March 1 to March 31
A Reading Life Special Guest post
"Our long love affair with the short story"
Eileen Casey
Eileen Casey
Eileen Casey, author of Snow Shoes, has very kindly allowed me to share with my readers an address she gave at The Cork International Short Story Festival, considered the most prestigious short story event anywhere.
A Question and Answer Session with Eileen Casey
My post on her wonderful collection of short stories, Snow Shoes.
Author Data
Eileen Casey is an Irish writer. Originally from the Midlands (Co. Offaly), she’s lived in South Dublin County for since the late 1970’s. She is a fiction writer, poet and journalist. Her many awards include a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship (Poetry) and a Sunday Independent, Hennessy Literary Award (Fiction).
A debut short story collection ‘Snow Shoes’ was published by Arlen House, 2012. She holds a B.A. in Humanities (Hons.) from DCU and completed an M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin in 2011 where she was awarded distinction.
Her debut poetry collection Drinking the Colour Blue was published by New Island in 2008. Collaborative works with Visual Artist Emma Barone are Reading Hieroglyphs in Unexpected Places (2010) and From Bone to Blossom (2011) with an introduction by Grace Wells.
Writing.ie has an excellent article in which Casey talks about the stories in Snow Shoes as well as a wide range of other topics.
There is more information on Snow Shoes on the webpage of her American distributor Syracuse University Press
Eileen Casey is an Irish writer. Originally from the Midlands (Co. Offaly), she’s lived in South Dublin County for since the late 1970’s. She is a fiction writer, poet and journalist. Her many awards include a Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship (Poetry) and a Sunday Independent, Hennessy Literary Award (Fiction).
A debut short story collection ‘Snow Shoes’ was published by Arlen House, 2012. She holds a B.A. in Humanities (Hons.) from DCU and completed an M.Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin in 2011 where she was awarded distinction.
Her debut poetry collection Drinking the Colour Blue was published by New Island in 2008. Collaborative works with Visual Artist Emma Barone are Reading Hieroglyphs in Unexpected Places (2010) and From Bone to Blossom (2011) with an introduction by Grace Wells.
Writing.ie has an excellent article in which Casey talks about the stories in Snow Shoes as well as a wide range of other topics.
There is more information on Snow Shoes on the webpage of her American distributor Syracuse University Press
"Our
long love affair with the short story"
By Eileen Casey
The Cork International Short Story Festival, 2011
On 17th September, 2011 in the Metropole Hotel, Cork, Edna
0’Brien read from ‘Saints and Sinners’, her 21st work of
fiction. She received the standing ovation
she truly deserved. Such an enthusiastic response to her work was not solely in
recognition of her contribution to world literature over a career that spans
half a century; neither was it entirely attributable to the fact that, given
she is enjoying her eighty-first year, she read beautifully and without missing
a beat, for the bones of forty minutes or so.
0’Brien brought the rapt audience to their feet because she is purely
and simply a master story teller. Her
work is multi-layered, nuanced, her themes hugely important and her use of
language unerringly evocative. As it
happened, the acclaim was justified because the next evening on the same stage
in the Metropole, 0’Brien received the Frank 0’Connor International Short Story
Award, a prize which carries the biggest monetary recognition in literature for
a short story collection, €35,000. It
was good to see an Irish writer win the prize and indeed there were two Irish
writers on the short-list this year.
Colm Tóibin, who has achieved enormous success worldwide, was nominated
for his collection, ‘The Empty Family.’
The Frank 0’Connor Award for a collection of short
stories was introduced seven years ago. This corner of the world has much to
celebrate in this regard, claiming a literary school of writers which include William
Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, Daniel Corkery and Sean 0’Faolain, among others. 0’Connor, in earlier times however, had been
a writer, ‘Whose star had been obscured by clouds.’ The brochure introduction
by Patrick Cotter, Festival Director, explains that part of the festival’s
initial aim when it was inaugurated eleven years ago, was to remove those
clouds. Among other things, Frank
0’Connor was blacklisted by De Valera’s government for his condemnation of
Irish neutrality and for leading a private life at odds with Catholic Church
morality. Yet, despite being regarded as
a bête noir, 0’Connor, in his own
lifetime, was treated as a hero of the short story form in America
This year, I had the pleasure
of reading at the festival as part of the programme. I shared the platform with P.J. 0’Connor,
winner of the 2011 Sean 0’Faoilain Short Story Prize. 0’Connor won with a story called The Haggard and he held the room in the
palm of his hand, so wonderfully entertaining the story and its delivery. The
judge of this really prestigious competition, Ian Wild, proclaimed the story as
being witty and in the vein of Flann 0’Brien, high praise indeed. Also given
prominent platforms were new writers from The Stinging Fly Press, The recent
Faber anthology and there was a special showcase this year of stories from the
Francis McManus Award read by actors who really know how to deliver a story.
This in itself proved very useful for the aspiring story writer. It brings to mind the importance of pacing
and explains how masters such as John McGahern spent whole mornings arranging
and then re-arranging a sentence. Such
attention to craft can be picked up by the ‘ear’.
A festival which focuses entirely on the short story and which
enjoys such huge attendances (a full house for most of the events) shows a
strong endorsement of the form and the realisation of how alive and well it is.
From such a small (in terms of size) word ‘field’, writers have sown and reaped
very successful careers. The mastery of the form in the case of Irish writer
Claire Keegan places her as a direct successor to John McGahern. Faber published her winning Davy Byrne
Memorial Award work Foster, as a
stand alone story, an accolade most writers can only dream about. I had the
privilege of being in one of Claire Keegan’s writing groups in Tallaght over
twenty years ago when she was just starting out, although even then she was
making an impression with her work. She
was dedicated and highly disciplined, two of the traits a writer really must possess
in order to bring the work to its best.
Annie Proulx’s short story Brokeback
Mountain (published in her collection ‘Close Range, Wyoming Stories’),
transferred seamlessly to the big screen, proving the resilient nature of the
short form.
My own list of favourite
writers is constantly lengthening. The last collection I read was ‘Elizabeth
Strout,’ by Olive Kitteridge. I found it
stunning and memorable. Before that, I
read Kevin Barry’s ‘There are Little Kingdoms.’ Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ is a treat I would never
tire of and I am always altered in some way by it. ‘The Collected Stories’ of Dylan Thomas is
still hugely enjoyable to me as is Richard Brautigan’s ‘Revenge of the
Lawn.’ Brautigan’s stories are really
short, sometimes just a paragraph. It
could be said he was writing flash fiction before the term was coined. I would always want to read William Trevor
and of course, I’m open to recommendations.
Having access to really well put together forums, workshops, discussion
panels and readings as developed by The Cork International Short Story
Festival, ensures a feast of new work alongside the more established. Together
with all the short-listed collections at the festival, ‘My Mistress’s Sparrow
Is Dead,’ edited by Jeffrey Eugenides and containing stories ranging from
Chekhov to Munro seems a good bet for the winter nights ahead.
Where do short stories come
from? This question is often asked of writers of the form. Unfortunately, they are not found under heads
of cabbages. Most writers agree that
short stories are concerned with one single event held over a specific
timeframe within which change, of some degree, changes the lives of the
characters in the story but also the perspective of the reader. Joyce maintained that short stories presented
moments of heightened perception or epiphanies.
At a recent seminar in Trinity College , Dublin
It appears that the best way
to get under the skin of the form is to read short stories and learn through
the process, writing them from the type of energy Joyce Carol Oates describes
so well. There’s a quote from 0’Connor in the festival brochure which seems to encapsulate
the whole point of having buoyant energy, a quote taken from 0’Connor’s
thoughts about what constitutes ‘ A real European capital.’
Speaking to the BBC in 1961
0’Connor said; “I have a feeling that, at
one time, Cork, for a short time at least, during the reign of Cormac McCarthy,
was a real European capital. It has
ceased to be that and the problem now is how it’s going to create a life for
itself, a life in which a man can live completely from the cradle to the grave;
that I think is a problem not only for Cork, but for the whole of Western
European Civilisation. Life has to start flowing back into smaller places. Metropolis ended with Hiroshima Western Europe
is finished.”
Because of the sponsorship of
Cork City Council and all the various activities of the Munster Literature
Centre, a life without limits is possible.
In the words of Festival Director
Patrick Cotter, such sponsorship ensures “That men and women can develop to
their fullest creative and intellectual extent; so that they are never obliged
to leave their home city to fulfill themselves.’
Sincere thanks to Patrick
Cotter, The Munster Literature Centre and The Hennessy Literary Award for
giving me the opportunity to read on such an international platform. I returned
home rejuvenated and with a renewed sense of purpose.
Eileen Casey’s collection of short stories, Snow Shoes, was published by Arlen House
in 2012.
End of Guest Post
There is a great deal to be learned about the short story and Irish literature from this very insightful article and I give my great thanks to Eileen Casey for her allowing me to share this with my readers during Irish Short Story Month.
I give my complete endorsement to Snow Shoes. Here are my closing words on the collection from my post.
Snow Shoes by Eileen Casey has 13 stories in all. Each one is very much worth reading, beautifully written and explicated with a deep artistic sensibility. You can feel the author's deep compassion for the trials and burdens of ordinary lives and extraordinary ones. I find her work profoundly emphatic.
I endorse these stories for any and all lovers of the form. Several of the stories are about long term marriages and I think anyone in such a situation will find themselves reflecting on the state of their own relationship. Her ability to write so movingly about a Korean comfort woman shows she can go outside the scope of her immediate world to project herself into psyches foreign to her immediate environment and shows the range of her imaginative power.
Mel u
No comments:
Post a Comment