in 1892, succeeding the Southwark Irish Literary Club. Among its founders were W. B. Yeats, T. W. Rolleston, Francis Fahy and Douglas Hyde and other leaders of the Irish literary revival. The Society was formally founded with Sir Charles Gavan Duffy as President, at the Caledonian Hotel, The Strand, 12 May 1892. Evelyn Gleeson was its first secretary.
Stopford Brooke gave the inaugural lecture to the society on “The Need and Use of Getting Irish Literature into the English Tongue” (Bloomsbury House, 11 March 1893 – its delivery delayed to allow for the start of the National Literary Society in Ireland). Although the business of the ILS has always been conducted in English the Society was influential in nurturing the revival of the Irish language by programming language classes even before the Gaelic League was formed in 1893.
Next event 8 December, 7pm
https://irishlitsoc.org/event/7th-annual-yeats-lecture-8-december-2020/
A very positive verdict in The Irish Examiner from Sue Leonard
Short, sharp and sometimes shocking, these wonderful stories truly pack a punch.
Sue’s long-running weekly profile Beginner’s Pluck offers a snapshot of a new writer and their debut work.
There’s a strong theme of witness in these 26 stories, which are set in Wales, Northern Ireland, and Italy. The characters face different challenges, from a failed marriage to eulogising a hated terrorist, but each of them is at a moment of change, needing to reassess their beliefs, or image of themselves.
In an enjoyable interview with Sue she asked what I would be ‘in another life’. To my own surprise I said I would like to be an expert ballroom dancer. That will surprise those who know me but it’s true! I don’t watch Strictly but, yes, sweeping rhythmically around a floor is the life I haven’t had… yet.
Prof Diana Wallace researches women’s writing, with special interests in historical fiction; Welsh writing in English and Modernism and the Gothic. She is co-director of the Centre for Gender Studies in Wales and Leader of the English Research Unit at the University of South Wales. Her review appears on the website of the Centre for the Study of Media and Culutre in Small Nations at the University of South Wales.
How can writers respond to sudden, even exponential, change? It can take a decade, as it did after the first world war or 9/11, for novels and memoirs to catch up as writers process traumatic events. And readers, time-pressed and battered by 24-hour news, may turn to genre fiction for the comfort of familiar plot lines and predictable endings. The short story, on the other hand, can turn on a sixpence to give us a snapshot of our crises in real time. Compressed, intense, often challenging, some of the most powerful examples of the form have come from writers on the so-called margins: women, immigrants, people from ‘small nations’ such as Wales and Ireland.
Angela Graham’s assured and compelling debut collection, A City Burning, ranges across Wales, Northern Ireland and Italy. It offers 26 brief stories, most no more than a few pages (one a mere page and a quarter), which turn their forensic flashlight on a moment of change when a character has to make a choice. Continue reading Review of ‘A City Burning’ by Prof Diana Wallace