The 2016 International Festival of Authors (IFOA) featured some brilliant Irish talent. Five contemporary writers including Catriona Crowe, Emma Donoghue, Julie Morrissy, Paul Muldoon and Ciaran O’Rourke were invited to the festival to speak and share their work and ideas, allowing the audience to explore Irish literature and culture. Celtic Canada was fortunate enough to snag some one on one time with these fabulous minds and ask them each a few questions.
Emma Donoghue
Many of you may be familiar with Emma from her popular book, Room. What many of you may not know is that Emma also wrote the screenplay for the film version of her book. Emma spoke to Celtic Canada about her success from Room as well as her newest novel to hit the shelves, The Wonder, which she was presenting at this year’s IFOA festival.
Celtic Canada (CC): Why did you think it was important to partake in the Ireland @ IFOA focus events?
Emma Donoghue (ED): It’s quite funny actually, you know, while I’m in Canada I usually expect to be a Canadian writer so to turn up in an Irish slot while in Toronto is quite funny, but I’m delighted. I remember having a very confusing moment last year when I was doing a showing of the film Room in Dublin, so there I would usually have emphasized the Irish aspect of that film but the Canadian Ambassador to Ireland was introducing it, so I remember I kept saying to myself ‘don’t forget to sound grateful to Canada as well’… the problems of dual citizenship!
CC: How does it feel to be coming off of such success with Room?
ED: It’s been mad busy, but these are good problems to have! It’s a lovely feeling that I have at least potentially an audience out there who are more likely to take a punt on what I write because they liked one of my books or films, so it’s all splendid.
CC: Seeing as you’ve written books that have affected people on such a deep emotional level such as Room, what’s the first book that gave you a similar emotional feeling?
ED: I think it was Sylvia Plath’s collection Ariel. Those poems about her father…any poetry of my own I wrote within a month of reading her was just too Plathian you know?
CC: How has The Wonder been received so far?
ED: Great, I was particularly chuffed that Stephen King reviewed it for the New York Times and admired my storytelling talents, because Stephen King is just so known for the storytelling! So I do think The Wonder has probably benefited hugely from not just Room the book but Room the film and that it’s getting a huge amount of attention.
CC: What made you want to write about the topic?
ED: Well, these fasting girls, they were real, there were about 50 of them that I know of and you can find examples from sort of the sixteenth century all the way up to the twentieth century and from maybe Belgium and Italy all the way through to Canada, so you could set a story like this anywhere…but I decided that I might as well set it in my country and that also the Irish Catholic nineteen century context would make a lot of sense of that refusal of food. So I thought also setting it in Ireland after the famine was a rich context, because that’s one of the big ironies about eating disorders, that people starve to death in a world of plenty, so there’s often a terrible contrast between voluntary fasting and then the involuntary kind of people starving because they’re hungry.
CC: So what’s coming up next for you?
ED: I’ve got a kids book coming out next spring set in Toronto about a big family. It was initially eight kids which is what I come from, seemed normal to me, but my publishers were just reeling at the number like ‘how could you have eight children in one family,’ they were saying to me ‘make it a big family of five’ and I was going ‘that’s not big.’ So I compromised and I killed one of them off and we made seven kids. It’s one of those moments where you realize your Irish background is giving you a different stand on things.
CC: What advice would you give to a young, aspiring author?
ED: Certainly, young writers sometimes seem to me to be too worried about the market. They’re trying to be all strategic about it and work out what will sell, and I think you’re just much more likely to succeed if you ignore all that and just write what you are most passionately interested in. I think that’s much more likely to give you a very original voice and a sense of energy about what you’re writing. Because it’s very hard to guess what the market will be like in maybe five year’s, you can’t write and publish a novel fast enough to really catch a fashion…writing and publishing takes a long time so I think ignore the market.
Julie Morrissy: It was a joy to chat with Julie Morrissy, a budding poet from Dublin, about her writing talents. Morrissy has spent a number of years residing in both Canada and the United States and is a Vice-Chancellor Research Scholar at the University of Ulster whilst pursuing a doctorate in Poetry. Her work has been performed and published in Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Her debut chapbook, I Am Where, has been well received thus far.
CC: When did you realize that poetry was something you excelled in?
Julie Morrissy (JM): Thanks for saying I’m excelling! It’s interesting because I went back to school at twenty-eight to do an MA in creative writing and I went in writing fiction and I had been wanting to write really my whole life…and I was writing a novel when I went into the program, but I started taking the poetry modules and I was working with Paul Perry and I just kept going and in the end I completely switched to poetry. I wrote my thesis in poetry and I don’t even really read that much fiction anymore. So I just had a bit of a turnaround.
CC: What inspires you to create?
JM: I think mostly other people’s work. Most of the time when I start writing I’m reading other people’s poetry and I kind of stop suddenly and start writing my own. Cinema as well, visual arts, I find that’s when I get the urge to write is when I’m kind of enjoying other people’s art.
CC: Is there anything in particular lately that has piqued your inspiration?
JM: It’s kind of strange, the last time I can remember there being that kind of rush to get something down on paper I went to see this film, It’s called Diary of a Teenager. It was a graphic novel and they made it into this film, and it’s like a Hollywood film…but there was just something about it, I think it’s something about the actual cinematic experience, like being immersed in the dark or something and as soon as I got out I was like, oh man I’m going to cycle home and write a poem.
Paul Muldoon
Author of One Thousand Things Worth Knowing and eleven other previous books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel which won a Pulitzer Prize had plenty of interesting things to share with Celtic Canada. Currently, Muldoon is the poetry editor of the New Yorker as well as a University Professor at Princeton.
CC: If you could go back and tell your young writer self something, what would it be?
Paul Muldoon (PM): I think I’d probably encourage him to do pretty much what I did which was basically try to do as well as one possibly could at any given moment. And you know I was very lucky I think on balance though it may have had its unlucky aspects. To start out when I was quite young, I was a teenager when I started writing poetry… but I published a book when I was 21 and sort of got that out of the way and I’ve tried as far as one is able since that to at any moment just do the best that one possibly could. It’s harder and harder of course to keep on doing it, that’s one of the things we’re not told when we’re kids. We don’t want to believe that in all likelihood we are disproving as we continue…but on the other hand one doesn’t want to linger over that, you know?
CC: Is there a particular poet or writer who influenced you to want to head down this path?
PM: I think that for me as for many teenagers, the poet who really got me started was T.S. Eliot. It seems strange, perhaps that Eliot would be the person but there was something about Eliot and there continues to be something about Eliot, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land. There’s an excitement about it, there continues to be an excitement about it one hundred years later. There’s something that for whatever reason allows others to think you know that’s an activity I want to be part of, I want to do something as exciting as that or in my modest way try to do something like that.
CC: Why do you think it’s important to take part in the IFOA?
PM: It’s exciting to be here and one of the lovely things about being at a festival is that we tend to work in our little cubicles and it’s great to be reminded with all these other wonderful writers here that there are other people doing this thing… because I think we all feel, well why do I do this, what have I to even think that I could or should do this and who do I think I am? And then I think, well there are other people who do this thing too. It’s okay…I find that quite inspirational to come away from a festival like this with that feeling that one’s just part of something wonderfully big.
CC: What is the most difficult part of putting together a book of poetry?
PM: I don’t really think of putting together a book of poetry, I write a poem or try to, I write another one and then with any luck another one and after awhile there’s a bunch of them and almost necessarily because they’re written in a short enough span of time…they tend to be of a piece.
CC: Is being a Professor of poetry a much different challenge to writing it?
PM: Writing poetry for me, they key to it…is not to know what one’s doing. I suppose being a professor, that tends towards at least pretending to know what one’s doing…I also find working with students, which I do a lot, I’m forced to think as I read their poems…I think the more one knows, the better and again the extent that one can forget all that, all to the good also.
Ciaran O’Rourke: Another talented poet, Ciaran O’Rourke, is based in Dublin. He won the Fish Poetry Prize in 2016, the Westport Poetry Prize in 2015 as well as the Lena Maguire/Cuirt New Irish Writing Award in 2009. This year, his beautiful poetry was published in the form of a chapbook titled The Sea Path. O’Rourke had plenty to say regarding his writing and his life.
CC: If you weren’t writing, what would you be hoping to do for a living?
Ciaran O’Rourke (CO): I was going to say be an activist in some way, but you can’t really make a living doing that, I suppose. I would probably teach. Teaching poetry instead of writing it. I have this idea that reading poetry and writing poetry are actually versions of the same thing, and teaching that is probably the most difficult of all of those activities, so I’d say I’d be a teacher.
CC: What’s the most difficult part of your artistic process?
CO: Probably trying to find it actually. For me, poetry’s sort of a strange creature, it kind of comes and goes as it pleases, really. I find it difficult but also quite healthy to figure out when’s the right time to be writing and when’s the right time to just be living and not worrying about it.
CC: What’s your favourite thing that you’ve ever written?
CO: I wrote my mom a note one time and my sister found it the other day, she was clearing out one of the rooms and I think my mom had just come out of the hospital and she was fine, but I wrote her this gobbledygook kind of note that said boo boo bah bah or something like that and for me obviously it was very meaningful at the time, enough that I included an illustration and a love heart to my mom saying glad you’re home, but I think it’s a nice example of just the nonsense of being a child and apparently trying to be a writer even then.
CC: What are you most excited for during the IFOA festival?
CO: Well I’ve been here for a few days now and it’s really been wonderful…I’m looking forward to reading with the fellow Irish.
Catriona Crowe: It was a complete honour to talk with such an accomplished, inspiring individual such as Catriona Crowe. Crowe’s resume is long and impressive, including her recent work focusing on Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries, which began in 2012 and will finish in 2023. Crowe discussed this project, as well as a few others and her future aspirations.
CC: Could you tell us about your main project (with Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries) that you’re working on?
Catriona Crowe (CCrowe): it’s a very violent period, it involves the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence, the Civil War and also hugely in the background World War I which killed about 45,000 Irishman, 250,000 signed up for it. There’s been all kinds of interesting slippages and strangeness about that decade since we got our independence in 1922 in the South of Ireland, we ended up as a partition country where certain amnesia have taken place, particularly around World War I it wasn’t fashionable, useful or patriotic for people to admit they had ancestors that fought in World War I. That has now changed completely, there’s also a much bigger focus on civilian victims of all of these conflicts…What I do is look after historical documents, arrange for them to be released to people so they can research them and if possible in the most democratic way, which is free to access online. So the big project I engaged in with that was the 1901 and 1911 census, which is sort of your demographic baseline for this whole decade, tells you what was going on then. We do have another census in 1926 but the authorities are refusing to release it early. I’ve also just left the national archives.
CC: What has been a standout moment or moment of particular success from the work that you’ve done thus far?
CCrowe: That’s an interesting question. In many ways, one of the most interesting moments I had was in 1996 when I discovered about 2,000 files dealing with Irish children that had been adopted in the United States between 1948 and 1972 and nobody knew they were there, and at that time there was a lot of discussion about people’s right to their identity, people who had been in institutions, who had been adopted, fostered children of unmarried mothers that hold panoply of institutional incarceration that we had in the twentieth century and that became a huge international story. I suppose I’m proud of it because we managed to make it something that focused on the people involved, particularly on the mothers.
CC: Why is this work so important to you on a personal level?
CCrowe: I suppose wherever you find yourself in life, one of the things you always want to do is see how useful you can be…If there is a chance to actually give some help or assistance to people who really need it and there was, there has been, there will be.
CC: What are you hoping that you’re still able to accomplish?
CCrowe: Stay upright! I’m not really sure to be honest. I intend to write a couple of books now that I’ve left the archives…I’m not dead yet, touch wood, and I hope there’s plenty of life still to come. The mantra is try to be useful, and everyone can be in whatever way they want to be. It doesn’t have to be a huge, big, splashy thing it could be whatever small bit of change you can make is worth trying to do.
Note: The interviews have been condensed
and edited for clarity.
