It’s a good week to be a Some Blind Alleys regular contributor. Rob Hopkins, who’s working on a long nonfiction project about his life in the US as a down-and-out tree surgeon, has brought the personal essay to the Stinging Fly, a quarterly journal in Dublin that primarily focuses on fiction and poetry by emerging writers.
Read Hopkins’s “Crackhead” here on Some Blind Alleys.
Regular SBA contributor Cathy Sweeney has been selected to read at the Stinging Fly’s New Writers’ Showcase – part of the Fly’s Summer Reading Series at the Irish Writers’ Centre. The reading takes place at the Centre on July 23 at 7 p.m. The writers selected from over 150 submissions are:
Cathy Sweeney, prose
Declan Sweeney, prose
Nicola White, prose
Liam Duffy, poetry
Andrew Jamison, poetry
Breda Wall Ryan, poetry
Congratulations to Breda as well – a former participant in an SBA workshop.
Tomorrow evening, the Stinging Fly’s Summer Reading Series begins at the Irish Writers’ Centre. The Centre has gone into a regrouping mode for the summer, so this is essentially all that is taking place there while the board of the Centre makes some hard decisions about the future.
(Although there will be a Some Blind Alleys Reading Night on July 24 at the Centre as well.)
Here’s the line-up (a more detailed one is available by clicking the above link):
9 July:
Readings: Phillip Cummings, Martin Dyar, Catherine Finn, Máighréad Medbh, and Geraldine Mitchell.16 July:
Readings: Poet Richard W. Halperin, Alison MacLeod, Adam Marek, and Orlaith O’Sullivan.23 July:
Readings: Michael J Farrell and the six winners of The Stinging Fly New Work Showcase.
I admit that I don’t know any of the above readers, but I know that the Stinging Fly is an active player in the emerging writers business, so I presume they are good emerging writers. The fact is – it’s the Stinging Fly that’s given these nights credibility, not the authors, and not the Centre.
And I’ll bet that every one of these nights will see big audiences – and that should be repeated: a big audience at the Irish Writers’ Centre, there to see emerging, possibly hungry, and hopefully interesting writers.
And the Centre had to do nothing except make itself available.
The problem, I think, when a single organisation tries to be everything to everybody, is that it quickly gets associated with a dull and conventional establishment. But if all you do is provide space, and give opportunities for more dynamic, small-scale organisations to come in and make that space exciting (and charge them), well, then you have a place people want to go to.
All you need to do is provide a cafe or a bar and have a committee or director there to evaluate applications by organisations to hold events there – or workshops (the workshops could run off-site).
Anyway, the point is that in this very small summer reading series is an opportunity to realize that the problem of the Centre’s relevance has been fixed.
The Irish Times has already written a fair assessment of the meeting that took place on the future of the Irish Writers’ Centre. The article reflected the fact that the suggestions made by the public were largely expressions of frustration, or expressions of goodwill, and were not, in my opinion, things that the board could vote on when they meet on July 14.
(But since I have no knowledge of the agenda of that meeting, I’m only speculating.)
I think this unproductive, poorly attended meeting, without any striking ideas, is a result of the fact that people have lots of answers but no questions.
Some good ideas:
Declan Meade, publisher of the Stinging Fly, said the Centre ought to be reaching out to organisations and letting them innovate in the space that the Centre provides.
A woman from Poetry Ireland said the Centre needed a business plan.
A woman from the Abbey Theatre said there needed to be tighter links to theatre.
A woman who is doing translation or something-or-other said the Centre needed a better website and could look into EU funding if it supported European writers.
These were all good, solid enough recommendations, but I couldn’t help thinking, What in the world were those people doing there? The Stinging Fly, the Abbey Theatre, and Poetry Ireland – I would have thought these organisations had already been consulted. Perhaps they were consulted, and, like me – I’d made my recommendations – were there to hear what others had to say.
I suppose, if I am to be perfectly honest, I went to confirm my suspicion that there really is no answer, because writing has moved beyond the question of, Why write? And has moved completely into an obsession with, How do I get published?
I wanted to prove to myself that my evaluation of literary society (I nearly gag when I write things like that) was correct. I found, in the majority of suggestions, exactly what I’d come looking for: really what writers want is not development, not improvement, but publication. If only there were a place to go to meet people who will tell them how to get published, they would become happy. It is like they think somewhere there is a smoky and jade-green brothel of agents and publishers in which they can go and smoke opium and be adored and fought over – if only people would recognize their genius.
One woman asked if they could get someone from Eason’s in to tell them what the anatomy of a bestseller was. If this is what the Irish Writers’ Centre becomes, no good writer will ever want to be associated with it. It will become a ghetto of talentless, second-rate poets whose only audience are themselves.
On top of this, people urged the Centre to get rid of the foundation classes (i.e., Beginners’, Intermediate, Advanced) presumably because it is a better idea to stop teaching people an appreciation of good books and start helping them write shit books – or running masterclasses that avoid the issue of learning as a foundation.
I watched some masterclasses once on BBC4, in which the classical pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim worked with really talented young professional pianists. That seemed like a pretty good masterclass.
But one can imagine the pressure Carlo Gebler and Jack Harte – the two men who led the discussion, and the men largely in charge of revitalising the Centre – must be under to create a Centre that will fulfil the hopes and dreams of the desperate and in-pain. When asked what I thought, I simply suggested they ought to shoot high instead of low – to create something that celebrates good writing instead of cuddling bad writing. But that is easier said than done. Because now they have to make money, and lots of it.
