Elizabeth Reapy A Q and A Session

March 1 to March 31

A Question and Answer Session

Elizabeth Reapy

I first read a short story by Elizabeth Reapy (she sometimes writes as EM Reapy) during Irish Story Story Month Year Two in 2012 when I read and posted on her very well done short story, "Statues" which centers around the life of a young Irish woman.  After that I made a point of reading any of her short stories I came across.   I next read a story I really liked "Fleas" about two young Irish men working in Australia.  Next I read "The Guest" a very funny and wise story about what happens when the families favorite son brings his girl friend to dinner.  All of the stories deal with the struggles of young people in the face of the issues facing the Irish economy.  I also loved the anthology of short stories   30 Under 30 - Short Stories by Young Irish Writers she edited

Author Data

EM Reapy, 27, is an Irish writer travelling Australia. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her work has been published in Irish, British and American publications. She was shortlisted for 2009’s Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award. She co-founded and edits wordlegs.com .  

(www.wordlegs.com/30under30), has been selected for masterclasses, performances  and awards; including Tyrone Guthrie’s 2012 Exchange Writer to Varuna Writers’ House Sydney and an Irish Arts Council Travel and Training Award to complete this. Her short film ‘Lunching’ is being produced by Barley Films. She will be featured at the prestigious Dromineer Literary Festival in October 2012. At present, she is redrafting a screenplay and working towards a collection of short stories. 

A Question and Answer Session With Elizabeth Reapy

1.  Who are some of the contemporary short story writers you admire?.   If you had to say, who do you regard as the three best ever short story writers?  

Junot Diaz, Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry, Annie Proulx, Roddy Doyle, Yiyun Lee, Dagoberto Gilb, Stuart Dybek.

'The China Factory' by Mary Costello is wonderful. I love love love Denis Johnson. 

Three best? Hard to narrow down but maybe Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov? 

2.  I have read lots of Indian and American short stories in addition to Irish and alcohol plays a much bigger part in the Irish stories.   How should an outsider take this and what does it say about Irish culture.

Alcohol is a big part of Irish culture. Though not every single Irish person drinks or abuses it, I think it would be hard to find an Irish person who hasn't been affected in one way or another by alcoholism. Writers write the society around them and ours is often merry, is often wasted.    

3.  When did you start writing?

Since I can remember. My mum kept all my old English copies and poems that I wrote as a child. Sometimes I get flashbacks of making little books from halving A4 pages, then staple binding them and then writing my stories as neat as possible inside. I was mesmerized by inverted commas, 66 and 99, the absolute power of them. You could make anyone say anything. I still find that really exciting. 

4.  I sometimes wonder why such a disproportionate amount of the regarded as great literature of the world is written in the colder temperate zones rather than in the tropics.   How big a factor do you think the Irish Weather is in shaping the literary output of its writers.   I cannot imagine The Brothers Karamazov being written on a tropical island, for example.

Climate definitely affects writing. I recently went to Buenos Aires and could only write poetry there in the evenings after walking around the scruffy, sunny, elegant streets for the day. Ireland is grey and wet most the time and it's lovely to have a big fire on and chill out with a book or write beside it. We're inside a lot here because of the rain and so have to keep ourselves entertained indoors (probably connects to the alcohol thing a little too). The rain is something I miss a lot if I'm away though. Rain is home for Irish people and I think it gives the writing here that slightly miserable yet refreshing edge.  

5.   Who do you regard as the first modern Irish short story writer?   

George Moore.

6.  (OK I know this is big question and OK to not answer it)-why have the Irish produced such a disproportional to their population number of great writers?

Tradition. 

7.   (Ok this may seem like a silly question but I pose it anyway-do you believe in Fairies?-this quote from Declain Kiberd sort of explains why I am asking this:

" One 1916 veteran recalled, in old age, his youthful conviction that the rebellion would “put an end to the rule of the fairies in Ireland”. In this it was notably unsuccessful: during the 1920s, a young student named Samuel Beckett reported seeing a fairy-man in the New Square of Trinity College Dublin; and two decades later a Galway woman, when asked by an American anthropologist whether she really believed in the “little people”, replied with terse sophistication: “I do not, sir – but they’re there."   

Absolutely. 

8.  Do you think the very large amount of remains from neolithic periods (the highest in the world) in Ireland has shaped in the literature and psyche of  the country?

Maybe in that we're people who find it hard to let go of the past. 

9. How important are the famines to the modern Irish psyche?  

The famines, especially The Great Famine 1845-48, were important and devastating turning points in our history. One of the biggest effects of these was the language changing from Gaelige to English for most Irish people. 

10.  Do you think poets have a social role to play in contemporary Ireland or are they pure artists writing for themselves and a few peers?

A poet's work, their personal art, their musings on a particular issue, does provide a social commentary on modern Ireland. It is up to a reader though to think about and challenge what a poem says. The social role is in the reading of poetry. 

11.   Where is the best place in Dublin to get a real Irish breakfast?  Fish and Chips and Irish Stew?  .   

I've only recently moved back to Dublin so couldn't recommend anywhere yet but in Claremorris, Co. Mayo - get your fish and chips in Vals, breakfast in Maxwell's where my cousin Maria will look after ya. For Irish Stew, get an Irish Mammy to make it, home made - always delicious. 

12.  Do you prefer e-reading or traditional books?

Traditional books. I love the smell and feel of them and I love making notes on them. E-reading is grand too but I found even when I travelled, I was drawn to buying physical books over ebooks, despite the convenience of the Kindle. 

13.   If you were to be given the option of living anywhere besides Ireland, where would you live?

I'm learning Spanish so I can spend more time in South America in the future. I want to live in Seoul and San Fransisco, also New Zealand, Germany, South East Asia, Canada... I will always live in Ireland but would love a couple of other bases around the world that I could call home too. 

14.  If you could time travel for 30 days (and be rich and safe) where would you go and why?

Pagan Ireland seemed like good craic.  

   

15.  Congratulations on 30 Under 30-just brilliant-all of the writers included grew up with social media and the internet as very big factors in their lives-how do you think this will shape their writings?

Thank you. It's been a great experience. I don't know how the internet will shape their writing but I feel social media is getting close to its expiration date as it's too sold out now. We'll maybe write with nostalgia about liking pictures or status updates like the way we used to ring house phones to chat to friends or meet at a certain time in a certain place and hope the other person would show up. 

16.   Best Literary Festival you have so far attended?

The Dromineer Festival was lovely, the Australian Young Writers' Festival was so much fun and our Shore Writers' Festival in Enniscrone was a brilliant weekend. Cuirt, Dublin Writers' Festival, Belfast Book Festival, Galway Arts Festival; there's too many to mention. 

I am going to attend and perform at Listowel Writers' Week this year and I can't wait. 

17.  Do you have follow up plans for more collections?

I'm working on a collection of my own short stories at the moment. 

End of Q and A

Anyone interesting in reading the best from emerging writers,  not just Irish, needs to read the quarterly issues ofWordlegs.com, edited by Reapy.

You can find more information on 30 Under Thirty:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers at the web page of Doire Press.

I offer my great thanks to Elizabeth Reapy for taking the time to answer my questions in such a well thought out fashion.

I hope to follow her work for years to come.


Mel u

"The Guest" by EM Reapy

"The Guest" by EM Reapy (2012, 3 pages, from The Galway Review

The Irish Quarter

Galway Coat of Arms

Yesterday I heard on TV that there were twenty cities in the world with a population of over ten million    I checked and the population of Galway, Ireland is about 75,000 and it has produced more great writers than most of the mega-cities, including the one I live in.    I will leave it to those more learned than I do try to explain this fact.   This productivity is far from over and If anything I expect it to accelerate.   

I recently read a new short work of fiction by EM (Elizabeth) Reapy, editor of 30 Under 30:   Thirty Short Stories by Irish Authors Under Thirty.   I came upon this story when a Facebook friend posted a link to the current issue of The Galway Review.  The Galway Review describes itself as "Galway's leading literary magazine, devoted to excellence in writing".   I am very glad I discovered this online publication and expect to learn of many great new to me writers from it.   They publish mostly Irish writers but they are open to contributions from anywhere in the world.   I thought I would take the occasion of reading the very good story by Reapy, "The Guest" to let my readers know about The Galway Review.

"I love the moonlight shining off
Galway Bay"-Carmilla

I have previously posted on two short stories by Reapy, "Statues" and "Fleas".   Both deal with young people from Ireland trying to find themselves as adults in difficult times.   They deal with people who want very much to keep their Irish identity while trying to escape from culturally repressive traditions.   There are still strong family ties in these stories but you can see the young people struggling to achieve a measure of adulthood while still keeping the prerogatives of a child to act without having responsibility,   Her stories, including, "The Guest", are largely narrated through marvelous conversations.   There are three main on stage full time characters in this story, a young man, seems like in late teens or early twenties his father and his mother.   Offstage are his older brother working in Dublin. He resents how his parents always talk about how wonderful his older brother is.    As minor but important players we have the girl friends of the sons.   Reapy does a great job of bring the family dynamics to life in just a few pages.   The younger son is very upset when he sees his parents making all sorts of special preparations for the visit of his son and his girl friend, especially as his parents basically just told him his girl friend was a tramp not fit to visit the house.   The ending is just wonderful.   This is a brilliant., very smart and very funny story.

Author Data

EM Reapy, 27, is an Irish writer travelling Australia. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her work has been published in Irish, British and American publications. She was shortlisted for 2009’s Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award. She co-founded and edits wordlegs.com (www.wordlegs.com/30under30), has been selected for masterclasses, performances  and awards; including Tyrone Guthrie’s 2012 Exchange Writer to Varuna Writers’ House Sydney and an Irish Arts Council Travel and Training Award to complete this. Her short film ‘Lunching’ is being produced by Barley Films. She will be featured at the prestigious Dromineer Literary Festival in October 2012. At present, she is redrafting a screenplay and working towards a collection of short stories. 

I greatly enjoyed her edifying essay "How I Write" on Tasmanian Travels

Anyone interesting in reading the best from emerging writers,  not just Irish, needs to read the quarterly issues of Wordlegs.com, edited by Reapy.

Mel u

"Fleas" by Elizabeth Reapy

"Fleas" by Elizabeth Reapy (2012, 7 pages)


30 Under 30:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers edited by Elizabeth Reapy with a foreword by John Walsh

The Irish Quarter

Elizabeth Reapy

My Posts on Stories from 30 Under 30

"Me and Shane moved to Perth about two months back.   In Melbourne before that.  Pretty much taking caps and drinking goon all the time, until we puked or shat ourselves or scored women that were more wasted than us.  Waking up in random hostels in St Kilda or in Ozzy houses cramped with Irish immigrants to keep the rent down.   Young ones like ourselves.  Younger even.  Was turning out to be worse than the way we were back in Ireland."

There are thirty stories in 30 Under 30:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers. So far I have posted on eight of them.  (I totally endorse purchase of this very fairly priced collection and will provide a publisher's link at the end of this post.)   There is also a very interesting introduction  by the editor Elizabeth Reapy (I have posted on her very well done short story, "Statues") and a foreword  by John Walsh..   Agreeing with John Walsh, I think this book could well be a collector's item one day.  

Posting on collections of short stories that include the works of many different authors presents a big challenge, to me at least.    I do not personally care for reviews or posts on short story collections that simply have one or two lines on a few of the stories and then gush over the collection as a whole with standard book review quotes.  These could in fact easily be written without reading much of the collection and to me it is like going on about a forest without realizing it is made up of trees.   Because of the high quality of the stories and the collections ability to acquaint me with contemporary Irish short stories, I now plan to post individually on all of the stories in the collection.

Upon completion of this project, I will list my top five stories.

"Fleas" by Elizabeth Reapy, the editor of this great collection, lets us see what it like to be a young  Irish immigrant who moved to Australia to get away from a life that got off to a very bad start in Ireland.  The narrator and his mate Shane's life is one long string of heavy drinking binges, short term laboring jobs and transit hotels.   You can get a pretty good insight into their lives in these marvelous lines:

"Shane's mam bailed him out once with a grand but we blew that in a weekend with Thai whores and a two day session with Thai whores in a plastic Irish pub run by the biggest fucking scumbags you could ever expect to find in Northside Dublin".

Oscar Wilde, and I am sure Shane and the narrator would hate this comparison, said he did not really become Irish until he left Ireland and in a way this is what "Fleas" is also about.   The lads can make a lot more money in Australian as truck drivers than they can as day laborers in Ireland and they use the money to do the things that there life experience has taught them that a proper manly Irishman does when he has some money.   They live in an alcohol fueled world.   Once they get great  money making jobs as truck drivers but they flunk the drug test.   

Most of Irish people in their world seem on the run from the law in Ireland or to at least have nothing to go home to.  They get into lots of nefarious adventures and Reapy makes them all very real for us.   Sometimes they get homesick for old Ireland but I get the feeling they are not going home anytime real soon.  They have learned a trick about how to get a meal when all your money has gone for the drinks, drugs and whores.   Find a nice Irish girl in a rooming house and hang around her looking starving when she is cooking and she will feed them.   I loved this brilliant line:  "Something to do with the potato famine".   

I really liked it when they got a job working the mango harvest because there are huge Mango trees on the family property in the northern Philippines.   I am trying to image Shane and our narrator eating mangoes and laughing!   

Reapy has a great feel for the experience of the Irish in Australian, for good reason.   The description of the 12 hour drive across the outback was brilliant.   When I read this I kept in mind that pretty much any part in Ireland is at most four hours from another so this must be overwhelming to the lads.  The remarks of the narrators on Aborigines encapsulate hundreds of years of colonialism into a few words.

This is a fun story to read.   It is not for those who object to profane language.  

As I read it I wondered if young Irish people really use this much profanity.   Do they constantly use "fucking" as an adjective?   Or is this a marker of the lower class origins of the lads or their attempt to be macho?   Will they grow out of their life style and become boring regular people with jobs and families or will they die in stupid perhaps drinking driven ways?

"Fleas" is a great story about the dark side of the Irish immigrant experience.   I greatly enjoyed reading it.  

I am keeping a rough tab on how many of the thirty stories involve drinking and so far four of the eight have.   This is way above what a comparable number of Indian or Filipino short stories would have.   

Author Data

EM Reapy, 27, is an Irish writer travelling Australia. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University, Belfast. Her work has been published in Irish, British and American publications. She was shortlisted for 2009’s Over the Edge New Writer of the Year Award. She co-founded and edits wordlegs.com (www.wordlegs.com/30under30), has been selected for masterclasses, performances  and awards; including Tyrone Guthrie’s 2012 Exchange Writer to Varuna Writers’ House Sydney and an Irish Arts Council Travel and Training Award to complete this. Her short film ‘Lunching’ is being produced by Barley Films. She will be featured at the prestigious Dromineer Literary Festival in October 2012. At present, she is redrafting a screenplay and working towards a collection of short stories. 

There is an extremely interesting interview with Reapy on writing4all

I greatly enjoyed her edifying essay "How I Write" on Tasmanian Travels

You can watch her reading from the story here

Anyone interesting in reading the best from emerging writers,  not just Irish, needs to read the quarterly issues of Wordlegs.com, edited by Reapy.

You can find more information on 30 Under Thirty:  A Selection of Short Stories by Thirty Young Irish Writers at the web page of Doire Press.  

Mel u

"The Revolutionary and Synge" by Ferdia Lennon

"The Revolutionary and Synge" by Ferdia Lennon (2012, 6 pages)
"Foreword" by John Walsh to 30 Under 30  A Selection of Short Fiction by Young Irish Writers edited by Elizabeth Reapy

The Irish Quarter

Ferdia Lennon 

"If all went well, then John would be in Galway by seven o'clock.   He was excited.  For years he'd said that Dublin was plastic.   Galway, however was the real Ireland."

When I began a seven day event on my blog in April of this year devoted to the work of emerging Irish women writers I was happily amazed by the great quality of the stories I found to post about.    I soon decided to make posting on the work of emerging Irish writers, men and women, a permanent part of The Reading Life.   This has worked out great for my blog and opened up lots of new things for me.   

There are thirty stories in this collection.  (I totally endorse purchase of this very fairly priced collection and will provide a publishers link at the end of this post.)   There is also a very interesting introduction  by the editor Elizabeth Reapy (I have posted on her very well done short story, "Statues") and a foreword  by John Walsh..

Posting on collections of short stories that include the works of many different authors presents a big challenge, to me at least.    I do not personally care for reviews or posts on short story collections that simply have one or two lines of a few of the stories and then gush over the collection as a whole with standard book review quotes.   These could in fact easily be written without reading much of the collection and to me it is like going on about a forest without realizing it is made up of trees.   On the other hand, to post on all thirty of the stories would take a long time, an hour or so per post give or take, so I am will decide as I go how many of the stories to post on. I will also comment briefly about the forward of Walsh and introduction of Reapy.

I decided to first read "The Revolutionary and John Synge" by Ferdia Lennon because, acknowledging the very paltry state of my Irish literary education,  I am convinced John Synge is the third most important modern Irish writer behind Joyce and Yeats.  I also really love the diction in his plays and was very moved by his book, The Aran Islands.   Much of my secondary knowledge of Synge comes from the work of Declan Kiberd.   I said to myself, I will read this story and if I like it I will undertake a review of much of the collection.  I read it and I loved it.  I was hooked by the opening lines (quoted at the start of the post).  I  do not know a lot about Galway but I am confident it has produced more great writers than any city of its size, and more than many a city of 20 million.   John, the lead character in the story, bearing the same name as Synge of course, does not just read Synge, he knows about his way to short life and admires him as a person.   He thinks about how Synge used to hide in the attics of Irish peasants so he could internalize their modes of speech for his plays.   Of course there are issues in the life of Synge and the narrator knows this.  To easedrop on people may in a sense be an act of reverence but it is also an intrusion and treats them as something to be studied for part of what they are, not as full humans.   John wishes he had been born in Ireland in the late 19th century of early 20th.   He loves the rough beauty of the Galway area.    Now John is not just a dreamy young man thinking about dead playwrights, he has drinking buddies and likes going to pubs in pursuit of women.   He goes to the bus station to meet his old friend, Donal, and is shocked by how he has transformed himself into an extreme body builder.  Donal uses profane language, thus certifying his masculinity.   They have an interesting conversation in which Donal tells him of his expensive diet and his training routine.  I enjoyed this conversation, especially the part about the fish!   

Donal and John, Donal lives in Dublin, begin to argue over where Dublin is "fake" or not.  "You're wrong, man.   There is something special about Galway.  It's the real thing.  Dublin's full of Yuppies."

John starts talking to Donal about The Playboy of the Western World, Synge's most famous play.  Donal has heard of it and has a confused notion of what it is about.   There is a simply brilliant depiction of the conversation between the two young men about Synge's habit of hiding in attics listening to people.  

I will leave the rest of this story untold.  In a way Donal can kind of be seen as an Irish peasant (I know I am reaching here, perhaps beyond the intentions of Lennon) and just like an Anglo-Irish aristocrat intellectual of the early 20th century John looks down on him when seen in the flesh.    Donal, not John a self-conscious intellectual, is the kind of man that Synge wrote about in his plays.   John is really shocked when Donal gets the better of him in an argument.   

This is a really good fun to read story.  There are girls,  nice ones and sleazy types, Guinness, and reflections of the recession in the Irish economy.   Lennon puts a lot in a few pages and I look forward to reading more of his work.

In  his forward John Walsh (I have posted on his marvelous collection of interrelated short stories, Borders) tells us the very interesting story about how his company,  Doire Press, came to publish the collection.  

Ferdia Lennon is an Irish writer from Dublin.  His short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Galway Ropes Anthology, Boyne Berries, and wordlegs.com.   

You can find more information about the collection at the web page of  Doire Press

I do not know how many stories I will post on for sure.  I am confident it will be at least ten and perhaps all of them.  

Mel u