Creative non-fiction about a personal experience of early miscarriage, which is a largely hidden ... more Creative non-fiction about a personal experience of early miscarriage, which is a largely hidden loss. Reflecting on experiences in the early 1990s, a background of Northern Irish Catholicism, where women’s fertility is rigorously controlled, both informs attitudes and gives way to an earlier memory in the late seventies, where I felt I was in control of my fertility. However, the present reflection now considers reproductive control as something further than contraception; including those difficult times, when a body edges beyond our wills. Despite all our gains for autonomy and reproductive rights, involuntary miscarriage is a devastating loss, which we do not control.
A collection of stories by 8 writers, End Notes tackles with compassion, insight and humour chang... more A collection of stories by 8 writers, End Notes tackles with compassion, insight and humour changes in the way we view dying, death and bereavement and how best to mourn and commemorate those we love. This Arts & Humanities Research Council funded ebook is part of the University of Hull project Crossing Over: New Narratives of Death in the Twenty-first Century
International Conference on the Short Story., 2017
In examining how both reader and writer interpret the ‘new’ through their previous understandings... more In examining how both reader and writer interpret the ‘new’ through their previous understandings this questions how we use those recognition. Do we reinforce the idea of the self & the familiar or do we challenge this familiarity and reconsider how we approach the ‘other’ in our reading and authorship as writers? In re positioning the other we can consider both Orientalism and the different in western short fictions and early short tales as a reflection of the observer rather than the observed.N/
The Wild Geese Press launches with a collection to showcase second-generation Irish writers in Br... more The Wild Geese Press launches with a collection to showcase second-generation Irish writers in Britain. Not quite British, not quite Irish, through their essays, fiction and poetry about music, family, and history these distinguished writers explore questions of identity and belonging and ask the perennial question: where is home – here or Ireland? The writers gathered here hold up a mirror to the diverse and complicated experience of the Irish in Britain. The collection features essays, fiction and poetry from Elizabeth Baines, Maude Casey, Ray French, Maria C. McCarthy, Moy McCrory, Kath Mckay and John O’Donoghue and many more.N/
National Association of Writers in Education, 2019
Hans Christian Andersen worked in a variety of written forms beyond children’s stories and also a... more Hans Christian Andersen worked in a variety of written forms beyond children’s stories and also as a visual artist, sketching for his diaries, travel writing and journals. If he wrote in the anonymous tradition of fairy tales Andersen’s work for children is full of individual responses. “The Little Mermaid” while strong on folk motifs is also about personal yearning and we can read here the shift he made in his lifetime between social classes, as if from one element to another. Although better known as a writer, an examination of some of his lesser known visual work, namely a surprising range of paper cut outs, shows recognisable figures and key images cut into this form which he used in performance as a storyteller. A study of these images which do not always figure in his writings, suggest that other meanings and disguises were adopted by the author. If in writing he chose to work in fabulation where a lack of reality allowed him to disguise himself inside the heart of a story, did the paper cut outs with their repeated motifs extend the possibilities for disguise and allow him to hide in plain sight.N/
This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and val... more This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and values which inform the idea as it impinges on the creative process and its content and contexts. The thematic core of silence allows a consideration of silencing and silence as opposite ends of a spectrum: one shutting down, the other enabling and opening up. As a multidisciplinary collection of essays derived from the teaching and implementation of Creative Writing at university level, the contributors consider silence as strategic, both through the need for silence and as something which compels resistance. They explore how writing has employed images and tropes of silence in the past, and used silence and gaps technically. In considering marginalised and forgotten voices, this book shows how writers bring their diverse range of backgrounds and experience to work with and against silence in Creative Writing Studies. The first theoretical work on silence in Creative Writing, this field-shifting book is an essential read for both practitioners and students of Creative Writing at the higher education level.N/
Writers have always used the land to represent what it is to be human and have used landscape as ... more Writers have always used the land to represent what it is to be human and have used landscape as a vehicle for emotion and identity. In probing the question does a nation write the people, or do the people write the nation, the writer confronts their own sense of belonging , their adherence and divergence. No longer figures in a landscape, we become the frame through which landscape must pass on its way to a re-consideration and a re-inscription. Exploring the inner lands in response to environment.N/
Abstract Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected li... more Abstract Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected life into areas once considered essential to an education, but now under threat in many universities. At degree level it has created an opportunity to re-engage with the classics by its insistence on its own history, while its non-traditional methodologies provide a different way for students to engage with early texts. Ovid's Metamorphoses lends itself to Creative Writing development. Such students, who are used to engaging with a subject practically, will have been equipped with the tools necessary to work with this. Their creative mindset allows the main work of reinterpretation necessary for the study of such early stories. The study for clues which point towards earlier methods (repetition, formal patterns, framework structures) which occur in such primary literature allows students to realise the evolution of a story, and understand that this is never a static process, but one of continuous engagement which the Metamorphoses above all others, seems to welcome.
Abstract:The Irish in Britain have only recently been granted ethnic status. This blind spot whic... more Abstract:The Irish in Britain have only recently been granted ethnic status. This blind spot which existed towards the Irish community, even as highly visible negative assumptions about the Irish circulated, resulted in a strange invisibility which simultaneously derided as it denied Irish identity, and failed to acknowledge the Irish as an ethnic group. This has effected how the generation born from the 1950's/60's migration into England can both consider and describe their notion of identity. Silence, denial and over identification reveal how the sense of non belonging, or 'otherness' is a common touch stone, and identification as a constant outsider is a prominent note. Criticisms of national identity levelled against the second generation from within the community reveal attitudes about ownership of a 'nationhood' which is still contested ground. Identity displayed through those visible traditions which are frequently stronger in displaced communities can...
Review of: Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, Lucy Caldwell (ed.) (2019) London: Faber & Fab... more Review of: Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, Lucy Caldwell (ed.) (2019) London: Faber & Faber, 368 pp., ISBN 978-0-57135-410-8, p/bk, £9.99
Creative non-fiction about a personal experience of early miscarriage, which is a largely hidden ... more Creative non-fiction about a personal experience of early miscarriage, which is a largely hidden loss. Reflecting on experiences in the early 1990s, a background of Northern Irish Catholicism, where women’s fertility is rigorously controlled, both informs attitudes and gives way to an earlier memory in the late seventies, where I felt I was in control of my fertility. However, the present reflection now considers reproductive control as something further than contraception; including those difficult times, when a body edges beyond our wills. Despite all our gains for autonomy and reproductive rights, involuntary miscarriage is a devastating loss, which we do not control.
A collection of stories by 8 writers, End Notes tackles with compassion, insight and humour chang... more A collection of stories by 8 writers, End Notes tackles with compassion, insight and humour changes in the way we view dying, death and bereavement and how best to mourn and commemorate those we love. This Arts & Humanities Research Council funded ebook is part of the University of Hull project Crossing Over: New Narratives of Death in the Twenty-first Century
International Conference on the Short Story., 2017
In examining how both reader and writer interpret the ‘new’ through their previous understandings... more In examining how both reader and writer interpret the ‘new’ through their previous understandings this questions how we use those recognition. Do we reinforce the idea of the self & the familiar or do we challenge this familiarity and reconsider how we approach the ‘other’ in our reading and authorship as writers? In re positioning the other we can consider both Orientalism and the different in western short fictions and early short tales as a reflection of the observer rather than the observed.N/
The Wild Geese Press launches with a collection to showcase second-generation Irish writers in Br... more The Wild Geese Press launches with a collection to showcase second-generation Irish writers in Britain. Not quite British, not quite Irish, through their essays, fiction and poetry about music, family, and history these distinguished writers explore questions of identity and belonging and ask the perennial question: where is home – here or Ireland? The writers gathered here hold up a mirror to the diverse and complicated experience of the Irish in Britain. The collection features essays, fiction and poetry from Elizabeth Baines, Maude Casey, Ray French, Maria C. McCarthy, Moy McCrory, Kath Mckay and John O’Donoghue and many more.N/
National Association of Writers in Education, 2019
Hans Christian Andersen worked in a variety of written forms beyond children’s stories and also a... more Hans Christian Andersen worked in a variety of written forms beyond children’s stories and also as a visual artist, sketching for his diaries, travel writing and journals. If he wrote in the anonymous tradition of fairy tales Andersen’s work for children is full of individual responses. “The Little Mermaid” while strong on folk motifs is also about personal yearning and we can read here the shift he made in his lifetime between social classes, as if from one element to another. Although better known as a writer, an examination of some of his lesser known visual work, namely a surprising range of paper cut outs, shows recognisable figures and key images cut into this form which he used in performance as a storyteller. A study of these images which do not always figure in his writings, suggest that other meanings and disguises were adopted by the author. If in writing he chose to work in fabulation where a lack of reality allowed him to disguise himself inside the heart of a story, did the paper cut outs with their repeated motifs extend the possibilities for disguise and allow him to hide in plain sight.N/
This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and val... more This unique book takes silence as its central concept and questions the range of meanings and values which inform the idea as it impinges on the creative process and its content and contexts. The thematic core of silence allows a consideration of silencing and silence as opposite ends of a spectrum: one shutting down, the other enabling and opening up. As a multidisciplinary collection of essays derived from the teaching and implementation of Creative Writing at university level, the contributors consider silence as strategic, both through the need for silence and as something which compels resistance. They explore how writing has employed images and tropes of silence in the past, and used silence and gaps technically. In considering marginalised and forgotten voices, this book shows how writers bring their diverse range of backgrounds and experience to work with and against silence in Creative Writing Studies. The first theoretical work on silence in Creative Writing, this field-shifting book is an essential read for both practitioners and students of Creative Writing at the higher education level.N/
Writers have always used the land to represent what it is to be human and have used landscape as ... more Writers have always used the land to represent what it is to be human and have used landscape as a vehicle for emotion and identity. In probing the question does a nation write the people, or do the people write the nation, the writer confronts their own sense of belonging , their adherence and divergence. No longer figures in a landscape, we become the frame through which landscape must pass on its way to a re-consideration and a re-inscription. Exploring the inner lands in response to environment.N/
Abstract Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected li... more Abstract Despite still being viewed as a non-legitimate subject, Creative Writing has injected life into areas once considered essential to an education, but now under threat in many universities. At degree level it has created an opportunity to re-engage with the classics by its insistence on its own history, while its non-traditional methodologies provide a different way for students to engage with early texts. Ovid's Metamorphoses lends itself to Creative Writing development. Such students, who are used to engaging with a subject practically, will have been equipped with the tools necessary to work with this. Their creative mindset allows the main work of reinterpretation necessary for the study of such early stories. The study for clues which point towards earlier methods (repetition, formal patterns, framework structures) which occur in such primary literature allows students to realise the evolution of a story, and understand that this is never a static process, but one of continuous engagement which the Metamorphoses above all others, seems to welcome.
Abstract:The Irish in Britain have only recently been granted ethnic status. This blind spot whic... more Abstract:The Irish in Britain have only recently been granted ethnic status. This blind spot which existed towards the Irish community, even as highly visible negative assumptions about the Irish circulated, resulted in a strange invisibility which simultaneously derided as it denied Irish identity, and failed to acknowledge the Irish as an ethnic group. This has effected how the generation born from the 1950's/60's migration into England can both consider and describe their notion of identity. Silence, denial and over identification reveal how the sense of non belonging, or 'otherness' is a common touch stone, and identification as a constant outsider is a prominent note. Criticisms of national identity levelled against the second generation from within the community reveal attitudes about ownership of a 'nationhood' which is still contested ground. Identity displayed through those visible traditions which are frequently stronger in displaced communities can...
Review of: Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, Lucy Caldwell (ed.) (2019) London: Faber & Fab... more Review of: Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, Lucy Caldwell (ed.) (2019) London: Faber & Faber, 368 pp., ISBN 978-0-57135-410-8, p/bk, £9.99
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