"Delta" by Barbara Tarrant- With a Q and A

"Delta" by Barbara Tarrant  (2012, 5 pages)

Year III

March 1 to March 31

Barbara Tarrant -Dublin

Hennessy New Irish Award Winner 2012

First Fiction

Today I am happy to be able to share with my readers a story by Barbara Tarrant (Dublin).   She won the 2012 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award for First Fiction.   The award is in its 41st year and has been won by some of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers including  Dermot Bolger, Joesph  O’Connor, Colum McCann, Hugo Hamilton and Patrick McCabe.  Over the years, the judges have included Roddy Doyle, Fay Weldon, Neil Jordan, Molly Keane, Elizabeth Bowen, Brian Friel and Clare Boylan, lending the event the credibility associated with these individual writers status and caliber.  The story for which she won "Baby" is not, as far as I know,online anywhere but she does have an amazing story "Delta" that we are able to read (I will include a link at the close of my post).

"Delta" is the story of Grace, a new first time mother and the ravages to her psyche brought on by the unceasing caused by colic crying of her baby Delta.  There is a terrible frustration and pain caused in the soul of a mother when her baby will not stop crying.  Made much worse by her at times resentment of the baby who can seem almost a malevolent force of nature sent to torture you.  (The medical name for this condition is  "post natal depression".) Part of the very real agony this brings is sleep deprivation.   The story takes place on Delta's seventh month birthday.

Grace is at a point brought about by sheer exhaustion where the slightest effort is almost more than she can make herself do.   At her part time job as a hardware store cashier she always wonders what sort of sleep the store customers had the night before.   Grace keeps getting worse and worse, she know she is on a dangerous downhill spiral.   Her husband left her to move to California.  She calls her mother and begs her to come over-she says she is busy.  To add to the pain, in a really poignant scene, the mother tells her her father cannot come over as he is sleeping but Grace hears him talking in the background.   

The imagery and prose of Tarrant totally bring this experience to life for us.  I will quote a bit from her story in order to convey a feel for the power and beauty of her prose.     

"From day one, Delta cried with savage frequency. The first six weeks was okay because Grace expected sleepless nights, the adrenaline kept her going, that and the novelty of a new baby. She had let the noise wash over her like sheets of rain and even been grudgingly impressed by its stubborn monotony and Delta's ability to sustain it for hours on end. Grace couldn't think straight against the background of furious, rhythmic, animal complaint; it vibrated through her, turning her into some kind of instrument for the conduction of sound; a sort of tuning fork, dehumanising her."

The mother is supposed to be at work at 1000am, she looks at the clock and is shocked to see it is 1130.

The ending of the story is amazing.   I think I would trivialize its power and depth by explicating it and  I urge you strongly to read this story yourself.

You can read "Delta" here.

I greatly look forward to reading more of the work of Tarrant and I hope in the not too distant future to be able to post on a collection of her short stories.   

Bio Data (supplied by author)

I am a third generation Dublin woman and live and work here. I am a graduate of Trinity College Creative Writing MPhil and last year won the First Fiction Hennessy award for 'Baby'. My work has have been broadcast on RTE radio. I read lots of poetry and short story's and volunteer with Fighting Words, a project run by Roddy Doyle to foster children's creative writing skills.  

A Short Q and A with Barbara Tarrant

1.  I sometimes wonder why such a disproportionate amount of literature of the world, that is regarded as great, 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.

 probably something to do with the endless winters and disappointing summers, melancholy gets into the blood.

2.   Who do you regard as the first modern Irish Short story writer?

 Mary Lavin

3.   Why have the Irish produced such a disproportionate to their population number of great writers?

 In our native language we were great oral story tellers, There is very little record of this element ( I think William Carlton was the first to record them) of our heritage. When the British tried to erase our native tongue, it was more difficult to destroy the psyche of a true storyteller.

4.   (Ok this may seem like a silly question but I pose it anyway-do you believe in Fairies?-this quote from Declan 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."

No, I do not.

5.  Do you think the Stories of an Irish RM books and the TV series are accurate accounts of the era?

 The Irish RM was a marvelous television series, I never read the stories. I believe the Irish character (warts and all) is celebrated in this work and if anything the British come out of it a bit red- faced! 

6.  Does the character of the "stage Irishman" live on still in the heavy drinking, violent, on the dole characters one finds in many contemporary Irish novels?

 I'm not sure this is entirely true, I think there is a more three dimensional Approach these days to this rather tired character.

7. Do you think Irish Travellers should be granted the status of a distinct ethnic group and be given special rights to make up for past mistreatment? Are the Travellers to the Irish what the Irish were once to the English?  I became interested in this question partially through reading the short stories of Desmond Hogan.

 the Traveller question is forever on going here. They are a unique group with a rich heritage and should be celebrated and protected.

8.   Where is the best place in Dublin to get fish and chips or the best Irish stew?

.   my local chipper, The Embassy Grill does the best fish and chips in Dublin bar none! As for an Irish stew? The ordinary Irish housewife cooks the best stew.

9.  Ebook or traditional?

 the traditional book in the hand for me!

My great thanks to Barbara Tarrant for  taking the time to share her very interesting thoughts with us.

Mel u

"The Quickening" by Claire Bamber

"The Quickening" by Claire Bamber (2012, 12 pages)

The Irish Quarter

Emerging Irish Women Writers

Claire Bamber

Irish Literature on The Reading Life

"It is the fathers who are crucially absent from their  lives:  in any but the biological sense, there are scarcely fathers at all".  Declan Kiberd in Inventing Ireland:  The Literature of the Modern Nation


"The Quickening" by Claire Bamber is a very powerful story that completely exemplifies what Declan Kiberd  says is the dominant theme of modern Irish literature, the absent or weak father.   Most of the works of the classic Irish writers like James Joyce and John Synge explore the consequences of this for young men.   Bamber, and others of the emerging Irish women writers on whom I have posted have helped us understand how the lives of women are shaped by this.   It is one of the dominant themes in Hard to Say by Ethel Rohan.  

Weak or absent fathers do not just effect their daughters, they also change the mothers.   In some cases, in the strongest of the women, they become better parents and combine the roles of a strong father and a loving nurturing mother into their persona.   In far too many cases it turns the abandoned mother into a bitter person, a parody of what a father should be realizing herself as a bitter woman who resents her children and makes them feel unwanted.   Sadly, this goes on for generations.   The abandoned mothers turn their daughters against men or plant in their minds the idea that all men are essentially no good so they come to think if they want love, a family or a man in their lives they must accept the inevitability of abuse.   Of course they will in their own time be abandoned.   Their sons will become men who think abusing and mistreating women, including the mothers of their children, is a mark of masculinity.   It is these themes that Claire Bamber develops so brilliantly in her wonderful story "The Quickening".

As the story opens a woman gets a call while having her nails done.  At first she does not know who it is then she recognizes it is Uncle Pat, her mother's brother.   She is in America and Uncle Pat is calling from Ireland to tell her that her mother is in the hospital, with just a short time left to live.   He begs her to come to see her mother.

We are along as the woman makes the flight to Ireland.   The man next to her asks her if she is from Ireland and is going to see family and Margaret says nothing.   As the plane lands she thinks about a time when she was ten and her Uncle Pat had given her a pet rabbit.   This memory is beautifully told and brings the very real pain in this story vividly alive.   I do not want to give away a lot of the details of this episode, wonderful as it is.

When she gets to the airport and sees how old her Uncle Pat looks it is a terrible shock to her.  On the ride to the hospital she begins to remember something that happened to her in the hospital long ago, a vicious act of cruelty her mother put her through.   We do not as we begin to read the story understand what a miasma of pain Margaret's memories of her mother are but before the story is over we will.

I do not like to spoil stories for potential readers and the ending of "The Quickening" is so powerful and so emotionally intelligent that I will leave the rest of the plot untold.

Author Biography

Claire Bamber was born and brought up in Ireland until she was thirteen, when her family moved to Wales.  She started writing three years ago, and all her stories are based in Ireland and concerned with Irish themes.  The Quickening is her first publication, and can be found in Causeway/Cabhsair magazine, published by the University of Aberdeen.  She was also short listed for this year's William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Prize for her story, Scar Tissue.  She is constantly amazed by the power of words and that when a story takes hold of her it won't leave her alone.

Mel u

"Bewitched" by Danielle McLaughlin

"Bewitched" by Danielle McLaughlin (2010, 4 pages)

The Irish Quarter:   A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to ?

Emerging Irish Women Writers

Danielle McLaughlin

Ever since Ethel Rohan (author of two great collections of short stories, Hard to Say and Cut Through the Bone)  honored The Reading Life with a guest post  on a short story by Danielle McLaughlin (Cork County, Ireland), "All About Alice" that appeared in The Stinging Fly I have badly wanted to read her work.   Here is part of what Rohan in her beautifully crafted post said about McLaughlin's story:

"While my first read of this story hung onto the sheer joy of tale and suspense, and was fueled by the need to get to the conclusion, my subsequent reads of  “All About Alice” focused on trying to figure out just how McLaughlin so beautifully crafted and rendered this moving and memorable story. The voice, tone, and pacing in “All About Alice” seem perfect. There isn’t a beat wasted or missing. The three big ‘Ds’ of details, descriptions, and dialogue are telling and serve to both reveal character and progress plot."

I was so happy when I found that a prize winning recent story by McLaughlin was available online.   Where I can I prefer to post on stories that can be read online as it does frustrate me at times to read a post on a story that sounds great only to learn it will be very hard for me to read it.  (This is in part also a courtesy to people like myself who live where there are no public libraries.)

"Bewitched" is an amazing story about a moment in which a bookish socially awkward teenage girl takes a step toward real maturity and wisdom, a step that decades do not take most people.  "Bewitched" is structurally the perfect short story.   It introduces us to two characters, Mrs. Wilson the Librarian who of course seems ancient and without a life to our young narrator, and the narrator herself.  I was so quickly and skillfully  drawn into the character of the narrator and was eager to see what would happen to her.    The narrator came across as a bit peevish in her refusal to wear a coat her sister had out grown because it matched the color of the rug in the local library and of Mrs. Wilson and that was just a perfect touch.

Every Saturday morning the narrator would head to the library when other teens were still in bed. (Side note, a lot of the literary fad for witches and the paranormal was begun by Irish short story writers like Joseph Sheridan le Fanu and Lord Dunsanny.)   She asked Mrs Wilson where they kept the books on witches.   Mrs Wilson is quite not into witches at all and she shows the girl some encyclopedia articles with horrible looking old crones and the articles suggest the women who claimed to have supernatural powers were just deluded and frustrated old women.   I want to quote a bit from the story so you can see the wonderful prose style of McLaughlin:

On Saturday mornings, while other teenagers burrowed deeper under their duvets, I ran straight to the library. I cannot remember how my obsession with witches started but it blew like exotic tumbleweed though the ghost-town of my teenage life. I asked Mrs. Wilson, the librarian, where the books on witches were kept.  I slouched along behind her to the bookshelves on Medieval History in the far corner.  She motioned to a few stocky encyclopaedias and eyed me curiously before padding off across the carpet.Mrs. Wilson, it turned out, was a woman with no concept of witches. The encyclopaedias carried a few scant paragraphs on sad, frumpish women of dubious competence. They were, it was strongly hinted, neurotic and unbalanced women, or at best, frauds.  Refusing to be defeated, I trawled through every shelf.  Dusty volumes of ancient mythologies, obscure pagan rites, even astrology, were fine-tooth combed, book by book, page by page. 

Sometimes Mrs Wilson tries to talk to the narrator but she just sees her as an old lady without a clue about life.  She objectifies her as just somebody with varicose veins who dusts shelves and moves books around, dull in the extreme in her teenage mind.

Not one but two big things happen in this story.  I will tell you about one of them and only allude to the other so the story is pretty much unspoiled for you.

The narrator likes to paint in her bedroom in the evenings, when she gets out of school.   She has a very interesting routine.   I was trying to understand it and there are several brilliant things going on in this section of the story.  The narrator seems possibly trying to get in touch with her emerging sexuality and to connect to a pagan wilding tradition, to almost transform herself through her art.  I think this passage is simply stunning

I peeled off layers of clothes as I painted, throwing them willy-nilly about the floor. Stripped to my practical and greying underwear, I would work faster, free from the clingy bulk of sleeves and shirts and prickly tights.  My eyes wandered from mirror to canvas, from the fleshy contours of my own white skin to the flowing passion of the glorious witches, all sleek and sassy and pouting.  I would paint fiercely, the colours rushing together.   Wild women screamed and glowered from the canvas, drawing me in, wrapping me in their dark and comforting cloaks, until the drab, wobbly form in the mirror melted away, washed away in a torrent of simmering colour.

I almost hate to do this but I will stop telling the plot here.   The narrator learns a powerful lesson, one far too few people ever learn.   If you are really lucky, you can learn it from the best of literary works.

Ethel Rohan was right, hardly a big surprise, McLaughlin is a great writer.   As I said it is a perfectly done short story on the Frank O'Connor model.  It introduced some interesting ordinary people, something big happens in their lonely lives, and a valuable lesson is learned.   All in four beautiful pages

You can read "Bewitched" here.

I am very grateful to Ethel for making me aware of Danielle McLaughlin.   I will following her work form now on and in fact hope to post on another of her wonderful short stories very soon.

Official Author Bio

Bio: Danielle McLaughlin lives in County Cork, Ireland. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming inSouthword, The Stinging Fly, Boyne Berries, Crannóg, The RTE TEN website, Inktears, and in various anthologies including ‘The Bone Woman and other short stories’ recently published by Cork County Library and Arts Service, the Fish Anthology 2012 and the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology 2012. Another of her stories was shortlisted for the Francis Mac Manus Competition 2012 and will be broadcast on RTE Radio 1 in July. She won the Writing Spirit Award for Fiction 2010, a WOW!2 Award for Fiction in 2011, the From the Well Short Story Competition 2012 and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition 2012.


I like to ask short story writers whose work I admire who their favorite writers in the genre are and share it with my readers.  Here are some of Danielle's:


William Trevor, Karen Russell, Kevin Barry, Yiyun Li,  Ethel Rohan, Mary Costello, Ita Daly, Nuala Ní Chonchúir, Alice Munro, Edna O Brien, Tessa Hadley, Claire Keegan, Flannery O’Connor, Tania Herschman, Clare Wigfall.


Mel u

The Weight of Feathers by Geraldine Mills

The Weight of Feathers by Geraldine Mills (2007, 129 pages)

The Irish Quarter:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to ?

Geraldine Mills

Resources and Ideas

Posts on Emerging Irish Women Writers

Valerie Sirrs on Lick the Lizard by Geraldine Mills


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 

The Weight of Feathers by Geraldine Mills is a collection of twelve short stories.   I have never had the pleasure of being in Ireland but if I do I know Galway for sure has more than its share of great writers.   Posting on collections of short stories by the same author presents a challenge, to me at least, as when you read through the collection you tend to quickly look for commonality in the stories rather than looking at the works one at a time.    My approach on a collection is to post on a number of the stories individually  and indulge in an overview at the conclusion of my post.   I think this shows respect for the artist and if I were pondering buying or investing my time in a collection of short stories this is what I would want in a post.   


"Death Match"   

The opening story in the collection, "Death Match" is a strange kind of loveless love story that also focuses on the loneliness of a man far from his home and off a woman who we never really understand.   It is ultimately a sad story at its core.   There are only two important characters in the story, Slavo who is I think from Eastern Europe.   He is working at a hotel in Dublin or London as a doorman.  He sees this as a very good job.     It is a big step up from his first job as an immigrant.    He meets the other main character in the story, a woman named Lourdes, as she is swimming wearing only her panties in the fountain in front of his hotel.     She calls him over to dry her off and he is, of course, interested in what she intends, he has not been with a woman since he left home, but he is afraid if someone from the hotel management sees him with her he will be fired.   To telescope a bit without out spoiling the really interesting plot, she goes home with him to his place and spends what seem to be a number of days with him.   They have a very passionate affair.   Salvo is happy over this and he thinks he is in love but he is also very confused as women where he comes from do  act like this.   These things rarely last too long and this does not.    The ending is really well done.   We never  really get to understand the woman and maybe she does not understand herself.    "Death Match" is a first rate story which I greatly enjoyed reading.  

"The Weight of Feathers"


I think it is logical to assume that the title story in a collection of short stories is perhaps the work in which the author has the greatest pride.   Either that or it is a marketing decision and the story with the most interesting sounding title is picked.  "The Weight of Feathers" is a kind of ordinary man's retelling of the Icarus stories.   (The story made me think of Gabriel Marquez's "The Angel that Fell from the Sky").


There are kind of two very interesting interelated plot lines in this marvelous story.  One is about a middle aged seeming woman working a farm in a rough area.   Her aged mother lives with her and they are in long term conflict over the mother's insistence that living on the farm is a bad idea.   In a way, the farm, though this may seem odd as farm is a very earth based experience, is her attempt to rise above the banalities of earth bound life.  I really liked the opening lines of this story.  "A man fell out of the sky and into my garden.  I found the slump of the body by the pomegranate tree when I went out for water the terraces.  The evenisng burned itself into the mountain.   There were feathers all around him, some stuck to his arms, some to his  legs, a golden syrup of wax melted on his face."    The account of how he and his son, who died as he attempted to fly toward the sun, is really a marvelous blend of magic realism and ordinary reality.   There is a lot more in this story and I  hope you can one day read it.


"Waiting for the Fall"


"Waiting for the Fall" is a very interesting story about an old man growing older, memory, grown children, loneliness, the lasting scars of war and the way things and their passing become a metaphor for the winding down of life.   There is for sure more than one kind of fall in this powerful story.  As the story opens we hear the sounds of birds flying away from a tree being cut down by a chain saw.   Robert cannot nap or watch TV because the noise is too overpowering.   Robert, a widower, notices the tree surgeon is a woman and he thinks to himself that if is wife were still here she would soon be friends with the woman and know how she came to be a tree surgeon.  We also learn about Robert's children.  One of them, his daughter, checks on him regularly and he knows she has lost confidence in his ability to take care of himself.  His son does not contact him very often.   Robert often drifts back to his experience in the war, in France. He was a fighter pilot.  It is something he cannot really share with anyone and the fact that it was the central experience of his life lets us see deeply into the core of his loneliness.   A very very good story.  Mills does a wonderful job of letting us look in as Robert drifts in and out of his war thoughts which have haunted him for decades.


"This Is From the Woman Who Does"


Fact of life for me, I do not like people who do not like cats and this story is about a woman working as a maid who abuses her employer's cat when she is not around.  OK I understand her resentment that her employers care much more for their cat than they do her.   This is not at all a fault with the story, of course.  The opening like really is attention grabbing.  "Herman looks at me with a bad eye, mean and calculating, as if to say 'I'll make her work for her money today'".  As she leaves Mrs P showers Herman with kisses and tells the maid "Warm some milk for precious".   As soon as Mrs P is out of sight, the maid locks Herman out of the house and laughs to herself as she hears him cry to be let back in as she knows he is has not has his breakfast.   OK good story, gets well into the mind of the maid.  Sort of a servants revenge story.


"Withheld"


"Withheld" is an interesting story about the relationship of two grown sisters, Magda and Mariam.   Mariam is there at the train station with Dan, her spouse, to pick up Magda who called Mariam and told her she wants to stay with her for a while, without offering an explanation.   They are both alarmed to see how much weight Magda has lost and how haggrard she looks.   I have noticed in reading Irish short stories a use of expressions like "himself" to refer to a man who either is or thinks he is important, it is used in the prior story to refer to the lady of the house and the cat".  Here we have the very strong sentence "the rain whipped into the station and sperm droplets of itself swam slant-ways across the carriage besides where they stood".   The question then becomes why refer to rain as "sperm droplets".   I think it is a way to see how the lives of the women are so dominated by the sexual feelings of men for them.   As the story opens we learn that Magda is there because Alan has left her.  The story lets us see a lot about the minds and characters of the sisters in just a few pages.


"Butcher Bird"


Decades ago I took a class in Neo-Platonism.   At last it has finally proved useful in allowing me to better understand, I hope, this totally great story about an Greek Neo-Platonist living in ancient Egypt.   The narrator of the story is Hypatia a late 4th century AD female Neoplatonist and mathematician.   She was of Greek descent and lived in Alexandria Egypt.  Her father was the last librarian at Alexandria.  The other character of import in the story is a man, Synesius, also a Greek NeoPlatonist who traveled from Greece to become a disciple of Hypathia.   Mills, of course and wonderfully so, makes her own use of the known facts (there is a lot of possibility that what we think are historical facts were sort of created stories in the late middle ages anyway) and turns this into a version of an ancient even in the 4th century myth.   We see the hatred and fear that Hypathia generates.,    The world was not, even though the popular historical press on women in 4th century Egypt says they were treated with more respect than in most other places for centuries to come, read for a woman smarter than the rulers of the country and the fictional Hypathia dies a horrible death.   The real one is said to have been killed by a Christian mobs in the streets of Alexandria who were horrified by her views, which of course they had no clue of understanding.  This is a really brilliant story and a genius of a subject.   It would be the basis for a great historical novel and  movie.




"Cut"


"Cut is the first short story I have read that deals with the reaction of a post operative transgender man to seeing his daughters for the first time in years.   When he decided to  undergo the operations that would turn him, in part, into a woman, what he feels he is, he and his wiife decided they should seperate and that it would be better for their two daughters if he did not see them a fnymore.   The father almost feels like a stalker as he shadows his two beautiful daughters.   This story does a great job of getting into the mind of the male central character.


There are five more stories in the collection, each a pleasure to read and very distinct from the other stories.


The Weight of Feathers is an outstanding collection of short stories.   I do not like generalizing about short collections that much but 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.

Interview for Reading Life

Geraldine Mills

 Questions on the Weight of Feathers

In two of your stories "The Weight of Feathers" and "Butcher Bird" you have modified stories from antiquity.   In "Weight of Feathers" the Icarus figure is not heroic but a very ordinary man. Why did you decide to modify the story as you did and is it also meant to be an echo of "The Angel that Fell From the Sky" by Gabriel Marquez.  "In Butcher Bird", a wonderful use of old history and myth, you significantly alter accepted history and turn this into a story that portrays 4th century Christians in a negative way.   How much of history should be read into this 

story? Is it a suggest of the fall of civilization with the murder of a female mathematician and neo-Platonist?

One of the more rewarding aspects of writing a story is the way it leads the writer into it. Much of my writing is done by grabbing an hour here and there, quite often when I am sitting in my car in car parks, waiting for some appointment or other. On one occasion I was giving myself an exercise on what might fall from the sky and after the usual, rain or snow or clouds the opening line for this story was given to me: A man fell out of the sky and into my garden. The character came almost fully formed. I could visualise very clearly the location, the house, the garden and the narrator who is racked by loneliness. It wrote itself.

The theme has already been covered in other genres. Breughel’s painting of Icarus becomes the ekphrastic material for Auden’s Museé de Beaux Art and is echoed in the songs of Greg Greenway. Though it may resonate with Gabriel Marquez, that was not my intention nor had I read Marquez’s story until after my own was published.  It proves that there are really very few themes/stories under the sun, only ways of writing them.

 I consider this story to be one of mythical realism, a legend grounded in the every day. It is very much about isolation and I like to leave it a little vague as to whether the narrator experienced it or just imagined it as a result of her loneliness, hidden away on her own in the mountains, with no one to talk to.

The story about Hypatia has a much more historical provenance. When a book fell off a library shelf and opened on the page of the life of this extraordinary woman I knew I wanted to read more about her. I researched the story and Hypatia of Alexandria by Maria Dzielska( Harvard University Press,2002) was the source that gave me most insight into her world. It was her exploration of the correspondence with Sinesius of Cyrene that I used to dramatise the last days of this brilliant mathematician.  Dzielska records the different ways in which she was killed but I set the story on the eve of Hypatia’s death and do not say exactly how it happens.  What was the driving force for me was not the historical context but an exploration of how fear drives people to do unspeakable things. It is simply a story about a woman whose power threatens those around her and she has to be silenced.

Are you a poet who also writes short stories or the reverse?  Does one form matter more than another to you?

I started out as a short story writer. It is the genre that I am most drawn to.  I search out the story behind everything. Poetry came along when a theme that didn’t fit into a short story still wanted to be voiced. My poetry in general is very much informed by my personal history and it is a way of making sense of it and also a method of recording the past. Short story allows me a much greater stretch of the imagination and does not command me to be loyal to a theme in the way my own narrative demands. Loss, isolation and a sense of place are intrinsic to both genres but the short story is the greater challenge and the one that pushes the boundaries in all sorts of directions. The confines of poetry support my short story in terms of structure and adhering to a tight form. The story has to have all its components clicking into place in the same way that a poem must. At the moment there are no areas of my own history needing to be revisited, there are no poems waiting in the wings, but there are lots of ideas for stories so that is the trail I am on.

Who are some of your favourite deceased Irish short story writers?

There are lots of the great masters who have influenced me over the years: Joyce, of course.  I am just after rereading Dubliners as part of the One City One Book project that celebrated the writer in Dublin for the month of April. I keep going back to The Dead as a perfect work. Maeve Brennan was a masterly writer in the genre and Mary Lavin who is also being celebrated at this time. John McGahern was my lodestar and served as my guide when I started writing first. His death is still relatively recent and I forget that he is no longer with us but he has been and continues to be an influence on my work.  My first introduction to the Irish short story was at school where we were exposed to many of the others big names such as Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Bryan Mc Mahon, Michael Mc Laverty.  They were my first port of call before I discovered the more expansive world of the American short story, for example, that has a breadth of place and experience that goes beyond that of the Irish.

Your stories are in part about loneliness.  "Death Match" is about a man far from home, "Waiting for the Fall” is about an old widow who never really got used to being without his wife, his memories he cannot share with his daughters, at his core a story about loneliness.  Is there something about the Irish experience and history (I am asking this as total outsider) that makes so many of the stories about isolation and loneliness?  

I wouldn’t have thought that isolation and loneliness are exclusively aspects of the Irish psyche but maybe they are. It’s all that rain and the black clouds constantly being blown onto our heads that has us in such a state. If I lived in the south of Spain I probably would have become an olive grower and not a writer. Living here in Ireland it’s the page and the cupeen of tea that gets us up in the morning.

 Seriously though, the human condition is one of the themes that I find myself exploring again and again. We write out of our own loneliness in an attempt to make some sense of it. We clothe our characters in it, give them time on the page to come to terms with it (or not) and in that way we hope it connects us, thus bringing us closer to our human counterparts.   

My great thanks to Geraldine for her very thoughtful and interesting answers.  I also thank Valerie Sirr for her wonderful guest post.

You can learn more about Mills and her work from her very interesting blog.   There are good articles on poetry, short stories and art on her webpage and I read all of her posts.   

Here work is available through Amazon and The Book Depository.

Mel u

Hard to Say by Ethel Rohan

Hard to Say by Ethel Rohan  (2011, a collection of short stories)


"History was my favorite subject.   I felt this mad fascination with the past, with a long, long time ago.   I never felt like I belonged in my time, in the twentieth  century, and sometimes imagined I was from another era, a time-traveler stuck in  the here and now."-from "Passages"

On March 28 I read one of the greatest short stories I have ever read in my life, "Beast and the Bear" by Ethel Rohan.   I was completely stunned by this story.    Normally I trust my own judgement but in this case I wanted to be sure I was not over reacting so I emailed a link to the story to a blogger friend of long standing with impeccable taste and she was as blown away by the story as I was.   We talked about what stories we could for sure say where better than it and we had to reach to the very greatest writers of short stories to come with some examples.   I know this sounds hyperbolic but it is how I feel.   Lots of things can happen in peoples lives but I would not be at all surprised if Rohan were not one day considered among the greatest short story writers of all time.   Maybe someone will do an Irish Quarter type event 25 years from now and include her as one of the  writers and someone will wonder who Mel u that predicted her success long ago was.  

There are sixteen stories in Hard to Say, my strategy  on collections of short stories of late has been to read all of them while posting on more than half  of them.  I will just post briefly on the stories followed by a few concluding remarks.   The stories are interconnected and share a comman narrator but they can all be read with great enjoyment one at a time and most were published separately.   The more you read on in her collection, the more you understand the stories you have previously read.

"Crust" (6 pages)

Is told by a woman, looking back on her childhood.   Her aunt told her that she never slept right as a child.   She asks her father why but he could not remember.   "His hair gritted, more yellow than gray under the kitchen's dim lights, a scarf of dust under the neck of the naked bulb.  I went inside his mind and poked around, a stick at a strange  at a strange, sodden bag.   Thus prodded, he recalled a rare skin condition that lasted past my first birthday-a seeping brown crust that covered my body.  How I picked at that crust, picked and picked".  The story is about her recolllection of her disease, the scabs that formed on her body and the special baths her father gave her for a year.   Her brother loved to pick at her scabs.   For years now she has been trying to quiet her mind, so she could sleep, using a multitude of chemical aids.   She has night mares that a crust is forming on her skin at night and she has to cut herself to drain the scabs.   She dreams that bright blood is flowing out of her mouth.  Her dreams take her back to almost a primodal prehuman emerging from the ocean stage.   This might be a nightmare or a daymare or a vision of what is behind a door we should not open.  

"Corruptionists" (7 pages)


"Corruptionists"   opens with the  narrator's mother in the hospital dying, her aunt is brewing tea in their dirty kitchen.    Her mother got blood poising after surgery to stop her from hemorrhaging from her "woman's parts".   Her mother had six children even though she should have medically stopped with the first one.    The narrator's grandmother awakes her and her sister and tells them their  mother will not live to the morning.   I love these lines


"I hated how Granny said "safe departure".  As if there could be anything safe about dying.  As if mother would wait with her suitcases alone in the dark on a fog-filled platform for death".


Their mother recovers and comes home.     She is not the same, she drinks taller and taller glasses of brandy and talks to invisible friends.   Sometimes things turn ugly and her in visible friends smash up the furniture.     This story is about what happen when you ruin God's plans.


There is a depth and a compression of meaning in this story that transcends my ability to convey it.  There is pain and power in  this story.     We wonder so much what will happen to the young narrator.


"Stung"  (8 pages)


"Disease ate away at Mother's eyes.   A slow killer, Retinitis Pigmentosa took its sweet time, liked to nibble and pick.   Her pale blues in grave danger, like two dangling buttons about to fall from a coat and into the gutter"


Patterns begin to emerge here, sick mothers, daughters made adults to soon, diseases of a creeping destructive sort, a disordered household, random pain.  The narrator hears the bells of the ice cream man outside and asks her mother for some coins.   While groping about to find them the mother is stung by a wasp, an event she blames on her daughter.   Her mom screams at her to get out and she plots how to steal some money from her mother so she can buy ice cream tomorrow.     She begins to dream of the woman in the moon, she longs to escape to a mystical place where she can never be found.   Her mother interrupts  her thoughts by asking her if it is bees or wasps that die when they stink someone.   The ending really is  brilliant, it telescopes years of dysfunctionality  past and future in a few lines.


"Robbed"  (6 pages)


So far all of our stories are held together via the narrator, a young girl from a family with some serious problems.   As this remarkable story begins, our narrator is outside the  local corner store only to come upon a robbery in progress.    Three young robbers are holding up place.    To her they seem like chimps in a cage at feeding time.   One of the men jumps over the counter and hits the clerk on the head with a bottle.   They begin grabbing things from the shelves.   As they rush out she goes in.  The clerk, maybe he is the owner, is staggering about unable to speak with blood oozing out of his head.    The scene of the robbery comes to haunt the girl.   The consequences of the robbery are expressed so  beautifully at first you do not realize what a terrible meaningless thing has happened to the narrator and the store clerk.   She still goes to the store to get her mother's cigarettes and beer.  One wonders what kind of parent would let her go there again and maybe we know the answer.

Entrance to Newgrange

"Passages" (9 pages)

OK I know I am going to like this story as soon as I hear it is about a visit to Newgrange, my near number one spot in all the world to go to one day.   I wish so much I was along on the field trip our narrator, growing older now, took with her school mates in her Catholic school to Newgrange.   Newgrange is older than the pyramids and Stone Hedge.   The narrator also has a kind of freedom being on a school field trip.  I think Rohan has caught perfectly the excitement of a first school field trip for a young girl based on seeing the reactions of my three daughters, also all enrolled in Catholic schools,  on their first field trips.    Our youngest was very insistent that the school had a rule that no mothers or yayas (servant for a child) were allowed along on the trip.   Anyway back to "Passages" where our narrator, I  like her for her sheer spunk, has stolen some money from her father for her pocket money for the day.     As the school bus passes through the country side, the girls are all from the big city,  laugh at and make faces at the country people.   The narrator is overwhelmed with a feeling of shame for participating in this.   She has gained wisdom from her pain.  The events on the bus seem quite credible.   We arrive at Newgrange and the narrator tries to imagine the people who built it picturing the world of now.      As the bus leaves our narrator wishes she could stay at Newgrange, how much she hates to return home.  Newgrange is Eden, home is the world after the fall.   This is a perfect story, it captures wonderfully the feeling of the narrator.   One of the things I really like about this collection is you can see the narrator gaining wisdom, a dark kind  but real as that of  sun lite worlds.   The sun only really shines at the heart of Newgrange once a year.   


"Wizards"  (9 pages)


As the stories proceed to pound more and more on us, we learn darker and darker secrets about our narrator's life, things we maybe wish we did not know.  The story starts out with our narrator playing Wizards, a dress up wave your wand around sort of game, which takes a different turn when the boy Richie points his wand at the girl's middle and orders her "to pull down my knickers, to show him mine, I refused".   Richie proceeds to beg and plead so she consents, no touching allowed.   It turns out this is not as big a deal to her as it should be as Richie's own father has been molesting her with his fingers for some time now.    We see how the abusive family situation has lead to this, if we think about it a bit.   I will leave the rest of the plot untold but it is really a fascinating  marvelously  perceptive story about the tragic consequences the destruction of the self esteem of a young girl can have as she matures.


"Split"  (17 pages)


"Split" is the longest and perhaps the darkest story in Hard to Say.   The condition of the mother is getting worse, she is nearly blind now.     Her invisible friends have stopped visiting and now invisible intruders who have violent fights and play loud music begin to plague the mother.    Monsters begin to climb out of the furniture.    The mother will scream at any one who suggests the visitors are not real and her and the father in the story, not a big presence in the stories but he is there, fight more and more.   The fights are followed by silences that can last for months.      More and more her almost blind mother finds her way to the pubs at night.   One night she does not return, then two days go buy and she has not come back.   An almost viscous miasma of darkness begins to descend on the narrator as her mother spends months in a mental hospital in a straight jacket with the father insuring everyone she will just fine.   The pain in the closing lines is hard to bear.   Some times something so ugly should not be depicted so beautifully.   The delicate power of Rohan's prose makes us almost complicit in what her words depict.


"Departures" (10 pages)




In this story we are getting ready to go to a party our narrator has organized for herself to observe her soon to happen emigration from Ireland to New York.   with counting down the days until she emigrates from Ireland to New York.   The last party she had was her  twenty first birthday which of course her parents did not attend.  (I cannot help but notice her Mother is sure hanging in there for a long time.)   Her parents and her sisters flew into wild rages when she told them she was leaving, after all she had a decent government job.   She knows that deep down her parents know she is running away from them.   She hopes that her ex-boyfriend, who abused her, will be there and will feel sad when he sees how hot she looks.   She has gone from victim of childhood abuse to loving, she thinks, a man that abused her.   She gets totally drunk at the party and her ex tells her she will be back.   People tell her she will end up with AIDS or in jail as an illegal immigrant.   She does not much care.    I loved it when her sisters gave her as a going away present a hardback copy of Wuthering Heights, a story with an abuser as the love interest (sorry to those who see this book another way).   There is very ironic note of sadness at the end which shows the narrator is still very much not grown up.  

"Peeled" (7 pages)


Our narrator now seems comfortably settled in the United States.    She is enrolled in a drama class.     The instructor is trying to teach them to see more, feel more, and touch things more deeply.   This has nothing to do with the story, or maybe it does to me only but as I read this story I was reminded of an old French/Asian colonial saying:   "Only Laotians can hear rice growing".    The teacher is trying to expand there sense, in an almost Whitman like moment the narrator begins to hear things she never could before, to see what she never could feel, now the teacher, a man, who has taken a special interest in her wants to teacher her to really use her sense of touch.   My first reaction is I know where this is going but I did not.   We are not sure in these stories how aware the narrator is off the consequences of her upbringing for her psyche.     She does know that she knows things other people do not, things that she will not bother to explain to anyone for a very long time but does she know the prize she will pay for this knowledge?    There are beautiful images in this story, for sure the narrator can see deeply into things.     Her relationship to the drama teacher does show a tendqancy to seek out perhaps under it all self seeking guru like figures, often a characteristics of adults who were abused as children.


"Mammy"  (14 pages)


Near fifteen years have gone by and our narrator is living in San Francisco in the last story of Hard to Say.  We do not know how she ended up there but it three thousand miles further from Dublin than New York City.   She has flown back to Dublin three times in that period to visit her parents.    Her mother has now been dying for twenty years plus.   She flies back one final time to visit her mother who is now in a nursing home and is fact soon to die.   Her father has become a quiet man whose passion is tending his garden.   In Ireland it is customary to call your mother, especially when you are young, "Mammy".   While on the flight over the narrator had read a book on the mutilation of young women in Africa.   The sadness of this is magnified when the she reads that the girls call their mothers, "Mammy".   Everything comes full circle at the end of this story, sort off.     Her choice of on plane reading material tells us a lot about her, maybe her horror on the mutilation of the girls is magnified by the memories of her own sexual abuse.


Hard to Say is a great work of the story teller's art.   Individually the prose of the stories is perfect and the insight acute and they for sure give us a lot to think about.  Taken as a whole it a masterful account of mother daughter relationships, of the way in which pain can bring wisdom from the hurt and more from the transcendence of the pain.     It is about growing up, about enduring, about Ireland and  there is a lot of drinking-per my Google research the Irish might be the heaviest drinking country in the world, for sure in the first and second world.)


I liked the narrator, she has her issues but hey so do I, I even came to like the father and I was working on being in sympathy with the mother.   I loved seeing the narrator mature and Rohan is beyond my praise in her handling of this.   


There are six additional stories in the collection, each one a joy to read that takes is further into the family and mind the narrator.  In a relatively short book, "Mother" appears 144 times.

Rohan was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in San Francisco, California with her husband and two daughters.

Ethel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say, PANK, 2011 and Cut Through the Bone, Dark Sky Books, 2010, the latter named a 2010 Notable Story Collection by The Story Prize.  She has also published a number of short stories.  

Details about her books can be found on her Amazon page.   Both collections are offered at very fair prices.   

There are links to a number of stories you can read online and more information about her writing career on her webpage.   She has a very interesting blog where she talks about her work.

I will also post on her other collection Cut Through the Bone pretty soon.

"Ethel, I am looking for someone to
write the parts of my story my Daddy
Joseph Sheridan le Fanu never knew about
(there are things a girl does not share with her father)"
-Carmilla

Mel u