Category Archives: Print
AN ULSTER PSYCHE
AN ULSTER PSYCHE
I was shocked by her photographs. How could she dare? As well as projected slides she had a dozen cibachromes on display whose marvellously luminous surface makes the paper itself a fresh lens. It becomes a pool of water in which everything is gently enhanced by the limpid medium. And yet, this pool is pinned to a wall.
I had to leave the room. Such things should not be shown without a warning. Continue reading AN ULSTER PSYCHE
Short Story in ‘The Honest Ulsterman’
I am particularly pleased to have my short story ‘Runner’ in The Honest Ulsterman, online on Thursday June 28th. Launched 40 years ago as ‘A Handbook for Revolution’, it has showcased world-class writers such as Seamus Heaney, Medbh McGuckian, Michael Longley, Louis McNeice – an amazing list.
Time to pay a personal tribute. Continue reading Short Story in ‘The Honest Ulsterman’
New Welsh Reader #117 ‘The Road’
A Taster here of my Short story ‘The Road’ featured in New Welsh Reader Summer Issue #117 alongside fiction by Joao Morais, Mihangel Morgan and Anna Vaught. This is the opening story of my Collection ‘A City Burning’ for which I’m seeking a publisher.
Jon Gower has said of ‘The Road’, “a fine tale, solar-plexus punching, vivid and filmic and puts the tragedy fully back into the term ‘Troubles.'” Continue reading New Welsh Reader #117 ‘The Road’
Gwyneth Lewis – Henaint / Old Age, a double pleasure in Welsh and English
Pleasure despite excruciating pain. I find myself recommending a tormenting thrill. Gwyneth Lewis’s Welsh poem Henaint and her translation of it into English, Old Age are excellent examples of the wonderful double enjoyment that a poet working in two languages can offer.
To read the Welsh poem and find its adjacent English version is like diving into one pool to discover it linked underwater to a twin, from which one emerges, amazed to have experienced two related worlds whose contents are refracted to the eye and ear by differing slants of colour, angle and echo: an exciting, astonishing experience – and repeatable! Do read these poems now in a special online edition of Eborakon poetry magazine. Continue reading Gwyneth Lewis – Henaint / Old Age, a double pleasure in Welsh and English
Dreams and the Writer: a skewed and fresh perspective?
‘A dream unquestioned is a letter unopened’. Apparently. Do you agree?
Twenty years ago I was in the grip of prolonged and serious physical pain due to a then-undiagnosed condition. I couldn’t work as normal. I spent long periods confined to the house. Someone was very unkind to me and, as a way of acknowledging his fault without having to say it aloud, he handed me a book, saying I might find it of interest. I had plenty of time to read it thoroughly, footnotes and all and, in one of those, discovered a reference to a book that came to mind forcefully this morning.
I woke from a dream so vivid and engaging that I was able to write down the dialogue between the figures in it and to describe their outward and inward dispositions, partly because I had ‘been’ them all, inhabiting the action from their perspectives. This is not possible in waking life. At least not with the immediate and assured access a dream affords.
This morning’s scenes, I realised, in which I was both multiply participant and also the observer, opened up for me a way to go deeper into a character in the novel I’m writing.
I wonder how common it is for writers to take advantage of what dreams offer? Continue reading Dreams and the Writer: a skewed and fresh perspective?
Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award Workshop with Moyra Donaldson
I like anything that delivers on its pitch and that was certainly the case with the Mairtín Crawford Award Workshop: Preparing Poetry For Submission, April15th at the Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast.
Continue reading Mairtín Crawford Poetry Award Workshop with Moyra Donaldson
Novel Research 4- Abandoned: Not Forgotten?
The fourth research trip for my novel (6th – 17th April), coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, was necessarily a time of public reflection, assessment and forecasting about peace and conflict, in great depth and with many of the major actors back in the spotlight.
Continue reading Novel Research 4- Abandoned: Not Forgotten?
Poem in ‘Spring’s Bride’
Easter edition Bangor Literary Journal. Download here
Easter
A rent in the year
Through which the cold news comes:
Even the best of us
Will be consumed by pain,
Abandoned undeservedly
And not know why
And asked to say to all this,
Yes,
Though he destroy me
Yet I trust in him.
Each of us shivers
In this gap,
Choosing to assent
Or not
To love’s defiance
Of anything other than itself.
Victory or vindication –
These it lets fall
(Aborted fruits),
Facing into the wind,
Arms wide.
Novel Research, Kindness and Methodology
The third research trip for my novel started and ended with snow. My flight from Cardiff to Belfast was delayed by 23 inches of it near the airport and by another fall on the return but I encountered nothing other than warmth from the people I met in Northern Ireland.
It was a pleasure to spend time with teachers, schoolchildren, community workers, experts in Irish and Ulster Scots, journalists, farmers and agricultural experts. I also enjoyed two great reading gigs and came home with a prize certificate.
