"Nest of Thorns" (2007, 8 pages)
March 1 to March 31
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Geraldine Mills
Galway
Ways to Participate
You can do a post on your blog and let me know about it-I will keep a master list and I will publicize your post and blog.
If you are an Irish author and would like to be featured, please contact me. There are several options open.
If you would like to do a guest post on my blog on anything related to Irish short stories, contact me.
During ISSM2 in 2012 I posted an overview on The Weight of Feather, a short story collection by Geraldine Mills which I greatly admired. I spoke individually about seven of the twelve stories in the collection. Here were my concluding remarks on this wonderful collection:
"The Weight of Feathers is an outstanding collection of short stories. The stories in this collection are sort of about the walls between people, the lack of understanding that comes from an inability to see beyond surface and sometimes deeper than surface differences. The stories are very different from each other. The people in the stories are very well realized. Mills kind of throws us into their lives and we have to do some work to figure out what is going on which only makes the experience of reading them ultimately that much more powerful.".
Today I want to focus on two of the short stories on which I did not post last year, both relate to issues of mothers and daughters.
One of the themes I have mentioned more than once this year is Declain Kiberd's assertion in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation that the dominant theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father. Kiberd also talks about how this effects women and how this is illustrated in Irish literature in the ubiquitous character of the "Irish Mammy" dominating her family, emasculating her sons, taking her revenge on her mostly absent husband and often cruel to her daughters who she resents because they are not boys. The mothers, like the fathers, often turn to drink or escapist behavior which is turn drives their children, especially their daughters, from them. The mothers then use their children's feeling of resentment against them as justification for total or partial abandonment of them. In time their daughters will abandon them and repeat the patterns in their own marriages.
"Rat Lessons" is the story of Lilith and her mother. Lilith, now a grown woman, has just gotten a call from her mother's sister Ida telling her that her mother, who she has not seen in over ten years, is dying in a hospital and she needs to come to pay her last respects. Lilith does not really want to go but her guilt and conscious tells her that she must. She had for year told everyone she knew, but for the man of her life, that her parents were dead. . I will tell a bit of the seeds of her mother's hatred and resentment of Lilith. The mother had been advised she was having twins and she felt a great sense of joy and pride. When the time comes, she does have two children, Lilith and a boy born dead. From that point on she sees Lilith as having sucked the life out of he son. she sees her as a murderer. The mother makes it very clear she would much have preferred the son live and Lilith die. She even named Lilith after a figure from Hebrew and Babylonian mythology who was said to be the first wife of Adam who mated with the arch-angel Gabriel and refused to return to the Garden of Eden. Of course this poisoned the relationship of the mother and daughter. We are not told a lot about her father, only that he only stood up to Lilith's mother one time in his whole life. He and Lilith were playing in the sand at the beach and his wife told him to stop acting like an idiot. For the only she saw a look of pure hatred on her father's face. He took his daughter by the hand and they walked away, down to the chipper to get some chips (potatoes). There is more in this marvelously compressed beautifully written story but I wanted to see how it is in accord with the thesis of Kiberd. (I should note I am totally self taught in Irish literature and history and one of my basic sources is Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd. I like his post colonial approach to Irish literature. I am open to suggestions as to how I might expand my knowledge-I am limited for practical reasons to E-books.) This is a great story. You will need to read it to find out why it is called "Rat Lessons".
"Nest of Thorns" is a very moving story about a mother who has finally found the courage to do what she has long wanted to, abandon her teenage school girl daughter by just disappearing. There is no sign of a father in this story and the life style of the mother makes us think the father could have been a passing stranger. The mother, Maeve, may have been a prostitute as she is depicted on the streets getting into the cars of men she does not know. This is not certain as she used sex with strangers as way to escape herself and sadly as a source of free alcohol. Maeve imagines her daughter coming home to their empty flat and yelling out that she is home to no answer. The daughter quickly knows something is wrong and she fetches a neighbor, Josie. Josie says "she's gone, the hoor, may God mend her". Josie takes the daughter back to her warm kitchen to comfort her. We hope somehow the mother might have known the daughter would be better off without her and we hope she is right but we also see the cycle repeating. This story is also very illustrative of the thesis of Kiberd concerning Irish fathers.
Valerie Sirr has done a very interesting guest post on Lick of The Lizard, another very beautifully written and insightful collection of short stories by Mills.
I hope to read many more of he stories of Mills in the future and I think, if am blessed to conduct it, that she will return for ISSM4 in 2014.
Author Data
One of the themes I have mentioned more than once this year is Declain Kiberd's assertion in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation that the dominant theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father. Kiberd also talks about how this effects women and how this is illustrated in Irish literature in the ubiquitous character of the "Irish Mammy" dominating her family, emasculating her sons, taking her revenge on her mostly absent husband and often cruel to her daughters who she resents because they are not boys. The mothers, like the fathers, often turn to drink or escapist behavior which is turn drives their children, especially their daughters, from them. The mothers then use their children's feeling of resentment against them as justification for total or partial abandonment of them. In time their daughters will abandon them and repeat the patterns in their own marriages.
"Rat Lessons" is the story of Lilith and her mother. Lilith, now a grown woman, has just gotten a call from her mother's sister Ida telling her that her mother, who she has not seen in over ten years, is dying in a hospital and she needs to come to pay her last respects. Lilith does not really want to go but her guilt and conscious tells her that she must. She had for year told everyone she knew, but for the man of her life, that her parents were dead. . I will tell a bit of the seeds of her mother's hatred and resentment of Lilith. The mother had been advised she was having twins and she felt a great sense of joy and pride. When the time comes, she does have two children, Lilith and a boy born dead. From that point on she sees Lilith as having sucked the life out of he son. she sees her as a murderer. The mother makes it very clear she would much have preferred the son live and Lilith die. She even named Lilith after a figure from Hebrew and Babylonian mythology who was said to be the first wife of Adam who mated with the arch-angel Gabriel and refused to return to the Garden of Eden. Of course this poisoned the relationship of the mother and daughter. We are not told a lot about her father, only that he only stood up to Lilith's mother one time in his whole life. He and Lilith were playing in the sand at the beach and his wife told him to stop acting like an idiot. For the only she saw a look of pure hatred on her father's face. He took his daughter by the hand and they walked away, down to the chipper to get some chips (potatoes). There is more in this marvelously compressed beautifully written story but I wanted to see how it is in accord with the thesis of Kiberd. (I should note I am totally self taught in Irish literature and history and one of my basic sources is Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation by Declan Kiberd. I like his post colonial approach to Irish literature. I am open to suggestions as to how I might expand my knowledge-I am limited for practical reasons to E-books.) This is a great story. You will need to read it to find out why it is called "Rat Lessons".
"Nest of Thorns" is a very moving story about a mother who has finally found the courage to do what she has long wanted to, abandon her teenage school girl daughter by just disappearing. There is no sign of a father in this story and the life style of the mother makes us think the father could have been a passing stranger. The mother, Maeve, may have been a prostitute as she is depicted on the streets getting into the cars of men she does not know. This is not certain as she used sex with strangers as way to escape herself and sadly as a source of free alcohol. Maeve imagines her daughter coming home to their empty flat and yelling out that she is home to no answer. The daughter quickly knows something is wrong and she fetches a neighbor, Josie. Josie says "she's gone, the hoor, may God mend her". Josie takes the daughter back to her warm kitchen to comfort her. We hope somehow the mother might have known the daughter would be better off without her and we hope she is right but we also see the cycle repeating. This story is also very illustrative of the thesis of Kiberd concerning Irish fathers.
Valerie Sirr has done a very interesting guest post on Lick of The Lizard, another very beautifully written and insightful collection of short stories by Mills.
I hope to read many more of he stories of Mills in the future and I think, if am blessed to conduct it, that she will return for ISSM4 in 2014.
Author Data
A native of Galway, Ireland Geraldine is a poet and short story writer with four collections of poetry and two of short fiction. Arlen House has published her short fiction collections, Lick of the Lizard (2005) and The Weight of Feathers(2007) which are available internationally from Syracuse University Press and taught at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. Her poetry collections include Unearthing your Own(2001) and Toil the Dark Harvest (2004) which were published by Bradshaw Books, Cork. An Urgency of Stars,published by Arlen House, 2010 was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. Arlen House was also the publisher of The Other Side of Longing, a collaboration with U.S. poet Lisa C.Taylor which was the Gerson Reading choice for the University of Connecticut April 2010
There will soon be a Question and Answer Sessions with Geraldine Mills.
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