Novelist and playwright Conal Creedon, Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at UCC, wonders are we ready to see the COVID-19 pandemic as our latest world war.  

 

AND I’M THINKING. . .

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,

but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Albert Einstein – Liberal Judaism (April-May 1949)

Even Albert Einstein, one of the greatest minds of the 20^th century, could not have anticipated that World War III would be fought with nothing more than a squirt of hand sanitizer and two  verses of Happy Birthday.

By the dawn of the 21^st century the anticipated rules of engagement for World War III had changed and changed utterly. The arrival of the pan-national, New Age eco-warrior movement informed us that the next Great Global Conflict would not be a nation versus nation old-style military exercise. World War III would not be a battle for territory, nor would it be a clash of opposing ideologies. No – the next war to end all wars would demand the banding together of the human race and human resources to fight against some greater, as yet unknown and un-quantified, catastrophe of global proportion.

Two years ago, our future, our planet came back into sharp focus when a fifteen year-old schoolgirl stepped out from behind the barricades, her words cut through the racket of sabre rattling and rhetoric – and world leaders sat up and took notice.

Greta Thunberg was that modern-day Joan of Arc; her message was global and simple. She reached out to every living soul across the seven continents regardless of colour, creed or nationality. “My message is the same to everyone,” she said. “We must unite behind the science and act on the science.”

Like the prophets of old, she insisted she was but a conduit to a greater knowledge, a greater power. And when our leaders reassured her saying, “I am listening to you, Greta”, her rebuke was as sharp as it was blunt. “Don’t listen to me,” she snapped. “Listen to the scientists.”

Our leaders waffled and the war on climate change was once again long-fingered. And though we all agreed that – The End of The World is Nigh, we relaxed in the comfort of our First-World life-style, sitting smugly at the top of the food chain, reassured by our self proclaimed superior intellect – we were confident that ‘nigh’ would not be coming anytime soon – and certainly not in our lifetime.

But then, three months ago, just when we least expected it – World War III began. COVID-19 hit.

Our expert strategists all agreed: This is a pandemic. In the absence of a vaccine there will be deaths, many deaths. An uncurtailed spike in infections will overrun our frontline medical defences and lead to an exponential rise in human mortality. The greatest scientists and medical minds on the planet assembled and devised a definitive battle plan. 

Phase one of World War III was to be a rear-guard action of damage limitation. The plan was simple. We had to ‘flatten the curve’.  This would give medical science some chance to limit the carnage of the first shock wave of attack. The strategy was clear: Self-quarantine and social isolation. Non-combatants [Joe and Josephine Public] must stay in our homes, for the virus lurks within the non-combatant community. Movement of people would stop. Our normal social discourse through work and play was to cease immediately. Shops, pubs, sporting and entertainment events would be shut down. The message was clear and simple. Stay home and “Flatten the Curve” – we were warned that, if we continue recklessly unchecked, the net result would be to “Cull the Herd”.

An interesting aspect of human group dynamics is our ability to react to any given situation with either herd behaviour  – or pack instinct. In times of crisis, humans function most efficiently when we rely on our pack instinct. We work best when refined to small groups with strong trusted leadership, working towards a common goal, for the greater good. In the face of this pandemic, under the guidance of good leadership, small groups would isolate from the herd and work as individual packs for the greater good – and that was the plan – plain and simple.

But the initial denial, dithering and mixed messages by some of our most powerful and influential opinion leaders – created uncertainty among the herd. The message they delivered was not simple, the plan was ever-changing and the strategy was unclear. This confused our pack instinct and encouraged our herd reaction – leading to some bizarre behaviour – not least, the insane stock-piling of toilet paper in every home across the globe.

And so, I sit here looking out on the deserted streets of my hometown. Life has degenerated to a Grade B science fiction movie – a dystopian global scenario that would not be unfamiliar to Austin Powers, Peter Sellers or Mr. Bean. The whole world is in lock-down.

And I’m thinking. . . 

The sceptic in me feels, not much will be learnt from 2020. The cynic in me imagines a future of unchecked climate change, rising water levels – and those who should know better, with their trousers rolled up beyond their knees and they paddling around the foothills of Mount Everest – reciting the mantra,  ‘Fake News! Fake News!’

But, the eternal optimist in me believes that we will remember the words of Greta Thunberg when she insisted, “We must unite behind the science and act on the science.”

Nobody knows if or when World War III, this battle with Covid-19 will all end. I’ve heard some say, it will all be over by Christmas. . .

When all this is over, and we honour our dead and count the costs. Let us look back on 2020 with 20:20 vision.  Let us hope that when the next call to arms resounds around the world that neither party political expediency nor partisan national interests will take precedence over human survival.

And I’m thinking. . .

Maybe Albert Einstein was correct when he predicted  – “World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Conal Creedon

TOMORROW: éinín / francach by Ailbhe Ni Ghearbhuigh

 

 

 

Alison McCrossan graduated earlier this year with an MA in Creative Writing, The imperative mood in her poem echoes the admonishing tone of much of our public communication during this crisis, while in a poem dedicated to Alison, her classmate, Irene Halpin Long, anticipates returning to simple rituals when the danger of COVID-19 has passed.  

 

May The Bells Sound, Spring 2020

 

There are holes in the streets but no funeral bells sound.

The imagined clips,  the rattle out of sight.

Shut the windows, lock the  doors, lest darkness saunter round.

 

His name is viral, embedded in every social site, one of a kind.

He’s driven to infect your society, with no regard for plight.

There are holes in the streets but no funeral bells sound.

 

He’s a modern myth, ego of a single cell organism, bound

to his mission of riding, host to host, until he comes upon your light.

Blacken your windows, lock your doors, lest darkness saunter round.

 

He’s suffocating old stars, the sick and the frail, as you surround

yourself with solitude; his strength lies in your need to interact.

There are holes in the streets and no funeral bells sound.

 

For every heart he nulls; every hole for every soul, it’s time to mound

an edifice, taller and taller, mind by mind, soul by soul, lighten his impact.

Check your windows, check your doors, lest darkness saunter round.

 

He’ll shoulder your faith for a vulnerable thought, blood lusting hound,

but hold on tight, keep looking to the sun, strike this pact:

while there are holes in the streets and no funeral bells sound,

open your windows, look to the sky, lest darkness saunter round.

 

Alison McCrossan

 

Let the chips fall where they may 

  for Alison McCrossan

 

Some day soon, our asphalt car park will feel

the weight of bald tyres, unwaxed upper lips,

giggle pocked bellies, grumbling for a hit

 

of hand-cut chips, doused in salt, vinegar,

folded in a paper parcel, cans of pop

and pots of curry sauce standing sentry

 

on the counter as we argue; “I’ll pay!”

“No ya feckin’ won’t! It’s my turn this time!”

Fingers racing to find the right change first.

 

You carry the cans. I carry the chips

back to the car, offering our bounty

to the dashboard. Heat fogs the windscreen window.

 

Seats pushed back, we set the world to rights. Chips

hop from unfurled paper to brazen mouths,

cooled by slurps of fizz and safe silences.

 

Irene Halpin Long

TOMORROW: “And I’m Thinking” – an essay by Conal Creedon

 

 

In a short excerpt from his new novel, Arts Council/UCC Writer-in-Residence Danny Denton depicts a Cork social world that seems very exotic in the midst of lockdown, while MA graduate Christine Kannapel considers the fugitive beauty of ravens. 

 from:  The Undiscover’d Country: An Echo Chorus

The Friday night Friary crowd arrived intermittently, flotsam delivered by the tide, each arrival announced by the banging of the door. Out of the buses they came, and out of the taxis and the lifts, and after brisk walks, with smiles, with keys and coins jingled in pockets, bags unhooked from shoulders. So careful with those early pints, gathered up in twos and threes.  Come midnight, only the nearer faces were clear. Jolly heads and shoulders bobbing. The loveliest kind of yellow light. Hands held. Arms draped. Wonder of the pint. Wonder of the deranged posters on the walls. Voices unravelling many spools of tales all at once, the palaver chewing and consuming and digesting and regurgitating itself. The selves unfolding. It didn’t matter what you said. Hours sinking in the watch. Deep hearty laughter. Jolly place. Waiting for Mike’s attention for ages. Random conversations, strange people: students; gamblers; the Apple crowd; that musician, that rapper dude; the swing crowd; the Icelandics with their Mohicans; the rugby-mad postman; the gamer; Toe Head; the taxi man; that African busker; yer wan with the art studio above in the Firkin Crane; Sheffield Chris who did the quiz of a Wednesday; that Traveller lady who was always about the place; four heart attacks right there; a campaigner there; lonely, they said; couldn’t even kill himself right, they said;  hiya, John! hey, June!; transformed groceries was all they all were; pasta and muesli converted; plans and problems; outrages…; no shocks here though; all was punditry; punditry was all; stories of the guards; voices in the void, repeating what they heard on the radio and on the television and on the web; no phrase so terrible as the beef industry; the match; the world put to rights; yes; yes; ho-hum; hey-ho; ahwell; herenow; gowan; gluck; goway; buck up; your hole; me hole; upoutofit; that could be us, Marta, that could be us; don’t be so dramatic, Lou; please, let the bombs start falling now!; tell no-one, even now; even now; say nathin’; not a word of boasting; not one to gloat; share the luck, I say; share the news; not one to boast; not one to gossip; not one to walk away; not one to give in; not one to take shit; not one to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong; not one to talk out of place; not one for the dogs; not one for bold statements; not one for doing; I love you; I know you do; do you not think about the future? what it might be like?; I think the world is going to hell; I think I’ll go for a run tomorrow; exit all, eventually, all ghosts, to leave Mike counting the cash, busting for that second-last fag.

Danny Denton

Tower Ravens

So black they’re blue
streaked in summer light,
I see why

a photographer
narrows into their perch.

Why do they fly away
when I too want to capture
them—to see my reflection

on their moon shine
feathers, my eyes
beads in theirs.

Christine Kannapel

TOMORROW: “May the Bells Sound: Spring 2020″by Alison McCrossan and “Let the Chips Fall where they may” by Irene Halpin Long

 

 

 

Fiona Whyte is a PhD student in Creative Writing at UCC.  This extract, with its plague echoes, is from work she’s submitting as part of her doctoral thesis, a novel inspired by the life of the 5th century Saint Cuthbert.  In today’s second piece, MA graduate,  Sue Lewando, ponders on what makes a story and why we’re all addicted to them. 

Let These Things Be Written (an extract)

They beached the boat at the foot of the Royal City and climbed the hill to the fortress. Wilfrid kept a few paces behind Bishop Cuthbert, picking his way slowly over the frost and ice-stitched path. The top of the hill was alive with birds. A rolling sea of black. Ravens, hooded crows, black-backed gulls. Beating wings, they swooped and dived, rose and swooped again, shrieked and cried and swirled around each other like warriors in a battle dance. Wilfrid pulled up his hood and tried to keep his face covered as they moved ever closer to the demented torrent of birds that plunged so close now they had to swipe them away with their hands. But the birds, this whirling mass of demons, had not come for the living. Just outside the walls of the fortress was a huddle of corpses, clothing ripped, faces, hands, any exposed parts picked over by the birds, plucked clean of flesh. One corpse lay on its back, mouth open, lips ripped away, bloodied hollows where the eyes should have been. Wilfrid stepped back, shuddering. He swallowed down the bile rising in his throat, and then, following Cuthbert’s example, made the sign of the cross over the dead.

        A watchman admitted them inside the gates. He eyed Cuthbert’s pectoral cross anxiously.

        ‘Why are these people unburied?’ Cuthbert said, his voice harsh and rasping. His throat must be sand-dry from lack of food and liquid, Wilfrid thought. He had been fasting for days. ‘Why were they not afforded the King’s protection within the walls?’

The watchman was a small, thin lad, younger than Wilfrid, too young for battle. A sword, too large to be his own, hung heavily from his waist.

        ‘They had plague, Bishop. Before he left for Pictland the King warned that no pestilence carriers were to be admitted to the city. No one was to touch them or come within ten paces of them. They were ordered away time and again, but they kept coming back.’

        Cuthbert joined his hands as if he would pray, though Wilfrid noticed how he appeared to clench his hands tightly together.

        ‘It is a violation of every sacred rule and custom to leave their mortal remains here unburied and unblessed. Even under the old gods due respect was accorded to the bones of the dead. This, this is a sacrilege. See that they are buried. I will say the funeral rites myself once I have spoken with the Queen.’

        The boy watchman shuffled from foot to foot, looked miserably at the ground as he spoke.

        ‘No one will touch them, Bishop, for if they do they may not be let back into the fortress. Ecgfrith King says he has built walls against the plague. He will keep the plague beyond these walls as surely as he will keep the Picts beyond the boundaries of our territory. The bodies are to be left to the birds of the skies to serve as a warning to others who are plague-ridden from spreading their contagion here. Those are the orders of Ecgfrith King and must be upheld until he returns. The Queen herself would not go against them.’

        Cuthbert put his hand under the boy’s chin, lifted it so the boy had no choice but to look at him directly.

        ‘I will bury them myself if I have to,’ Cuthbert said.

Fiona Whyte

 

What’s in a Story?

Imagine the darkness of a tribal night, and the tales that hang on the flickering firelight; the actor on stage, enthralling his audience; the beer-swiller in front of an action movie. Imagine the reader curled in a swing seat; the poet at open mic night. For each of them, the surroundings have evaporated, story has taken over. The love of story rests deep in the human psyche, and has done for so long the centuries disappear back into the mists of time.

In Ireland, I’m greeted with the words: What’s the story, anything new or strange? When I moved here, a few years back, this was alien to my English ears, but the words strike the writer’s chord full on. My friends don’t want to hear a list of personal gripes, the same old, life’s irritations regurgitated. It’s also likely they don’t want a discussion on politics or what was on TV. They’re asking if anything interesting and personal has happened in my life. They’re seeking a story, and want to be entertained.

In real life conversation rolls around a subject, going off at a tangent, skipping around stories, anecdotes, and interruptions. The storyteller can digress to the point that the punchline gets lost in the landslide of words, but by then someone else has taken the floor, so it doesn’t matter. It’s what turns the social wheel. But when someone comes up with a new story, something you haven’t heard before, don’t you lean forward just slightly, focus, and listen?

Fiction isn’t like real life. It can’t ramble around the houses, or the reader will lose the plot, then lose interest. It must grab the imagination, and not let go. However, writing fiction which achieves that goal is like playing a game of chess against yourself. You might think, how can you fail, but perhaps you should wonder how you can possibly win, when you’re fighting on both sides of the board, and each move changes the game plan. The story you’re seeking is sometimes a moving target, and hitting the target is a skill that needs to be learned and practised.

Even if the tale has been triggered by a real event with real people, the author is not trying to tell the truth. If you like, fiction is a compound lie, driving towards some kind of closure. Even when the underlying story nugget comes from the same source – a prompt in a writing circle, for instance – no two writers will envisage the same characters, the same situation, the same plot.

For some readers, a good book means a literary novel with prose that can be enjoyed for its own sake. For others, it rests in a driving story with a dramatic ending. Who are we to judge? Whatever reason for the eventual choice, however justified in terms of literary value, fiction should enthral or transport the reader, or it has failed in its task.

Sue Lewando

TOMORROW: an extract from  Danny Denton’s new novel and “Tower of Ravens” by Christine Kannapel. 

 

 

 

Cathy Ryan and Elaine Desmond are currently students on the MA in Creative Writing.  As an antidote to lockdown, they bring us out into nature with these two poems. 

 

The Arctic

 

Rosebay willow herb,

it was the last time you told me the name of a plant.

We were walking the dusty gravel road to the edge of the woods.

Woods so silent and full that

the absence of noise was pure sound.

 

Up here, the clean living of tree and bark have

grown into wildly shifting shapes,

into creatures and beings I have never seen.

They skin, scale and shimmer, their beaks, jaws

and eyes appearing from twisted, lichened trunks.

 

Up here, the trees are an endless unwrapping of language and tellings,

written in dapples on tireless, delicate skins of bark,

whorls and hieroglyphics marking the passing of time.

Telling of the passing of silence, telling of our passing

our hands tucked deep in our pockets,

making the break slowly.

Cathy Ryan                 

 

Head-

                          Land

 

Darling heron-ruled headland, green-marine

claw of rock and water. Cadet blue

sometimes or paint swatch shades between

damselfish or larkspur. Truly? Not true —

it’s mostly grey. Mud-sullen, pallid grey

as colourless as tuberculosis.

Though our eyes find turquoise past this clay,

some days even storm tides won’t heal sepsis.

Watching trawlers, ferries, overhead flights,

we haul our bones from shore to shore, as practic

al herons squawk their advice,                                                       

KEEP GOING they shout, walk light, don’t stick,

keep-your-hearts-open, trills a curlew

be primed for magic. Listen — from out of the blue…..

Elaine Desmond

 

TOMORROW: An extract by Fiona Whyte from her novel,  Let These Things be Written, and Sue Lewando on the nature of story-telling.

 

 

 

Rachel Andrews is a journalist, cultural critic and essayist.  Winner of the 2018 Hubert Butler Prize, Rachel  has written for n + 1, Longreads , the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review and The Stinging Fly.  She teaches on the media module of the MA in Creative Writing.

 

from an essay “The Turning” 

My daughter tells me something I didn’t know. The most ancient starfish in the world is 400-million-years-old and comes from dinosaur times. Then she tells me something else that is new to me. Glitter pens are dangerous for fish and for the sea. That’s because the glitter breaks off and gets into the ocean, the fish eat it and they die.

She says this in a light tone, her manner matter-of-fact as I resolve anxiously to jettison glitter products from our lives, another in a series of attempts to mitigate a calamitous future I can intellectualize but cannot yet fathom. My daughter, eight-years-old, lives primarily in the present, although lately she has begun to imagine her way into a time to come, which currently involves marriage and children of her own. She is extremely interested in some of the workings of the female body: how an egg slowly grows into a baby inside of mother’s tummy, how mother must work long and hard to push that baby out. She is fascinated to know she was blue when she was born; she asks me time and again to re-enact the sharp, frightening cry she emitted at the moment of her arrival into the world.

My daughter is starting to find her way into the trouble of existence, starting to conceive of life as something wrought in bright and shade – and sometimes only in shade. For the most part, she continues to turn to me for explanations and for comfort, even though as I struggle to process the reality of our degrading planet, I am increasingly looking around for my own explanations, my own comfort. When I am fretful I might look to art, to literature, for a way to fully conceptualize the situation we find ourselves in.

*

Cathy Fitzgerald, who grew up in New Zealand and lives in rural Ireland, developed an eco-literacy workshop to help artists look at changes they can bring to their practice in response to the environmental-social emergency. Fitzgerald conducts her own eco-social art practice: it involves the transformation of her small local forest from monoculture plantation to mixed species woodland. It’s a way, she says, of “softly subverting” the stranglehold of industrial forestry, as well as the legacy of colonial land clearances. Fitzgerald holds her forest close: she looks for ways she can support its diversification by slow and selective thinning of the conifers, which opens up the space for native Ash seedlings to grow; she values its capacity to keep going in the face of the deadly fungal Ash-dieback disease that has swept from Europe across the Irish Sea. Her art practice also takes the form of blog posts, of photographs and videos. In the short film she named the black space: (resilience) of the ash night, she walks through the forest at night, rain tumbling, the black of the video images a reflection of the blackness beginning to engulf the earth. Yet all the while her camera captures the straight slim shoots of the young Ash trees coming up from the ground. All that “quiet, relentless growing,” writes Fitzgerald in a blog post. All that pushing upwards, despite it all.

*

Thatcher said there was no alternative. Fukuyama announced the end of history. I grew up at the feet of those who worshipped individualism, you versus me, humanity ascendant over the planet. I got the hard sell, as Naomi Klein has termed it. But my daughter thinks about the world around her in a way I did not. That she has been on the schools’ climate strikes, that she has carried a home-made sign that depicts the planet on fire, that she asks me if the earth is healthy and I have to reply that it is not, means her consciousness, if nothing else, is elevated – and mine can only rush to catch up.  The philosopher Glenn Albrecht has invented the term solastalgia, to give expression to the very real distress caused by negative environmental change. As the modern-day plague and the burning sun come gunning for us, I feel the experience of solastalgia up close and present, a dread rising. At the end of The Great Derangement, which Amitav Ghosh wrote to try and understand why literary writers, along with artists, have not addressed the issue of climate change, he offers no false hope, but, unlike me, he eschews despair. He sees the future in my daughter’s generation, wants to believe that as she and those who follow her come into awareness, they will see the natural world for the living presence it is, will reach out to other beings, respect them, find kinship, make connections. It is this vision – which is not a new vision, but is surely new for our scientific, rationalist, technological age – that, he says, will find its expression in “a transformed and renewed art and literature.”

At her workshop, Cathy Fitzgerald suggested something similar. If we are to face the uncertainty, then we can only do so by turning one towards the other, by linking arms across consciousnesses both human and not. We must walk together with the land, inside the darkness and the resilience.

Rachel Andrews

TOMORROW: “Arctic “by Cathy Ryan and “Head-Land” by Elaine Desmond

 

Two poems celebrating Cork locations reminding us of the lost freedom of the city.  Jessica Militante is a student on this year’s MA while Christine Kannapel graduated earlier this year.

 

Lost Marbles

I remember them rolling recklessly down Western Road

A seagull laughing as I chased after them

This was before the doubt took up permanent residence in my chest

And blamed me for making it hard to breathe

At Mardyke Street, they split away from each other

One sailed into the River Lee

Waving cheekily as it rode away on the waves

I followed the other down the lane

It lodged deep into a crack in the pavement

Just out of reach

Each attempt at rescue sent it deeper

Before it disappeared

The seagull tilted his head to the side

And I walked home without them

Jessica Militante

 

Echo

A man is singing in the city centre

by a park with apple trees. I sit lost

in an orange room of pale light, typing softly

his rhythm, listening, to know it better.

When I am grey and nearly stone, I wonder

will I too sing – but this man will out live me.

From his corner, he’s seen all there is to see

of autumn incensed night and flat skied winters.

 

It’s not autumn yet, but summer is old

and I thirst for years of my life, for song

to appear on the street, to share my soul

like drum beats.  I find the man wary, amongst

piles of newspapers that couldn’t be sold.

“Echo!” he sings – a pitch for sale, all day long.

Christine Kannapel

TOMORROW:  “The Turning” by Rachel Andrews

 

 

 

 

Cork novelist and short fiction writer Billy O’Callaghan read in the Department of English reading series with John Banville last November and gave a master class to MA students. This extract recalls another kind of lockdown –  the muffling effects of illness, isolation and being snowed-in.            

 from Old Love,  a novella-in-progress     

The pain started, or became noticeable, back on the evening of the first of March. Tommy can be so precise about the date because earlier that same morning the initial flakes of a blizzard had hit, after days of anticipation. In the pubs and shops and even on the radio, a white-out was all anyone talked about. A week or so earlier, some wise-ass on one of the Cork stations, in prognosticating all kinds of weather-related horror, slightly misquoted the line from Joyce, “Snow was general all across Ireland,” either deliberately or by accident corrupting the tense from past to future, and it quickly caught on as the go-to phrase, even out here on the island, initially as a kind of punchline but then as a doom-laden statement of impending fact. Late February had been such a thin, cold month, the small days decked out in grim frocks of cloud and fog, and then March came roaring in, a couple of hours on from its first watery dawn, and by the time he had sat down to his porridge, somewhere around nine o’clock, the sea a hundred yards back from the cottage could no longer be seen and the snow, not yet intense but with a certain fine Siberian heft that he’d not experienced before, had turned everything in that westerly direction the pepper-dull colour of the sky.

            By evening the whole world was whiteness. Somewhere in the day, after eating a couple of boiled potatoes and the leftover half of a can of baked beans that he had in the fridge and quickly fried, he’d banked down the fire and settled himself with a copy of the Examiner some few days out of date.

            The dog’s snarling woke him. He lifted his head from the back of the armchair, stunned to know that he’d been asleep, and for perhaps ten or twenty seconds felt a tightness across his chest, as if he were bound to the chair by a coil of heavy rope. His mind was still mostly off in some warm place, in the smoky moments after a better springtime dawn with the sensation of another beside him in the narrow bed, a body naked except for the spill of shadow but already turned away, there and somehow not, and the rags of the dream made such a confusion of the room around him that he struggled to register the actual hour as late rather than early, with the light having all but drained away. The fire to his left had burnt down to a ruby smouldering, and the newspaper had slipped from his lap and pitched itself in a loose spread of crumpled and collapsing tents beside his right foot. Over near the door, the spaniel crouched sphinx-like, belly to the ground, alert and keeping guard, and when Tommy strained to listen, he caught the faint scratchings and the occasional thud of something small careening against the old wood and guessed from having known this happen before that it was a rat, probably smelling the heat and desperate to get inside, especially with night coming on. He stirred in his armchair and the dog noticed he was awake and began to bark, as if delivering news, and instantly, because of the meanness of the sound, the scratching stopped. “Good dog,” Tom whispered, though it hurt his chest to do so, but when he started forward a little, with the intention of getting up, a new pain screamed through him, a vicious stabbing sensation deep and slightly to the back of his left side, so suddenly intense that his vision darkened in a kind of swoon and bubbles of sweat blistered his forehead.

            He slumped back, helpless, and waited for the worst of it to subside and the details of the cottage to regain their shape. Then, when he could, he leaned forward with caution, got himself to his feet and walked in a slow, unsteady loop around the room, avoiding the small table and the part of the floor where the dog was still crouched, wincing into every step and breathing in tight quivers but pushing on, telling himself that what he was feeling could only be due to the way he’d been sitting, that in his sleep he must have tweaked some muscle or pinched a nerve, and there were few such pains, even ones as overwhelming as this, so serious that they couldn’t be either walked off or stretched away.

            But a dozen paces were enough to force a surrender, and he reached out for the support of something solid and settled in a half-sitting lean on the windowsill. Outside, the accumulated snow cloaked everything down to the sea in thundery blue-grey dusk, low stone walls and fields lay smothered, distant rises were rubbed from view, and still it fell, relentless, so fine and dense that it formed clouds of itself, spinning in small tides wherever pressed by a breath of wind.

            The dream lingered. It was everywhere, superimposed just out of focus across the latening surface. He couldn’t catch detail, but didn’t need to, because he often woke with the taste of it on his tongue, the fantasy-infused recollections of hot Iberian mornings, the flavours of strong coffee and peaches, the fruit so ripe that when he brought his lips to it he could feel the suggestion of its stone sitting deep within the flesh. And having a bare shoulder to kiss, or burying his face in the jet black tumult of hair, rooting for the hidden back of a neck with his mouth until he could draw awake small moans that were equal halves irritated and thick with giggles. All that he could have had and chose to miss.

Billy O’Callaghan

TOMORROW: “Lost Marbles” by Jessica Militante and “Echo” by Christine Kannapel

 

Partings are considered in these  two poems.  Some tough love from Molly Twomey, a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing, and something a little more tender from Maeve Bancroft, who was conferred with a PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction)  earlier this year. 

 

Dearly Departed

Babe, since you’ll kill yourself if I leave, 

could you rip out your veins?

I need a new ring.

 

Throw your body into the Lee,

so I can sail on your back under Mary Elm’s bridge.

Pretend I’m in Venice and its thirty degrees. 

 

Can I keep your Nike sweater, the grey one,

it looks so good on me. What about your red

blood cells? You know I’m anaemic.

 

I’ll sip them in a martini,

your eyeballs floating like two salty olives.

At your funeral, 

 

do you want me to sing?

The Pretty Reckless or Taylor Swift.

I’ll pretend to be you, clinging

 

to a bottle of gin, dribbling,

I’m sorry, I love you, don’t leave,

as if this isn’t the fourth time

 

you’ve stopped me with a butter knife,

the empty packet of your mother’s pills,

claiming you don’t need therapy,

 

and didn’t mean to sleep with her.

It was just a symptom of this weeks

disorder on DiagnoseMe.ie.

 

Listen, I am going shopping for a veil,

a little black dress, I’ve left a knife, a rope,

a litre of petrol and a lighter in the shed.

 

Molly Twomey

 

Departure

 You tie your shoelaces at a quarter to eight

Head bowed, I see the ragged morning

Light strike your hair (turning grey) as night

Rolls to day. You turn to leave – Cedar aftershave lingering.

 

I touch the soft hollow of your pillow, discarded glasses,

Coffee cup warm your breath trapped within.

Tender words float upon fond glances.

The door swings shut. My blood runs thin.

 

Too soon, the cup will be chill as stone

And your hair will stop turning under a blanket

Where day and night and light are one

And we’ll always be apart.

 

I slide across and lay my head

On the beloved’s side of the bed.

 

Maeve Bancroft

TOMORROW:  “Old Love”  by Billy O’Callaghan

 

 

 

 

Mary O’Donnell is the author of 13 books of poetry and fiction.  She has worked as a theatre critic, broadcaster and a teacher of creative writing. Earlier this year she was conferred with a PhD in Creative Writing (Fiction) at UCC.  Here she writes about a familiar experience for any student writer. 

From: STOLEN, a short story

He gets along fine with the others on the MA programme, and likes most of the tutors too, although he still wonders about the red-head—the ‘multi-genre writer’ according to the bio on her website—who believes she can stretch him in new reading directions.

Even so, he tells himself to go with the flow, to accept what comes his way. Whether his sense of expansion derives from simply being away from Leinster for a year remains to be seen. At forty-nine, he has man-breasts, thin legs and no arse to speak of. He’s not one of those guys who drift around with a sheaf of poems sticking out of the tweed jacket pocket, or who carries a Boxer pup as a babe magnet. At least he has abundant hair, tied back these days in a rough ponytail with a piece of string.

One of the other tutors is renowned for his verbal flayings of students whose non-fiction memoir isn’t up to scratch, and creates a terrifying atmosphere in the classroom. A broad-shouldered, brown-haired, long-eared chap whose essays appear frequently in a big-wig journal in England, nothing the students write can meet a standard so lofty Karl thinks it must give him altitude sickness. Karl, who hasn’t read the journal in question until now, doesn’t know what all the fuss is about. Unlike the red-head, Long Ears doesn’t believe in praising the positive and not over-emphasising the negative. They are all incompetents, with no hope of making it in the world of writing. In the presence of Long Ears, some of the younger guys sweat. The women seem more able for him. He’s pretty free with his language too. Wanker. That arse. Oh for fuck’s sake. Dropped from his mouth as a matter of course, although Karl too has begun to use similar language as he moves around the house, sometimes knocking into things when he’s drunk too much, even more so when he has to re-draft his work.

Even so, he has discovered oxygen blowing into him again after ten years in Dublin’s planning offices. There was safety, yes. Collegiality. Regular salary. Green plants shivering beneath the AC system in summer as he and the others worked through the applications, some of which made the cut, it went without saying. Even so, the magisterial nature of decision-making had begun to drain him and he felt the ancient pull of wanting distance, especially since the break-up with Anna. It has been a quest for great plains, something new to pit himself against after Anna announced two years ago that she was bisexual and had met someone else. You mean you’re gay, was his bald, stunned response. No, I mean I’m bisexual, Karl. Bisexual? If you can take that on board. That really raised his hackles, apart from the shock of it. Splitting hairs, trying to have it every way. She was leaving him for another woman, so how the fuck did that make her bisexual? Was she leaving the door open, in case she changed her mind and wanted to get back with him, or be with another man?

He’d always wanted to move away from Leinster, with its city-defined attitudes, its aspiring garden-trimming-coordinated-fucking-furniture-leaving-cert-child-buggering-dinner-party ambition, have a larger house, live more cheaply. Their home had been neat and modern. Dining-room linking to sitting-room on the left. Small office to the right. Downstairs loo he could hardly stand up in while he pissed. White walls everywhere and neutral furnishings with the odd flash of a Moroccan kilim and a turquoise cushion. The usual polished granite kitchen island—a prerequisite in every Irish kitchen when someone decided that food preparation could no longer occur on worktops facing a wall, but must be performed on a space the size of Texas. But Anna wouldn’t budge from her commuter route to the city. And then she met Henni, from Finland.

It wasn’t like the old days when you stuck it out and put up with one another until the man died and the wife entered a new phase of coming and going as she pleased, of bridge, hiking (that made him laugh, thinking of all the under-exercised flesh trailing up and down the Sugar Loaf mountain), evening courses and weekend breaks to Kerry with ‘the girls’. Even so, the stomach-sickening, pile-driving shock of discovering that she loves—absolutely loves—a woman, pretty much in the way she’d once loved him, took some digesting. He developed irritable bowel syndrome, found himself practically skidding to the bathroom to shit his guts out, all because of heartbreak. Now he was truly emptied, and that heart was just—just—beginning to grow numb, scab over. To heal, in therapy-speak. Since taking up with Henni, and implicit in this, while recovering from life with him, Anna has been having monthly therapy, suggesting recently that he should try it too.  

Mary O’Donnell   

TOMORROW:  “Dearly Departed” by Molly  Twomey and “Departure” by Maeve Bancroft