Dalkey Book Festival

Very late post just to say if anyone’s at the Dalkey Book Festival tomorrow I’m reading in New to You at 2pm.

Topic is how growing up in Dalkey influenced my writing so sitting here selecting which of the many scenes set by the sea that I might read from The Other Boy and What Might Have Been Me.

Excited though I am about the reading, the excitement has just been topped as I just found out there is a drawing of me on the ‘writers’ wall’ in Harold Boy’s national school!

Hopefully not a student out for vengeance a year after last year’s colouring competition in Eurospar...

Happy Birthday Listowel!

This week marks the 40th anniversary of Ireland’s longest running literary festival; Listowel Writers’ Week.

You can only have your first Listowel experience once and mine was seven years ago. I’d never been to the town before and pulling into the square in a taxi with three strangers, what I remember seeing first is the Listowel Arms, where the climbing roses were in full bloom. I remember too the sunshine and a band playing on the street – although part of me wonders if I’ve edited that into the memory, as I’ve never seen one since.

Later that evening, I met my friend as arranged and we set about exploring. By the next evening, when we’d both finished our workshops, our twosome had grown into a little group. And the little group grew into a bigger group and an even bigger one, until seven years later, Listowel is full of friends. Some of them are the kind of friends you see year round. Some of them you look forward to seeing once a year. Some you remember only their faces and by now it’s too late to ask their names but it doesn’t take from the animated discussions over coffee and custard creams in the boys’ school on breaks from the workshops, or in the back of Keanes’ late at night.

Over the last seven years I’ve learned how to write novels, short stories, articles and obituaries, I’ve even had a stab at writing songs. Life has changed, is changing, will continue to change. There’s a statue of John B in the square now and a new bookshop on the mainstreet. One of my good friends had her book published a few years ago and her second and her third. Last year mine joined hers on the shelves.

I listened to the John Murray show yesterday, broadcast live from Listowel. Since Wednesday I’ve been getting e-mails and texts from friends enjoying the fortieth festivities. They urge me to come down, that it’s not too late, that the sunshine is promised to last the whole weekend. And sitting writing this, looking at the orange climbing roses in my garden, in full bloom, I’m still not sure why I won’t be joining them. I know you can only experience your first Listowel once, but something tells me that by missing out on this one, I might just get a little closer next year.

This is the sea

This piece originally appeared in the Irish Daily Mail magazine last September. I thought it might be worth sharing here for anyone who hasn’t already seen it....

Growing up next to the sea, you take it for granted. That’s not to say you don’t notice its beauty, just that it is always there, like, say, electricity. Where I went to school the sea was a constant presence, a shimmer behind the railings, rockpools where pictures in our science books came alive. You could say that the sea was part of the curriculum.

During the summer, my friends and I headed over Killiney Hill and down the steps at the back to Whiterock. When we had money we went to the Rainbow Rapids in Dun Laoghaire, snaking plastic tubes that swerved out of the old baths building and back in to a deep plunge pool inside. The green slide was the fastest, with more twists. I always went for the beige one.

You see the truth was, even though I was surrounded by sea, I was no water baby. Far from it, but then I was not from a family of water babies. My mother never learned to swim and my father is the only person I’ve ever met who taught himself, lying across a dining room chair, a library book open on the floor beneath him as he practised strokes in mid air. And yes, it was Dad who taught me.

I only remember snatches of those lessons: a mouthful of water, the opposite side of the pool seeming to bob ever further away. My arms cold and bare after the water wings had gone. Somehow, I got the idea that if I put my face fully underwater, I would certainly drown. Despite all this, the lessons were a success, certainly more so than our driving lessons years later, in that I did actually learn to swim. I swam with my neck arched and my chin well above the surface, I swam with graceless strokes fuelled by panic. But I swam all the same.

When we were teenagers, my friends grew more adventurous. They leapt off rocks and piers and boats. My fear grew in direct proportion to their confidence and I stayed near the edge, never higher than my waist, well out of danger of a wave breaking in my face. It bothered me for a while but then it didn’t, because we grew up and there were much more important things to do. For a few years I lived in London and the closest I ever got to the sea was the canal, where the listless water barely covered the wheels of the submerged shopping trolleys. And it was only when I moved home, back to the sea, that I started to notice it in a way I never had before; the colours and shape of the waves, how being next to it seemed to fill me up, like water seeping into a footprint on the shore.

That’s what brought me to the side of that pool one Monday night in January, convincing myself, but still not convinced that I could do this. There was an audition swim before we were assigned classes and one splashy breathless width later I was joining the level twos, a group I barely had a chance to assess before our teenage instructor set us off on our first width.

It started badly. My new fog resistant goggles were steaming up already and in my haste I hadn’t fitted them properly so the rubber strap bisected my ear. Halfway across, I became conscious of a voice calling out, repeating the same thing. “Put your head down! Put your face in the water!” I realised it was my instructor and that she was talking to me.

Of course, I was doing my usual stroke, neck and chin achingly high and I ignored her. I wanted to explain to her that I wasn’t ready, that it would take a while, but she kept calling, louder each time and just like that, my body obeyed her, even though my mind hadn’t. My face was in the water and I could see tiles and the shimmery white leg of someone in front of me. I pulled my head back out, gasped in some air before going under again and again until suddenly I was there, at the other side.

Clinging onto the rail, my heart pounded. I grinned from ear to ear. The instructor was focussed on someone else now, making wild gestures with her arms at one of the men. Whether it was what he was doing or should be doing, I couldn’t tell. She hadn’t noticed my achievement, no-one had. There would be no pat on the back, no brass band parading along the tiles. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that when it was my turn to swim back, my heart pounded a little slower than before. And each time that night and the next Monday and the one after that, the fear loosened its grip, bit by bit, so I was able to leave it behind like the trail of bubbles in my wake.

I’m still no water baby. You wouldn’t envy my technique. But I swim in the sea and I love it. I run straight in. When the waves come, I close my eyes and dive right through them and when I break the surface again the icy tingle on my skin feels something close to freedom.

Things I never blogged about in March

Today is the second of April. And too late I realise that it’s five whole weeks since I’ve been writing ‘update blog’ on my to do list, five whole weeks since I’ve been moving it onto the next day.

It’s not that March was a barren blogging month. Far from it, there were lots of blog worthy events; the first ‘hello’ in Terminal Two, my new Villagers CD, a ceili in Monkstown that provided more than enough material. I could’ve blogged about the hen party of one of my oldest friends or a turquoise frying pan or the two robins by my foot in Blackrock Park or pruning the garden after a long winter or about how it’s easier to look at a closed down shopfront when the sun is shining.

I almost blogged about childhood memories of St Patrick’s Day – fractured views of the parade through gaps between the people in front of me, the boom of ‘ATA Security’, a shamrock shake afterwards.

I wish I’d blogged about a nighttime drive across the Wicklow mountains, looking back over my shoulder to see the orange flames rising from the landscape, sudden and frightening against the black, black sky.

I should’ve blogged about the Dublin Book Festival and the novel writing course I’m doing with the Irish Times and the new French edition of The Other Boy.

You’ll be glad I didn’t have the energy to blog about a sudden bout of gastroenteritis.

Truth is, it wasn’t lack of material or even that I was too busy to blog in March – no more so than usual. What happened in March was that I was on a break from my second novel. I took the break seriously, those precious few weeks to draw breath and not work and where any writing done is sporadic, half written scribbled things, notes in journals and sometimes just inside your own head and sometimes not even that.

But now it’s April and it’s back to it, the next draft. And something tells me there’ll be lots of new things to blog about.

Or not.

Dublin Book Festival

The Dublin Book Festival is bigger than ever this year, running from Thursday 2nd March until Sunday 6th.

There are three things I really like about this year’s programme.

The first is that there is, quite literally, something for everyone. Whether your thing is prose or poetry, crime or literary fiction, history or comedy, the programme is jam packed with household names. They have events for kids and young adults, walking tours and tea parties and even a session with everyone’s favourite Dragon, Bobby Kerr for those who are more interested in ‘books’ of a different type.

The second thing, is that almost all of these events are free. For the ones that do carry a cost, that cost is a very reasonable €5 which you get back by way of a book token for the festival book shop. The cost of readings and workshops in this country has long been a pet peeve of mine and it’s great to see a festival that’s so accessible to everyone on all levels.

And the third? The third is that I’m delighted to say I’m part of the programme this year and will be lining out with other ‘Fresh Voices’ Paul Soye, Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Liam Carson at 4pm on Sunday 6th March in City Hall. There’ll be readings and discussion with our chair Sinead MacAodha, so should be a lot of fun. Hope to see some of you there!

http://www.dublinbookfestival.com/

Moments

Before I was published, I’d often imagine into the future; what it would be like to get a book deal, to see my name on the cover of a novel, to see that novel on a bookshop shelf. These daydreams would usually come when I was at some difficult stage of the process, times when I was trying to avoid actually doing any writing at all.

Since I’ve been published, I’ve noticed that people often ask me about those exact moments I used to imagine. Usually, they have a smile on their face, urging me to tell them stories of elation, euphoria, of a world shattering into a billion starry molecules all around me. And sometimes I tell them that, or something like it, even though it’s not one hundred percent true.

The truth is, that while I remember each of these moments with a startling clarity - the Wednesday August evening when I got the e-mail, the Saturday morning I met my editor outside a McDonalds to take possession of my first copies - as well as elation, there was relief and disbelief and fear. And even as each event was happening, there was something else going on too, a tiny gap between the way I was actually feeling and how I was expected to feel. A gap big enough for the dreaded ‘should’ to squeeze through, as in: should I be feeling more than this?

Today, I received delivery of the paperback format of that same novel, The Other Boy. The paperback release is a low key affair, a new cover, bigger print run – no publicity or launch parties here. I was on the phone, still in my running clothes, when the courier rang the doorbell and I ate my breakfast, answered some e-mails and played a Facebook scrabble move before I rescued the box from the hall and sliced through the brown tape.

The first thing I noticed about the book was how nicely it fit into my hand; chunky but not too big, the cover matt and soft and grass green. When I turned it over, my name was there, right at the top. I sat down on the couch, read a bit in the middle and I remembered writing it. I flicked to another section and smiled, I remembered writing that too. And that was when it finally hit me, 10 months after being published, a year and a half after getting the deal, that this was actually my book, a book I’d written. The kind of book I might even buy.

I’m writing this in Starbucks. There’s a floor length window with the sea outside and today it’s rough, white peaks of waves on grey water. I like writing here because it’s a nice distraction to glance out at it, between paragraphs, when I run out of words. Today, I’m glancing at something else as well, my novel, the paperback, on the table, next to my cup.

It’s silly, I know, self indulgent, to carry it around like this and tomorrow it’ll be back on the shelf where it belongs. But just for today, I’ll keep it close and enjoy the unexpected tingle of elation that seeing it unexpectedly seems to bring.

Seapoint Literary Supper

This is a bit of a shameless plug but I think it's an event some of you might be interested in. Dubray Bookshops and Seapoint restaurant in Monkstown - home of amazing seafood and their legendary rosemary and parmesan fries - have started a literary supper evening on the first Thursday of every month.

The idea is simple. For €28 you get to enjoy a 3 course meal, a glass of wine and a reading and Q&A session with an Irish author, who, on Thursday 3rd February, happens to be yours truly.

Spaces are limited (genuinely so, as you can see in the photo the room is lovely but not very big) so if you're interested call Seapoint on 663 8480 to book your place.

Kick off on the night is 7:30 and as well as reading from The Other Boy (which is out in paperback that day) I'll also be doing my first reading from my new novel What Might Have Been Me.

Hope to see you there!