Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2014 Short Story Competition

This is free to enter.

For published and aspiring writers alike - enter the Writers' & Artists' Yearbook 2014 short story competition and you could win:

• a cash prize of £500

• a place on an Arvon residential writing course of your choice

• publication of your story on www.writersandartists.co.uk

We're offering you the chance to win £500, plus a place on an Arvon writing course of your choice! All you have to do is enter a short story (for adults) of no more than 2,000 words, on the theme of 'the visit' and email it to competition@bloomsbury.com with "WAYB14 competition" as the subject line.

The closing date is midnight on Saturday 15th February 2014. The winners of the competition will be announced on this site in March 2014.

Find out more info on the brilliant Arvon residential courses, see www.arvon.org

Don't forget to read the full details, terms and conditions (below) before you enter. Please remember to register on www.writersandartists.co.uk before submitting your entry.

Interview with poet, Iggy McGovern

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Iggy McGovern who recently published A Mystic Dream of 4, a sonnet sequence based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton, 19th century Irish Mathematician & Poet is published by Quaternia Press (2013).

 I met Iggy McGovern at the café in the Science Gallery - nice food, nice staff but a bit noisy. Good mushroom soup and the stew has been recommended.

Welcome to writing.ie, Iggy. First, how did you start getting into poetry?

It’s a while ago so the story has become more of a myth. I had become very boring and my wife sent me out to become more interesting. I did a night class in creative writing in Newtown Park Avenue School, Blackrock. It was run by John Kelly, who is still teaching. We covered everything, poetry, stories, scripts. I had the idea that I would write short stories. At the end he gave everyone report cards. On mine he wrote that I would never be a short story writer and to try poetry. I do still try short stories, but I’m no use at it. Some of my poems are like short stories, though, very short stories.

Do you find going to workshops useful?

I have been to other workshops since. A particularly good one was with the poet, Michael Longley. Every year the writer in residence in Trinity offers a series of workshops for which you can apply. I particularly liked the way he ran it. He didn’t let us fall upon each other’s work like mad dogs. He would make comments but we were not invited to do so. There were no amateur critics looking at amateur writers. Until last day, that is and I’m not sure if he contrived it. He asked one person if she liked another person’s work. She said No. He looked at his watch and said we’d run out of time and should we go to the pub.
I also enjoyed a workshop from the wonderful Australian poet, Les Murray. He just sat there and we talked about poetry. He did most of the talking. And at the end, he looked down and saw the folder of poems that we had all submitted. He said he’d take them back with him and send us his comments. We all assumed that would be the last we saw of them but he was as good as his word. And he kept one of my poems for an anthology he was editing.

Do you recommend writers take classes?

Yes, find a good, general creative writing course. Be aware, though, that you can become addicted to going to course after course, which is unhealthy.

What was your first publication?

I think it was Poetry Ireland Review. I had a mentor who fed me information on what to do in my writing career. The next step was to send poems in. It wasn’t a great poem but I felt great! Another piece of advice worth passing on is that once a poem is published, it’s out of the running for submitting to competitions. So if you have a poem you think has the potential to win a prize, hold it back. And don’t send to two places at once. It may be accepted by both and then you have to extricate yourself.

How was your first collection The King of Suburbia picked up by the Dedalus Press?

Dedalus Press was changing its editorship from John F Deane to Pat Boran and Pat was aware of my work, having published some of my poems when he was editor of Poetry Ireland Review. It was his first collection as editor so there was double celebration when it won the inaugural Glen Dimplex Award in 2006.

The Science Gallery is where the Science and Arts talks of Ignite Dublin take place. I told Iggy about my talk there in December which mentioned guerrilla poetry, International Put Your Poem In A Shop Month (IPYPIASM) and other poetry in public spaces.

I had a poem on the Dart once. I wasn’t using the Dart at all at the time and didn’t want to buy a ticket to go and see it. Someone told me it was on display in Tara Street station. I told the guard at the barrier that a friend of mine had a poem I wanted to see. I’m sure he knew it was mine! It was called Joggers, from my first collection.

Did you stand around and watch for people reading it?

No. But someone had noticed it. There was a big wodge of gum stuck in the middle. It was an honest response. Many responses are dishonest – “I love your work,” “I’ve read all your books.”

I have read all your books, Iggy.

And I’ve read yours!
I don’t know if Poems on the Dart is still going. It was organised by Jonathan Williams, the literary agent. I did wonder if I got an agent whether I’d get more bookings but mostly I find festivals and events are word of mouth. For Electric Picnic, I was asked by Poetry Ireland. I regret that I didn’t make more use of the ticket.

I think the joy of Electric Picnic is that you never see all that you hoped to see but you always see things that you never planned or expected.

I did see one comedian that I really enjoyed, I didn’t plan that.
One of my favourite events recently was in Aghamore Co Mayo near Knock, a festival called The Kenny-Naughton Autumn School. The location was an old pub that closed down in the 1960’s. It had been inherited by a teetotaller and he’d just shut the door and left it, sold on the license. It was just as it was back in the 1960s. The bottles and bar are all still there. Again, it was word of mouth that they asked me from an Irish musician I met in Oxford

There’s a good description of the festival here http://literaryexplorer.webdelsol.com/westireland/westireland.html
What was your biggest crowd?

In New Zealand. There were maybe 200 people though I couldn’t see them for the lights; this was at the Auckland Writers and Readers festival. I did a reading and they interviewed me. Again the connections came from the residency I did in Australia in the Blue Mountains. That was a 4 week residency as part of my sabbatical in La Trobe University in Melbourne. It was an unusual combination of physics and poetry. Science and arts is on the rise.

You write a lot in form. Why is that?

I find it quite difficult not to write in form. And people will tell you that freeform is much more difficult. But I like the constraint. How do you know when a poem is over? When you’ve filled up 14 lines.

How do you say what you want to say but still stay in the form?

I supposed lots of the things I want to say are not that portentous, not the biggest thing in town, so my thoughts can be easily shaped. I may be guilty that the form is more interesting than the words. But the idea does come first when I’m starting a new poem.
I don’t go in for big ideas. I’m not sure what good it does. It can easily turn into polemic and I don’t think polemic and poetry belong together. Why would you do that? You’re not raising consciousness, if you’re ranting. I also don’t like the idea of using someone else’s pain. Writing in form is maybe a way of keeping all that at bay.

I have a couple of ranting poems. They probably work better as performance pieces than on the page. What advice do you have for writers who are starting out?

Remember that the fun is in the writing. Once you have a poem, you’ve had your fun already. Anything else is extra, a bonus, the sending out and all that.

What are you working on at the moment?

A sequence of sonnets. I wanted my next effort to be more coherent. My first two books were more loose. There was one section in my second book made up of letters to my grandfather; that was more coherent and people seemed to like that.

I know what you mean. I’m trying to write more poems that are not just about me.

Poems that are not about yourself are always about yourself, ultimately.
This sonnet sequence is based on the life of William Rowan Hamilton. He was an Irish scientist, mathematician and poet in the 19^th Century Dublin. He was a friend of Wordsworth.
Each sonnet is from the point of view of a person who interacted with him, real people, like a talking head. There are four sections - Geometry, Algebra, Metaphysics and Poetry. Each section has 16 sonnets, 14 talking heads, headed by a sonnet written as a personification of Geometry, Poetry etc. And the last sonnet in each section is written as Death. That’s my favourite character.

That sounds fascinating and intricate. I’m looking forward to reading those. Thanks very much Iggy.

His Website: iggymcgovern.com has lots of information and some poems.
Here's him reading on Youtube

Interview with Poet, Nessa O'Mahony

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Nessa O'Mahony

Hello Nessa and welcome. You’ve been around the writing scene in Ireland for a while now. What was your first publication?

My very first publication was a story in Ireland’s Own. I haven’t written a short story since.

How did you move on to poetry?

I come from a journalism background writing press releases and articles for businesses. My parents, in an inspired mood, gave me a creative writing course as a birthday present. It was at the Gaiety with Roger Gregg. He pushed me to have a go at writing poetry and I thought, this is it! Fiction was too close to the journalism; poetry was utterly different.
I found myself writing about my godmother. She was the family carer, spent her life caring for others and she had died of cancer about five years before. I remembered going in to her bedroom to see her toys, dolls in beefeater outfits and costumes from all over the world. I thought it was odd, a fifty year old woman having kids’ things and I described this in the poem, the sense of waste. Looking at it 20 years on, it was a judgemental poem. As I was writing, there were tears streaming down my face. But at the same time, the clinical part of my brain was thinking about the size of the poem, the look, line endings and words. I was intrigued that you can have these two parts of the brain going at the same time, which I didn’t get writing insurance press releases.
Combined with that, was the fear that I’d transgressed. Writing about family was like contraband. My writing class really liked it and when I showed it to my mother, she said I’d really caught her.

Do you remember your first poetry publication?

The writing course was in 1994 and in 1995, I got my first real break with Windows Publications, run by Heather Brett and Noel Monahan. They published a selection of my poems in the anthology alongside some other poets including Michael D Higgins. I did my first reading at the launch in the Irish Writers’ Centre. It was an experience. One of the other writers read a story involving cunnilingus. My parents had come along to listen and I thought they’d never let me write another poem!

How did your first book come about?

I wrote a lot; you’re in a hurry if you start at 30. My first book, Bar Talk happened quite quickly, published in 1999 by iTaLiCs Press. This reinforced the illusion that publishing is an easy business. I only have one copy left. I’ve been looking for spare copies in online stores.
Incognito Magazine, edited by Chris O’Rourke, published some of my poems in 1997 or 8. He was an ex-postman with a background in drama. Each magazine had a great launch night with all sorts of razzamatazz. He approached me and we put together a collection from the poems I had.

How did the editing process work?

Chris didn’t edit the individual poems; he put the poems together, this one works with this, there’s a gap here. He identified a subliminal concern of mine about being an old maid that I hadn’t written about. I wrote some to fill those gaps. Having him read my poems was useful; there is an objectivity missing in yourself when you’ve been with a group of poems for a long time. Ideally you would use good friends whose judgement you trust but it’s a big ask to read 60 poems.

What happened after that?

The first few years were very exciting. I got a lot of opportunities early on - a trip to Sicily, 2 weeks travelling and reading. For a while, I took a pay cut and worked on my writing on Monday mornings. Boy did I manage to produce stuff! It was my time. I went to work at the Arts Council. [N1] 
My second collection Trapping a Ghost came out with Bluechrome in 2005. The middle section imagines finding a diary that cover my grandmother’s civil war romance. it’s about 50% true and 50% imagined.

And you went back to college

Yes, that was a major decision. I did a masters in Norwich in 2002 and then had three years living in Wales working on my PhD. I met my partner, went on loads of great walks, and, because I was working on my verse novel I was reading every existing verse novel out there. I had to write about the process of writing it, while I was writing it. It probably heightened the self consciousness of the writing of process, not a very good thing really. When I’d finished, it took some time to clear the head and to get back my writing spontaneity. It gave me an ambition to try writing larger stuff.

Tell me about your verse novel

In Sight of Home came out with Salmon in 2009. It’s an imaginative history of family research, someone else’s family history actually. It tells the story of an Irish woman who emigrates with her family to Australia in the 1850s; there’s also a framing narrative featuring a 40-something 21st century Irish poet living on Anglesey.
I was invited by the University of New South Wales in Sydney to read at the Sydney Writers Festival when the verse novel came out. They had set up a John Hume institute in the University of NSW and I had completed year’s residency with the UCD counterpart..
I have a different relationship with writing now - it’s far less about performance (doing) and less about visibility. I think that only the tip of the iceberg of people who are writing and publishing are performing. There are phases when writers are not seen at all. Maybe there is not enough space for the limited number of opportunities there are to read. And newer fish make the most bubbles in the pond.
Now, I’m a part time teacher. I spend 10 months of the year doing nothing else, marking essays, putting in the hours to support the writing. I have July, August and some of September.

Where do you teach?

I teach creative writing at the Open University and Oscail DCU distance education, the Irish Writers Centre and other places. I would usually say yes to anything offered. They’re usually one off contracts and not a reliable source of income. But whatever I’m doing is someway related to writing. Although I love teaching, I find it saps the energy I need for my own writing. But I love working with people. What I don’t like is grading papers.

Why is marking papers so large a part of the job?

The teaching is institutionalised. I have to set assignments with a marking structure and the work has to be assessed. Something that gets a high mark, that is academically good, may not be published.
When I did my PhD, I realised that you can get a good pass mark, but it may still be a failure as a creative work. Academically you would be adding to the story of knowledge. But the criteria they look at, voice, register, characterisation, don’t necessarily result in a good creative, publishable work. The two things don’t go hand in hand; people go in with false expectations. A writer might get a 1^st class grade but it doesn’t mean that someone will publish their work. What the period of study does do, however, is get you into the habit of producing.

How does your love of reading affect your poetry?

It’s all about the story telling, the narrative arc. That’s all poetry did for hundreds of years, tell the story. I read much more fiction than poetry. I’ve just finished Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. She immerses you into the period. Mulishly, I won’t try and write a novel; I want to see how far I can push the poetry.

What are you working on now?

I’m finishing a third collection by the end of the summer, hopefully to be published by Salmon. I’m grappling with writing about my grandfather. His life history is a classic story - WW1 in the British army, sent home wounded where he joined IRA. Then in the north of England, he shot a policeman in the ear and was sent to HMS Parkhurst. He was released under the amnesty, joined free state army and was wounded again in the civil war.

I’m mentoring with an American student at the moment. That’s something that could be developed in Ireland. Poets who have gone beyond the workshop stage, emerging writers working with experienced writers, who has the objectivity. They do it with the Jerwood Prize in the UK.

That’s an interesting idea. It wouldn’t suit everyone.

No, you need a mentor who has been there before, who possesses openness and generosity and isn’t going to mould the writer to write like them. I think it should be in the remit of the Arts Council. They should nurture new writers as well as supporting the old names. There’s a lot out there for the optimistic starter and some for the bitter old hacks at the end, but the support for writers in the middle is missing. If they provided the funding, the transaction between the mentor and student would be one step removed. Perhaps the Irish Writers Centre could organise it.

Thanks very much, Nessa. Here are some links for some of Nessa’s poems.

Poetcasting recordings

Guardian poem of the week

Interview with Donna Sorensen

Last in a series of repeat posting of interviews for January.

Hello Donna and welcome to emergingwriter. I’ve been reading and enjoying your collection, Dream Country, on the train to work. First how did you first get into poetry?

I've been reading and writing poetry since I was a young teenager, back when I thought I had the 'black dog' that Winston Churchill suffered from! Ah, the drama of being a teenage girl. I wrote on and off for years after that but other things got in the way, like getting my pilot’s licence and travelling the world, so I never focused on it. My mum is a children's author and I dabbled in writing children's texts alongside teaching for a while but it was only really when I was working at the Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin and I started taking part in poetry workshops, that I fell headlong into the poetry world and haven't really come up for air since. I knew straight away it was the medium I'd been looking for, as all I wanted to do whenever I had a spare moment was write poetry. So I'd say I've been really working on developing the craft and getting poetry ready for publication since 2009. Being in Dublin helped; there's such a vibrant network for writers, you can experience and understand exactly how it all works - the editing, the sending out, the different journals being published, the importance of doing readings etc... I really miss it!

Would you recommend poetry workshops or writers groups for people who are just starting out writing? What about for people who have been writing for a while?

Defo for people just starting out. I found it most useful for me to start right at the start in workshops lead by experienced poets who could pass on something of the craft of poetry as well as their artistic insight and then writing groups as I got more confidence and material. Iain Broome and I were just talking about whether we think writing groups are useful now actually in our podcast,Write for Your Life. I think once you're further down the line, it's vital to keep in touch with other writers and to get constructive feedback, but you've got to be in the right group where you respect them as writers and value what they are saying.

You mention having had something of the craft of poetry passed on to you. Do you have any examples you could share?

Sure. 

Caitriona O'Reilly was a fabulous person to workshop with. She's got such a wealth of knowledge about poetry and is a really quiet and assertive intellectual force. I felt she was great at passing on something of what she'd learned along the way. I did a course with her called The Shape of the Poem and we only wrote formal poetry, experimenting with different forms each week. I really liked where it took me, as I don't use formal structures very often when let loose on my own. I wrote sestinas, triolets, villanelles and pantoums and liked being forced into patterns with my writing; liked creating something based on a big wild idea but reined into a constrained space.

And Paula Meehan really helped me with editing. Before I worked on poems with her, I accepted poems and lines and even words that I should have scrutinised more. She talked a lot about putting words under pressure and I've carried that through with me. Is this really the best word for this space? Have you mixed your metaphors? Have you laboured the point, spelled things out too much? Questions I try to ask myself now when I am finished with a first draft of a poem.

Those are some good questions to ask of a new poem. Are there any others spring to mind?

I am not sure whether all people writing poetry feel this, but I am constantly wondering what other shapes a poem could take. I feel sometimes it's like one of those books I used to read as a kid where you had to make decisions and those decisions would determine which page you turned to next and therefore the next adventure in the story. So many different ways to take a poem or a line, sometimes seemingly endless possibilities, it can seem like a big responsibility to finish something at a certain place, to mould a poem into definite stanzas. I guess that's part of the mystery of any creative pursuit! Some of my poems finished in the form they started and quickly too. Others seemed to take ages and much pulling them apart and putting them back together before I found how I wanted them to be on the page.

Are some of the poems in your collection started from the workshops?

Yes, the first poem in the collection, Mirrored Belly of the Sea, was written when I was under the tutelage of Paula Meehan. It's the first poem I had accepted for publication too. I think that's the only poem actually I'd written for a workshop that was in the collection. It was accepted by the Stinging Fly and didn't come out until a year later (back when they were doing once a year submissions) and in the meantime I'd had a few more accepted and published. But this one still felt like the first one.

About 16 or so have been published from the collection I think. It's actually exciting, starting to send out stuff for consideration by journals that's not in the collection! Haven't written masses by anyone's standards, what with having a baby and day job again now, but I am getting round to it every so often. It's a big thing, preparing submissions. I don't think I realised it right at the start, but keeping track of what's where and who's said no to things before and what particular journals are looking for. You've got to keep trying though eh!

Are any of your formal poems in your collection?

I decided not to use my formal poems, mainly because their subject matter was quite separate from that of the collection; I felt there'd be a strong discord. I sometimes feel, too, that poems with more formal structure seem more certain and sure, I guess because of the repetition, the recitation; like mantras. I know this is not true of all of them, but it's just something I associate with that style. My collection evokes more of a feeling of uncertainty, of transformation, of moving through unknown spaces. 

How did the publication come about? Had you been sending it around?

I was really lucky, actually. The Stinging Fly had me as their Featured Poet in the Spring 2012 issue and New Island Books read my poems there, liked them and asked to see my manuscript. I'd written in my bio about getting a commendation from the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award for my 'unpublished collection', which turned out to be a good thing to put in there! I worked a lot on the manuscript in the time between submitting for the award in 2011 and publication, but the main skeleton of it is the same.

And actually, it's something I've always wondered about poets - do they always know when a collection is finished? I have since written poems which I've thought "Oh! That would've worked really well in the collection!" but I guess that's just part of creating something... You could get yourself into an endless cycle of tinkering on things if you didn't have a deadline to work towards.

I read your interview with Billy Ramsell and really enjoyed it, especially the part about poetry rewarding reading in areas not traditionally associated with poetry:

'The richer such a storehouse becomes, the less the poet has to draw from the accidents of his or her biography.'

I can totally relate to this and quite a few of my poems in Dream Country were sparked by really random stories and bits of information I picked up. 'This is London' for example, was inspired by an urban myth I heard that after the war, there were so many books streaming into antiquarian booksellers in London, from the victims across the continent, that they didn't know what to do with them. So they used them to fill in the city's bomb craters. I am not sure it's true but that doesn't matter so much. The image it created was so powerful to me.

Another random poem - 'We Are Far From Home', relates to me and the confusion I have about having ended up in big cities, when I am happiest out in the middle of nothing - but it was sparked by a National Geographic piece I read about Nile Crocodiles they'd found living in tiny holes, burrow and caves deep under the Sahara Desert and thousands of miles away from proper water sources. Completely random I know!

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

My advice for aspiring writers would be - take advantage of the writing and performing going on around you. Get out to readings, festivals, spoken words, read journals, enjoy being part of something bigger, because it fuels and inspires you and right now, I feel very, very far away from all that. Coming back to Denmark has been amazing for my life - I've got everything a person could need to flourish, but I don't have the creative buzz around me that I felt in Dublin and in parts of the UK. I wish I could pop along to poetry readings after work, or drop in to open mic nights, but those are few and far between in Denmark and what with the collection out now, a 1-year-old, a weekly writing podcast and full-time job, I don't feel I have the space to start a night up on my own yet. Maybe I will at some point. I've met some great writers here, but it's just not the same!

These things have also meant that I am not writing as much as I want to. I am scribbling lines here and there and feeling annoyed with them. I've done more abandoning now than I ever have before. I wonder if it's also the pressure of having had a collection published and feeling like I have to be more serious or more perfect. Whatever the excuse (and you can see I have many!) I am only writing the odd bit of poetry here and there. I am hoping to come over to Ireland to do a reading in the spring and would love to enjoy Dream Country a bit more - take some time to read from it and show it to people. I feel like it's been cast out into a sea of books and people and I need to haul it in and wave it around from the deck to passing ships.

Is there any English language literary scene where you are?

I'm in Copenhagen and there is virtually no literary scene in English. There's a writers' group I've tried out and a few writers scattered about, but no regular nights. There are a couple of literary festivals, but really, you do feel completely adrift here! I'm just spending any writing time I've got glued to the computer, Twitter in particular, to keep abreast of things and read good stuff. Anyway, can't complain as it's a great place to live! Just feel like I had to sacrifice something big creatively in order to move back here. I also use Danish all day every day at work and I feel very contained and not myself - operating in a second language is a really interesting exercise and you get to know a lot about yourself, but mostly I just sit there thinking that people around me are not getting the full me and feeling a little sad about that. When I write, I am reconnecting with my Englishness and my full person.

Thanks very much Donna and good luck with your writing.

Biography

Donna Sørensen is a young poet, originally from the UK. Her début collection, Dream Country, is published by New Island Books in Ireland where Sørensen lived and worked, in the literary sector, for three years. Sørensen's poetry has been published extensively in Ireland, and in the UK, including literary journals such as The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review, THE SHOp, Southword, Crannóg, Orbis, Revival, Cyphers and Bare Hands. While in Ireland, she was a board member of the Irish Writers' Centre, where she had previously worked as a volunteer coordinator.

Donna Sørensen was selected to read at the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series in 2011 and the Cork Spring Poetry Festival in 2012. An early version of this collection received a commendation in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2011. She now lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, and works as English-language Content Manager for VisitDenmark. She is also the co-host of the popular weekly podcast for writers, Write for Your Life (http://www.70decibels.com/writeforyourlife/).

Dream Country is available to buy in bookshops and on New Island Books (http://www.newisland.ie/books/bestsellers/dream-country/978-1-84840-250-8)

Interview with poet, Billy Ramsell

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Billy Ramsell
 

Billy Ramsell was born in Cork in 1977 and educated at the North Monastery and UCC.  He holds the Chair of Ireland Bursary for 2013 and has been shortlisted for several other prizes. He edits the Irish section of the Poetry International website and recently judged the Shine Strong award for best first collection by an Irish poet. He has been invited to read his work at many festivals and literary events around the world.  Complicated Pleasures, his first collection, was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007 and a second, The Architect’s Dream of Winter, is forthcoming. He lives in Cork where he co-runs an educational publishing company.

Hello Billy and thanks for agreeing to be interviewed.
How did you first get into poetry?
It began for me in Barcelona in September of the year 2000. I’d just moved there, to the village-like suburb of Gracia, and I was renting a room from what had to be Spain’s most boring woman. Montse. I’ve never managed to meet an interesting woman with that name. I was still making good my arrival in the city. I spoke only the tiniest amount of Spanish and precisely two words of Catalan.  I knew no one of course, though that changed after a few months when I managed to land a job in one of the world’s worst language schools. In such isolated circumstances you tend to turn inwards. Or at least that’s what happened to me. I watched poetry -and the composition of poetry, the self-pleasuring interiority the craft – become increasingly important to my mental health.

Those were the circumstances in which I wrote my first published poem, which was entitled ‘An Otter’.  It came out in The Shop the following September, during the week of the 9/11 attacks. I was back in Ireland then, working in a call centre. Bertie Ahern gave everybody the Friday off; a national day of mourning entirely appropriate to the atrocity we’d all remotely witnessed.

I woke that morning in a friend’s apartment on Barrack Street. She had the strangest accommodation; sort of a disused auctioneer’s office with flat colourless mushrooms sprouting in the corners. I’ll always remember coming to in her living room that Friday. I’d been drinking fairly heavily the night before and I awoke to a peculiar sense of disembodiment, mingled with the conviction that I was in my own bed somewhere else.

I walked into Waterstone’s that morning and came upon a copy of The Shop with my poem in it. I was thrilled. I had no idea I’d been accepted. I walked around the block before purchasing a copy,
I'd dabbled in a number of different areas before poetry. I'd been in a band. I'd written several acts of what was surely the worst play in the history of Irish letters. It was about a once-successful but long-broken-up band reuniting to play at their drummer's funeral.  I'd written a few poems.
One thing I knew for certain is that I was no scholar: At college I was willing to read almost any book in the library on almost any subject; architecture, marketing, chemistry. You name it.  However, once a given title was prescribed or placed on any kind of official reading list, I found myself almost physically unable to take it off the shelf. It was a kind of allergy. I overcame it in the end and managed to do a reasonable amount of course-related study. But it was always minimal and always a struggle.

That's one of the great things about poetry. It rewards wide, broad and deep reading, especially into topics normally considered non-poetic; information technology for instance, or population studies. But you don't have to pursue knowledge in any structured way. You can follow your nose, hunt and gather. You're building a silo of facts and fantasies, of theories and information, which can be used to fuel and nourish your creative work. The richer such a storehouse becomes, the less the poet has to draw from the accidents of his or her biography.

I suppose it'd fair to say an interest in poetry was always native to my operating system. By 'poetry' here I suppose mean the micro level interaction of linguistic elements: the crunch of certain consonant clusters, the interplay of fricatives, what might be described as the pentameter's inevitable cadence and so on.

I guess some brains ship with software for recognizing and responding to such things, just as others are optimised for plot or character psychology or for manipulating musical intervals. It was only while living in Barcelona, however, that I seriously applied myself to the craft of actually making poems. And it's a ridiculously finicky, fiddly and miniaturist business: like making superbly-detailed ships in empty bottles.

Love this. Spain’s most boring woman...
What do you mean by: I awoke to a peculiar sense of disembodiment, mingled with the conviction that I was in my own bed somewhere else.
There had been and would be other memorable awakenings, more or less traumatic or tragicomic. But that’s one that sticks out. It was, I guess, a combination of the chemicals in my system and the quicksand-armchair in which I’d nodded off. Or maybe the room was filled with fungal spores from the mushrooms in the corner. I don’t know. But for whatever reason I seemed to float at some length and with unusual potency right at the meniscus between sleep and waking.  For a few seconds I felt almost capable of shaping the waking world the way you can sometimes manipulate dreams; that I might will myself to wake up anywhere: Limerick, the Taj Mahal, Las Vegas. Of course half my half-asleep self knew that this was all nonsense. But that didn’t matter. It was an incredible moment. Impossible to convey, really. I’ll never forget it.

Did The Shop not tell you you’d been selected? Actually, that’s happened to me a couple of times. Not with the Shop though. It’s all the sweeter, I think
It was indeed a sweet one. I’d been living in Spain when I submitted and I suppose by the time their acceptance reached my Spanish address I’d moved back to Ireland. As late as 2001, the bulk of such correspondence took place via the old snail-mail. It’s kind of hard to believe now.

Someone asked me this recently and I thought it was interesting, “If you could see a dead poet reading, which 3 would you pick?” Obviously they would be alive....
Well let me go right back to basics and choose Amergin, the bard who accompanied the initial Celtic invasion of Ireland. They say his verses soothed the very ocean. That’s a performance worth checking out, eh? The original slam champion.
My second choice is James Clarence Mangan, just because he’s probably Irish poetry’s greatest enigma, and I’d wrap it up with the wheezy aspirations of Seán Ó Riordáin. Can I be greedy and ask Beckett to be MC for the night? I think they’d all get along. It’d be some evening. Well, I think Beckett and Ó Riordáin would get along.

We'll let you have Beckett. Can you tell me a bit about Poetry International? How did you get involved?
Poetry International Web is an online project based in Rotterdam, an offshoot or adjunct of the long-running eponymous festival. The project was founded in 2002 and has gradually attracted contributing editors from around the world: from Denmark, the United Kingdom, Iran, India and so forth. Ireland joined the club in 2005. We’re excited because it now looks like France are finally coming on board too; that’s a major poetry vacuum plugged.

Each contributing country is awarded a number of 'slots' per year during which they forward material to the central editorial staff in the Netherlands to be processed and uploaded to the site. At the moment Ireland has three such slots: one in January, one in June and one in November. Or thereabouts.

I have funding to fill those slots with the work of eight poets: six writing in English, generously funded by the Munster Literature Centre, and two writing in Irish, generously funded by Foras na Gaeilge. It's more or less a condition of the project that everyone involved be paid for their work. Except me. Like several other national editors, I'm a volunteer.

The Irish domain is administered by the Munster Literature Centre and until January 2012 was edited by its director Patrick Cotter. Then I took over. I’ve tried to impose my stamp on it but the constraints of space and funding make it frustrating.

Y’see it’s’ all about balance. In both the English and Irish categories I can't just add my favourite poets or indeed the poets with the greatest critical reputations. It's got to be fairly evenly measured between old and young, famous and not so famous, straight and gay, emigrant and immigrant, conservative and experimental, Dublin-based or otherwise. And so on. My goal is to be representative rather than canonical.

Who have you chosen for Poetry International already and are you allowed to say who is coming up?
It’s been a good mix so far I think:  Dave Lordan, Máire Mhac an tSaoí, Mary O’Donoghue, Harry Clifton, Simon Ó Faoláin, Trevor Joyce, Bríd Ni Mhorain, and Paul Perry. I’d like to think it reflects at least some of the Irish scene’s diversity.

In July we had Alan Gillis and Eileen Sheehan. After that who knows?

What do you enjoy doing outside of poetry? Do you find it crosses over?
I’m a sports fan and you’d be surprised how often that seems to make its way into my writing. I’m also a small bit of history bore but strangely enough historical characters and situations never seem to feature in my stuff. In about 2008 I rediscovered music in a big way, especially trad and electronic/modern classical/ambient stuff. I’d be happy if that particular interest came through in the work, an attraction to noises, patterns, acoustic images and so on.

I run as far and as frequently as I can and in recent years that’s become a big part of my approach to writing. Of course the endorphins and adrenaline provide a creative boost. But it’s amazing what drifts across the mental heads up display when you start to motor, when you start to push it in that rhythmic way: stray words and phrases, idea-germs, ways out of compositional problems. I highly recommend it.

Lastly, what have you got coming up yourself?
Well I just judged the Strong / Shine Award for best first collection by an Irish poet, which was an enjoyable but challenging experience; it's hard to trust your refereeing instincts when you're sole arbiter, there's no linesmen, umpires or replay-technology to act as sounding board for your decision-making process. And in this instance there were some agonising decisions to be made. I must admit though that in the end I'm delighted with the winner: Michelle O'Sullivan is a special poet, one who has applied herself to the art-form with unusual seriousness and zeal.

Now that's out of the way I'm focused on seeing my next book, The Architect's Dream of Winter, through the final stages of production. It'll hopefully be coming out with Dedalus Press in the next couple of months.

There's a few other bits and pieces too: putting together the next upload for Poetry International, completing a couple of modesty overdue reviews, helping as best I can to organise The Winter Warmer, a weekend of poetry in Cork this November that's being produced by O Bheal. And there's another big project waiting the wings that I'm excited about but can't really discuss yet...

I've got a few outings coming up as well. I was delighted to be reading at the Bandon Arts Festival alongside Matthew Sweeney in September. I'll also be appearing at the Model Gallery in Sligo as part of Kate Ellis's Resound collective, which is an ongoing collaboration involving music, art and spoken word and is an incredible project to be involved in. Then I'm off to the Poetry Africa festival in Durban. After that it'll be time to sit down, shut up and try to write a few poems.

Thanks a million, Billy and good luck with all of that.

Here are some links to Billy's poetry in wordlegs
and on his website
and in southword

Interview with Poet, Fred Johnston

Continuing my repostings of interviews for January, here's Fred Johnston. His new collection Alligators Datys is just published.

Fred Johnston has such a long writing CV, I can only summarise it here. He was born and educated in Belfast. He has lived in Toronto, Canada, Spain and Africa. 'Orangeman', a collection of stories in French, translated by film-maker and writer and good friend, Christian le Braz, appeared from Terre de Brume (France) in October 2010 and has just published a second volume of short stories, 'Dancing In The Asylum,' from Parthian Books (UK) Among his poetry achievements are Founder of Galway's annual international literature festival, CÚIRT, in 1986. Writer-in-Residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco, 2004. He is the Founder of the Western Writers’ Centre – Ionad Scríbhneoiri Chaitlín Maude – based in Galway (www.twwc.ie)

Hello Fred and welcome to emergingwriter. You've had such a long writing life so far, I'm not sure where to start. But I'll start at the beginning. How did you first get interested in poetry?

I was writing poetry very early on, at about the same time that I began to write short stories. I wanted only to be a short story writer, as it transpires. Steinbeck influenced me, and James Baldwin and later the French writers. Dear me, but I toted things up the other day, and it is forty-two years since I published my first short story! Poetry was always dear to me in so much as, writing songs, which I also did from an early age, I believed in the measured potency of words. I also believed - and it was in the air then too - that poetry had a social and political importance; certainly, that poets had or should have. Not many Irish contemporary poets want to hear that now, sadly.

You write both fiction and poetry. How do you change from one to the other?

One doesn't so much 'change' from one to the other as permit oneself to be led into a different manner of seeing things; poetry has one way of doing things, let's say, prose quite another: which is why it saddens me to see young poets banging out poems which are actually merely acts of chopped prose. I blame writers' workshops, some of the worst kind, anyway, for this. In poetry I am dealing with music; in prose, with a sort of oration. Each demands something quite different from you.

You also do book reviews. With Ireland a very small place, you must often know the writers you are reviewing. And the reviewers of your books may often know you. How do you keep the review separate from the relationship?

I was a book reviewer for newspapers and journals and indeed theatre and visual art for many years. I have no problem keeping the relations between reviewer and acquaintance separate, but I have learned that there are those who believe you are betraying them if you speak your mind. Joyce said, and I paraphrase, that the big sin in Ireland was to put things in print. He wasn't wrong. I expect he meant opinions that ran contrary to the consensus, or some consensus served up by a tiny group, poets, writers or politicians.

The cultural world in Ireland tiny, the poetry world a tinier world within an already tiny world. Everything is personal. Everyone connected to one degree or another. Friends help out friends, review friends: woe betide the reviewer who speaks his mind to his friends! It is held, schoolboy-fashion, that some poets are not to be criticised save favourably and sanction will be sought if one attempts to criticise them unfavourably. Of course, this attitude prevents the poet under review ever from maturing. I believe also that a writer is not divorced in some quasi-mystical way from his or her work; this view is not tolerated easily in some quarters.

For instance, if a poet who epigraphs his work continually with quotes from old Soviet Union poets who were incarcerated for their work, yet will himself never join a demonstration or write a letter of protest to a newspaper, I see it as a reviewer's duty to point out the obvious disconnection inherent in this. This rather more 'holistic' approach is not welcomed in Ireland. One doesn't lose real friends by being a reviewer, it should be said. One only loses those acquaintances whose time it was to go anyway.

Have I 'suffered' professionally from writing negative reviews? Oh, without a doubt. But I'm against cultural love-ins, they do the art no good at all. One should rather have art and literature that was excruciatingly bad than art and literature that slapped itself on the back. The word 'consensus' sounds too much to me like the sort of thing a doctor might write on one's chart at the end of a hospital bed.

You have embraced Facebook. What, if anything, do you get out of it as a writer?

Facebook is merely a communications tool, for opinion, viewpoints and dissent, sometimes. But God protect us from a day when some budding poet adds to his bibliography that he or she 'had three poems published on Facebook.'

What advice would you have for poets who are starting out or at an early stage of their development?

One could be dreadfully cynical and suggest that he or she finds some well-connected friends in the media before writing a line. Too much of publishing and promoting poetry is a 'who-you-know' game. It has become particularly thus through the fashioning of 'poetry celebs,' God help us, and that sort of thing.

On a more positive note, one might suggest that they stay true to their first creative impulse, that they do not crave publication as if it were the height of poetic achievement nor desire to have a collection of work published while they are too young to have anything to say; that they do not look to a writers' course ever to turn them into poets nor seek poetry prizes. Of more real value to the world is to be the local postman.

As Eliot said, writing poetry is a mug's game. One writes, I would add, because one has no choice. There is no other motive.

What can you remember your first publication?

It was a short story published by the late David Marcus in the New Irish Writing page of the old Irish Press. It was based on real experiences.

How did you feel, do you remember, when your story was accepted?

I felt very good when my first story was published, four decades ago. I was also very young. I believed the publication heralded the beginning of an illustrious and adventurous Bohemian career. I was incredibly naive; but these days anyone who publishes anything is looking at once at a collection of this or that and being encouraged to do so. Dreadfully damaging in the long run. I had one real thing to say and I said it. I was eighteen years old. At twenty I probably had one more thing to say. That's all.  Most things that I believed pertained only to my own view of the world. With some contemporary writers, this affliction never quite passes.

Have you got a good writing prompt for a new writer?

I am unsure as to what you mean by a 'writing prompt,' as I had always thought that, firstly, inspiration was a personal affair and secondly that imagination worked from there. The writing should prompt the writer.

I guess what I mean by a writing prompt is just an exercise a new writer could use to kick start the imagination. What do you do? Walk? Read? Meditate? use a notebook? Memoirs? Use photos or visual art?

I have personally never used prompts as such beyond giving ideas time to mature. I can't say much more about that.

Time - a great writing prompt!

I know you write in French. Does the initial idea come in French? Do you dream in French. Do you do your own translations? I have tried poetry translation (I speak Dutch) but I found it extremely tough to get both the meaning and the rhythm and nuances out. 

Excellent question. I have occasionally had dreams in part-French! The nuances. . . well, when translating, your faced with a choice: to go for the adaptation of the poem, or the more precise translation, which is always more challenging, naturally. But I suppose that's part of one's job. And one's risk.

The initial idea derives very often from a sort of verbal play, if you like; I simply want to use French to see how it sounds, how it works text-wise. Yet just as often I have a theme which, odd though it may seem, is more suitably handled in French. I am freer in my writing, I think, in French - I envy very much those who can, for instance, write in Irish as well as English. One can deal with subjects in a very different, not to say more open and even intimate way. It's always hit-and-miss.

I am always delighted and surprised to have one of my poems in French take by a French publication. For me, changing languages is changing my mind-set, my emotional response. I suppose one literally becomes someone else. I have respect, I would hope, for the translator's task and detest the fact that in Ireland so much of what is published as a translation by some poets is in fact a crib from an original translation altered slightly. That's just messing about, to put it mildly.

I think I would add that the French have more respect for poetry than we have. We're churning it out, paying little attention to style and some times, to form; we think emotion is poetry. It isn't. Too many of us see poetry as a way to get trips abroad and a handy grant. I hate to say this, but Irish poetry is far from being in a healthy state. It needs serious critical revision. But sadly, I doubt that it will get it. We're not who we think we are.

Trips abroad and grants galore. I wish!

What have you got coming up?

A new collection of poems, 'Alligator Days,' is being published by the redoubtable Revival Press. I was extremely lucky to receive a literary bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland and another from the Northern Ireland Arts Council this year, and for this second bursary I am working on a project with Lagan Poetry in Derry.

Interview with writer Niamh Boyce

Continuing my repostings of interviews, here's Niamh Boyce whose lovely book, The Herbalist won Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Books Awards. Congratulations!

Niamh Boyce's first novel The Herbalist, was the winner of the inaugural Novel Fair at the Irish Writers Centre in 2012. Since then she has been working very hard on whipping it into shape with her publisher, Penguin Ireland. I was lucky enough to get a review copy and my nose was stuck in it for a long weekend recently. Set in 1930's Ireland, it is packed full of great characters and fascinating stories. Do yourself a favour and get a copy to see what all the fuss is about. Here's an interview on some of the burning questions I had on the book's journey to publication.

Welcome Niamh, to emergingwriter. Congratulations on your novel. You have 4 women narrators who are quite distinctive. I am particularly fond of Emily. How did you keep their individual voices and attitudes?
The women were so different in circumstance, age and attitude that their voices felt very distinct from early on in the process. I wrote them exaclty as I heard them – but  did vary the point of view. Emily, who was a real chatterbox, narrates from the first person; which is the most intimate. And Carmel and Sarah were written from the third person. It was no effort really to keep their voices distinct- they're at such very different stages in their lives and have very different attitudes towards life, love and the Herbalist.

The women in your novel are to a certain extent, defined by their clothes. How would you recommend any emerging writers consider this for their own characters?
It depends on the character really. Many might not notice clothes at all. For someone like Emily however, with her love of Hollywood glamour and silks, satins and furs - clothes become very important. They symbolise the kind of woman she wishes to be. 
Clothes can be very evocative, a child's shoe can evoke loss, a leather belt can evoke terror.  When I facilitate writing workshops, I often use small items to help writers to create with characters. Lipstick has worked very well in the past, often bringing up stories of betrayal, murder and lust, as well as some touching personal memories. A hat can represent a part of someone’s personality they usually keep hidden, there are endless ways to work with characterisation through clothes, it’s a very rich area, and very enjoyable.

Your novel won the novel fair in 2012. What did your agent and publisher recommend you change between then and the final draft?
My novel fair entry was a condensed version of my original manuscript, so the first thing I did was work back in those scenes I had cut for clarity in the fever coming up to the novel fair! The next stage was working with a calendar, an excellent recommendation from my publisher. I printed out a calendar from the year of the novel, one for each character. That way I knew where everyone was on any given day. It was very helpful; I’d recommend it to anyone writing a novel.

Niamh blogs here and you can see the Amazon link for The Herbalist here, or better still, buy a copy in your local independent book shop.

Other blog tour links are:
6th June

June Caldwell of the Irish Writers Centre

13th June

Alison Wells at Head Above Water

20th June

Theresa Milstein at Theresa's Tales Of Teaching Tribulations And Typing Teen Texts