"Sausage" a short story by Sarah Clancy

March 1 to April 21

A Short Story by

Sarah Clancy

Sausage"

Q & A With Sarah Clancy-be sure to read this

Today I am very proud that Sarah Clancy has given me permission to share a second of her stories with my readers.  

You can read her wonderful short story "Hold the Front Page" here

Author Data

Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her first book of poetry, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull, was published by Lapwing Press Belfast in December 2010 and a further selections of her work were published in 2011 & 2012 by Doire Press Galway. Her second collection of poetry 'Thanks for Nothing, Hippies' Salmon Poetry 2012 was launched at the Cuirt International Festival of literature last year and has been very well received   Her poems have been published in The Moth Magazine, The Stinging Fly,Revival Poetry Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, The Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review and have been translated and published in Mexico and Slovenia.  She was the runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Series 2010 and 2011, and was the winner of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011.She was an invited guest at the 2011 Vilenica Festival of Literature in Slovenia and at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival and in Spring 2012 her poem “I Crept Out” received second prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition.

"Sausage"

by 

Sarah Clancy

(©Sarah Clancy 2012. This story is protected under international copyright law and cannot be published online or in print without the permission of the author.)

Sausage

©Sarah Clancy 2012.

She spat a mix of tomatoes and masticated white bread on to the footpath and put her hand up to her mouth half choking half laughing as passers- by gave the pair a wide berth. He zipped up his fly with a satisfied gleeful grin. There was a blush of red on both of their faces; whether from the wine or the prank you couldn’t say from where I was sitting. Ridiculous that’s what I thought.

The tableside cafe was nondescript, neither swanky nor cheap but like others in Ljubljana it profited from its priceless riverside location. People ate and drank here alright but mostly they came to people-watch and were equalled in numbers by those who were there to watch them back. A middle aged man wearing a Tito T-shirt walked past handing out cheap looking black and white fliers, probably recruiting for some non-existent revolution. Slovenia had done very nicely out of communism thanks, and now it was decked out in consumer cafe-culture regalia, profiting in turn from the countries wholehearted swing towards capitalism. Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose I thought to myself. Plenty of hints of where the tiny country’s prosperity came from could be spotted by any sharp-eyed observer in the multiplicity of banking logos that held court on everything from billboards to sun umbrellas. He wouldn’t be getting his revolutionaries on this street at least.

The couple had quietened now though they still erupted in laughter every so often. The man had straightened his tie and buttoned his suit jacket up again and the woman far from spewing her food on the street now had her legs crossed and was daintily holding a wine glass in one hand. They were definitely drunk though. Just moments ago, the man had pushed his chair back from the table and sat facing the street in that very male legs-spread pose, with his jacket open and with a deep red and fleshy Italian sausage at least eight inches long, protruding from his open flies. His suit was a wide- boy pale cream number and so the sausage was clearly displayed against the slightly pleated pale background of the crotch area.

I had been there since they sat down and though the pair clearly found their own antics hilarious, none of the people passing had noticed or if they had, they had remained disdainful enough not to give any sign of having seen the fleshy protrusion. Not to be daunted, the man had summonsed a waitress over in loud English and ordered two more glasses of wine, all the while promoting the sausage’s presence by looking down at it and shifting his buttocks in the chair to force it upwards. The waitress, thin and young with creamy skin and wearing those ugly skin tight stonewashed jeans favoured in seemingly all the post communist countries raised her eyebrows with a weariness that usually takes decades longer to acquire and walked off without responding, whereupon our woman spat her half eaten mouthful of bruscetta on the ground.

It was the woman that I was there to keep an eye on; the man was just some suit she’d met on the conference circuit. Knowing my girl though, he could expect to receive a generously given blow job in some only half hidden corner of the convention centre later. His antics were clearly leading that direction. I could have told him that he needn’t have bothered trying so hard, it was a sure thing.

I swallowed my coffee, slightly queasy still from having been seriously out- drunk the night before. The official conference dinner had been on and so I’d been satisfied that whatever my girl got up to, they would be restricted to the convention centre and its hotel grounds and I didn’t think she was in any danger at all at this early stage of proceedings.

Granting myself a rare night off I had gone out on a bit of a bar hop and ended up drinking toasts to Ratko Mladić in a bar with a bunch of Serbs. My current affairs knowledge was shaky about these parts but I was fairly sure that somewhere in my brain I knew Mladić  was one of the bad guys. That hadn’t deterred me though, from drinking with them. I put sunglasses on against the glaring daylight, reassuring myself that here in this city everyone from children to grandmothers wear them and as a result they wouldn’t make me look ridiculously like some half- wit private eye or security detail.

Sometimes in order to shadow people, you are better off to go on ahead of them and so I paid my bill and stepped from the indoor area of the cafe and turned right on to the street so that only my back was visible to the pair and I headed on across the bridge and across the plaza to the convention centre.

They must have got up immediately after me as I had only just installed myself on the 12th story open- air terrace when I saw the two like tiny miniatures coming across the plaza towards the building. The man was walking fairly normally but my girl appeared to be progressing in some sort of hopscotch manoeuvre. From above at least, it didn’t look at all elegant; she seemed to be advancing in rough fits and starts laughing. I winced on her behalf, slightly embarrassed. ‘God can she really be such an idiot? I wondered, exasperated. I pictured myself shooting them then, like some calm, composed sniper paid to rid the world of such embarrassments. I pointed one arm out and sighted along it as I imagined you would if you had such a task in mind then I gathered myself and put my hands in my pockets. I know I’d never harm a hair on her head, never. In fact the only reason I’m here, and have been in all those other places, is because I know first-hand that she’s the type of girl that comes to harm.

I’ve been with her in bars like the one I was in last night and to be honest the way she came on to malevolent looking bruisers of men, the flotsam from Europe’s recent wars both elated and scared me. No doubt she could have got me into many a tight corner, me who's never as much as thrown a punch in my life. Whenever it got dodgy we’d leave and she’d jaunt down the pavement exhilarated. I often challenged her in that sort of excitement inducing pulse-raising way we risk the things most precious to us; ‘go on then, go with your cavemen, your bruisers’ I'd dare her but no, she’d raise some temperatures and we’d beat a hasty retreat and she’d link me as she half-danced down whatever dingy street we were on saying; ‘nope no cavemen, I like suits, I like my men in suits'.

Oh she wouldn’t agree with me about putting herself in danger but I know, for example, I could easily have strangled her within 10 minutes of us meeting. I’d been at that conference in Bonn and bored senseless, I gave a presentation I could have done in my sleep to a group of after lunch delegates who actually were asleep for the most part, except for our girl at the back, who kept catching my eye. As my allotted twenty minutes ticked down like the slowest most turgid bomb charge in the world she sat at the back and opened her blouse button by button so that every time I looked up I saw slightly more of her exposed flesh; neck, collarbone, the curve of her small breast , the darker rippled flesh of her aureoles and finally the nipples, then she just sat there staring at me and I had to concentrate hard to not  inadvertently come out with one of those words whilst I went through my talk like an automaton.

I am generally a little over cautious about making certain my advances are wanted before approaching any woman, especially since that business with the student, but in fairness as invitations go that one was pretty explicitly delivered, so I knew when I saw her in the corridor afterwards that she didn’t want to ask me about the finer points of Drupal. Anyway she probably knew more than I ever would about it, she was the bee’s knees of the IT conference circuit just then and though I didn’t know it I was on the cusp of becoming one of its Bebo-like throwbacks. For example I still remember when the Palm Pilot was the hot tip and in fact I’d lost my company a pretty penny getting user’s handbooks commissioned when in fact it turned out that the army of users I’d confidently predicted never materialised and the devices became curiosities, languishing like my nieces’ old Pac-Man console, chucked in a box room somewhere gathering dust.

That day in the corridor I turned her way slightly, and made as if to keep walking and she caught my wrist in her hand. I swung back and allowed the others to pass us as they went like lemmings to a cliff towards the coffee area. Beasts with one mind conference delegates are- they get so used to being instructed on their every move that they develop a group mentality that leads them to the coffee area whenever they are in doubt about what comes next in the programme.  Our girl pulled me back into the lecture theatre though and in through the door of the projection room. Without really speaking to me she pressed me back against the wall and I was a passenger then doing whatever she wanted for a delicious out of control ten or so minutes. And can I tell you? I didn’t have to sit in public a riverside cafe with a lardy sausage sticking out my flies. No. All I had to do was not object.

After that I slept with her in seven different countries; it came to a point where I checked speaker’s panels in advance and then made the case to our department heads on why it was necessary for me to attend each one. The most exotic trip was to Vietnam where she turned up late and the only thing that was blown to anyone’s satisfaction was my department’s budget.  After her talk there she’d vanished, and I lost track of her and went stumbling through the weekend in a torment, an almost physical pain that hurt all the more because I knew it was ridiculous, a midlife mad swoop back to lust and youth. ‘I’m not for keeps, I’m not for keeps’ she’d breathed down at me as I lay on the bed that first night we’d shared a room back at the Madrid Expo.

In Vietnam I only finally caught up with her in the departure lounge of the airport as we waited to board the plane. I wanted to ask her, you know if we were finished, but I couldn’t and I knew no way to do it without flashing my utter desperation at her so instead I pulled her to me and wordlessly led her to the disabled bathrooms. Though this time I ignored the slight reluctance I felt from her, it seared through me and left me feeling winded so that in the quiet sterility of the cubicle all I could do was stand there and look at her. She seemed unnerved and I saw the decision land on her features before she bent to open my flies in a workmanlike fashion. I’d like to tell you I stopped her, that her lack of excitement showed me that she was only doing it to please me and that I was a bigger man than that. I didn’t though, and it hurt and soared as only desolated gratification can.

She left the cubicle and I sat on the toilet lid with my head on my hands until the flight was called. I sang a mantra to myself, a lament, the whole plane journey home; easy come easy go easy come easy go easy come easy go. It wasn’t easy though and honestly, immediately afterwards I let things slip. I don’t regret it now mind, it was a roundabout way to help me find my real purpose on this earth however hard you may find that to believe. And if I wouldn’t willingly live through that year again then so be it, it’s over and I’m here.

It was no surprise at all to me that when the cutbacks were announced that I was one of the first wave of people let go, I mean my department had been running over budget for three years and really after Vietnam I was just about going through the motions at work and at home. My wife stood by me pretty well, she was never really anything but consistent and in fact given that she was, no still is I suppose, one of the leading employment law specialists in our city the settlement I received was in the realm of a golden handshake. I have to confess that I do get the odd pang when I think of her hand on mine over an uneaten, overpriced celebratory dinner in Davitt’s directly after the meeting with the human resources department. She reassured me that I should look on it as a fresh start not an ending. Even if she was considerably less generous when we split up a few months later I felt it unfair to contest her and in any case knew it would be futile given her courtroom networks. I let her have the house and the car and even the savings accounts- to be honest I don’t need either of them anymore.

Now I spend most of my time travelling but this time it’s at my own expense. My golden handshake has dwindled quite a lot over the last year; it’s surprising how quickly money evaporates when you have to foot your own bills isn’t it?  I travel on the cheap now though and I don’t really worry about how I will cope when my money is finally gone. Honestly I am too busy to worry about it; our girl has become something of a celebrity ever since she predicted the whole handheld device trend.

I know what this looks like, what you are thinking but you are wrong, it’s not that, I’m no jealous ex- lover who just won’t give up. No, I struggled for a while with jealousy I won’t tell you I didn’t, but really, when you observe someone like our girl for long enough it begins to crystallise in one’s mind that the men, ‘the suits’ are interchangeable. She swaps one for the other without blinking and she does it with a commendable lack of trauma for all involved. You can be sure that I’m not the only one or one in twenty or even one in a hundred that she has sung that ecstatic refrain of ‘I’m not for keeps, I’m not for keeps' to. She has rules and it seems to me that she follows them.  If I’ve learned anything about human nature though, contrary to common belief it is men who can’t cope with casual sex, not women.

Well I suppose what I mean is that we can cope just fine so long as it’s us who are casual about it and us who get to explain to our accomplices how we don’t like being tied down. When the shoe is on the other foot though, let me tell you it could drive us to anything; murder, suicide, alcoholism anything and that’s for sure. That’s why I’m here in fact, during the break up and immediately after losing my job I became certain that our girl is going to get herself killed. I know men and I don’t mean it will be one of the bits of rough flesh she taunts out and about in the bars. It will in the typical cliché be one of the quiet ones. That’s why I am here, actually that’s why I’ve been everywhere in fact I have no plan now other than that I will watch for the danger and if it is humanly possible I will prevent it.

Here in Slovenia though I can afford to be a little relaxed, this is only her second time with this particular man so he's probably still swooning on the very thought and pulse of her- like I was, like they all were. I saw it start back in Berlin, in fact I was a little nauseated when I saw her pull this guy right in between the austere concrete slabs of the holocaust memorial and lie him down then and there. I lurked on Hannah Arendt Street until they emerged and debated whether I would have participated in that particular desecration.  I would have, but don’t judge me, any of us would.

I can hear the applause now from the conference room below and the late afternoon sun is starting to prick at my scalp where my hairline is. I consult my conference programme and debate whether or not I can afford to head across the plaza to my two star hotel and take a sleep. My girl is due to speak at five; it's the main lecture of the evening and in fact I can see the media already gathering below.  They are expecting an announcement and she won't disappoint them. She takes her work seriously our girl - I have to tell you that; she’s not the darling of this industry because of her blow jobs, not by a long shot. She always heads for her room an hour or two before speaking, to prepare and to freshen up; what was it they said? Know your prey?  Yes, I know her. I tell myself that I can count myself off duty when I see her cross the road to the convention centre hotel's marble front and so I make my way down in the dark elevator and clutch for my sunglasses as the glare of the sharp evening sun hits my eyes and I step onto the road yawning widely.

The news bulletin flashes onto the huge flat TV screens in the conference centre lobby surprisingly quickly after the crash. Most of the conference attendees ignore it watching instead the excitement of the press conference that's just cranking up in the reception area. A couple of the older delegates, the ones heading for the bar, look up and see the scroll rolling across the screen beneath the newsreader. They catch sight of the name of their conference; ‘Emerson Handheld World’ and like people everywhere always do as if compelled; they pause to see if they are going to appear on the telly. They just catch the end of the segment as a still of the conference centre is replaced by a live shot of an ambulance and traffic on the street at the edge of the plaza. The newsreader says; ‘according to the organisers the dead man was not a registered attendee at the conference’. The bulletin moved along quickly to a piece about Poland’s membership of NATO and the old-hand delegates headed on through the swinging glass doors to the bar.

End

I offer my thanks to Sarah Clancy for allowing me to publish this on The Reading Life.  I hope she becomes a frequent contributor to my blog.

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Sarah Clancy -A Q & A Session with the author of Thanks for Nothing, Hippie and Stacey and the Mechanical Bull

March 1 to March 31

Q and A Session with Sarah Clancy

author of

Stacey and the Mechanical Bull and 

Thanks for Nothing, Hippies

I first became familiar with the work of Sarah Clancey, Galway, through reading two of her short stories.  I have already published and posted on one of them, "Hold the Front Page" (the story is here) and I will post another very soon.  I am very proud to say these are her first published short stories, after three books of poetry.  

I thank Sarah Clancey for her very interesting answers to my questions.   Her answers contain lots of reading suggestions and she give us some very welcome additional insights into the workings of creative writing workshops in Galway.  Her insights are fascinating.  You should read her response when I asked her if you could do a remake of Roberto Bolano's satire of Latin American writers, Nazi Literature of the Amercas set in Galway, one of the truly great literary cities of the world.

You can purchase Sarah Clancey's books at the webpage of her publisher, Salmon Poetry, one of Ireland's premier publishers.

Author Data

Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her first book of poetry, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull, was published by Lapwing Press Belfast in December 2010 and a further selections of her work were published in 2011 & 2012 by Doire Press Galway. Her second collection of poetry 'Thanks for Nothing, Hippies' Salmon Poetry 2012 was launched at the Cuirt International Festival of literature last year and has been very well received   Her poems have been published in The Moth Magazine, The Stinging Fly,Revival Poetry Journal, The Stony Thursday Book, The Poetry Bus, Irish Left Review and have been translated and published in Mexico and Slovenia.  She was the runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Series 2010 and 2011, and was the winner of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam 2011.She was an invited guest at the 2011 Vilenica Festival of Literature in Slovenia and at the Cork Spring Poetry Festival and in Spring 2012 her poem “I Crept Out” received second prize in the Ballymaloe International Poetry Competition.

Question and Answer Session with Sarah Clancey

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?

Richard Ford, Al Kennedy, Eduardo Galeano, Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Gerard Donavan, E Annie Proulx, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Roborto Bolano, James Martyn Joyce, Kevin Barry, William Wall, Mary Costello, Bernard Mc Laverty, William Trevor,  Etc etc etc etc  Regarding the best ever, it would be impossible really not to begin with James Joyce for Dubliners, and I’d go from there in a roundabout way to Raymond Carver and Somerset Maugham or Borges. 

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.

'Hold the Front Page is actually set in Britain, though that may not be apparent, the press involved in the story are from there, though I agree the speaker’s tongue has been loosened by alcohol. An outsider should probably take Irish drinking for what it is. I think it says very straightforwardly that the consumption of alcohol is common and prevalent in Ireland. It is an activity that I am fond of myself on occasion. We can of course go and look to colonialism and the emasculation of our men for the cause, or to the weather, or to the fictitious melancholy Irish soul or to a multitude of other reasons that may all have something to them. In Ireland we famously have a ‘poor’ relationship with alcohol, albeit one that people cross continents to join us in,  and  in fact many of them return to where they are from and build replicas of Irish drinking venues all over the world. Certainly our drinking causes harm in many families, and in particular to many young people.  It is also a major factor in depression which is prevalent here and I don’t mean to dismiss the seriousness of that at all, however people do not drink to cause problems, nor in search of depression, they drink because they like it and because it is habit and for the most part, it is fun. 

Drinking in Ireland i.e the act of swallowing alcohol is the exact same as in many other countries and in particular in ex-pat communities of people who live abroad. However from my own experience of travelling, drinking as a pastime or night out abroad is far less enjoyable than the same enterprise is in Ireland. For example I think of New Zealand with its big screen sports-bars, of Australian bars with poker machines lit up in the corners and haunted by gamblers, of the US and its pitchers of flavourless beer, of men-filled double door saloons in Mexico, of sleazy concrete places in the dry state of Goa in India that one must enter through an apartment block, etc etc you get the picture and in some ways the fact that many bars here are hospitable, warm, reasonably clean and set up for conversation or music is probably a factor.  Note that I am old enough not to have to run the gamut of night clubs anymore and so the places I chose to frequent are maybe more cosy than those a younger age group inhabits.

3. Declan Kiberd has said the dominant theme of modern Irish literature is that of the weak or missing father? Do you think he is right and how does this, if it does, reveal itself in your work. I claimed in my post on your work that some of your stories are text book cases of this theme. Why do you think this came to play so strongly in your work?

I don’t think this is the case in the particular stories of mine that you have published though it may be true in others, in "Sausage" and "Hold the Front Page, I think you’ll find instead the absence of any mention of  the characters who are adults, having children at all. I like writing about ‘atomised people’ i.e those who have a particular perspective that their own life doesn’t challenge. As you will have noted both of the main characters in the stories you have are at the least a little eccentric and strong family ties tend to rein in or act as a weight on the behaviour of eccentrics. Also in a sideways answer to this question, I am not a great analyst or critic of my own work, where I get my pleasure and fulfilment in writing is in telling the story or in constructing the poem, in the language, rhythm imagination and feel of it rather than its sociological derivations. Declan Kiberd may well be totally correct in his theory, but for me I am choosing to write creatively as best I can rather than theoretically.  I also normally read that way, as a reader accepting and engaging with what the writer wrote without necessarily second guessing it.

4. when did you start writing?

 I am actually more of a reader than a writer but I would say that it’s nearly four years now since I applied myself to my own writing with any degree of seriousness or effort.

5. I enjoyed our conversation on Facebook about Roberto Bolano-as you

read his Nazi Literature in the Americans did your mind flash to a version of that set in Galway?

I love Bolano, I am kind of obsessed with him, but seeing as how I have spent time in both Mexico city and on the area of the Costa Brava in Spain that he writes about it is those places that the writing took me to. The chat if I remember was about the ‘Visceral Realists’ in The Savage Detectives, and those guys remind me of every single type of attempted organisation by humans in the world. 

7. Tell us a bit about your non-academic non literary work experience please

I have been working since I was about 14 or 15 and really there’s not time enough to tell you all of my work. I have a poem about it 

‘Hippy Get a Job’ you can read it here below however to the list in the poem you can now add, Youth-worker, Human Rights observer, Tour Guide in Ireland, Lecturer and work-shop Facilitator and a few other things as well.

http://poethead.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/hippy-get-a-job-by-sarah-clancy/ 

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

I am not sure we have? We have produced a lot of writers for sure but maybe not so very many ‘great’ ones.  I suspect though our love of writing comes from our love of talking; talking, storytelling and the telling of extraordinary lies.

10. (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."

No I don’t, I wish I did though.

11. 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?

Well I can only speak for myself in this really and I would say yes, the sense that I am from an old place and an enduring place is one that grounds me and also stops me from taking myself too seriously, i.e gives me a sense of my own transience.

12. The role model for the modern poet seems to be a writer who lives life at the edge. Going back to Bolano, he said in "Leave it all Again" (an essay founding a movement called infarealism) that poets should abandon the coffehouses and the universities and "take the part of sharpshooters, the lonesome cowboys..the spat upon supermarket shoppers in their massive individual collective disunctives-the cunning, the lonely, the unnoticed and dispised"- do you see this as good advise or does it lead to a confusion which suggests quality poetry can arise only from what would conventionally be called a disturbed psyche. I noticed Ezra pound is often mentioned by Galway poets. Does this push too much toward poetry as preformance art with the poet try to emulate the over the edge rock stars?

There are a lot of questions in that question. Do I see Bolano’s advice as good? I never believe anything he says; he’s a downright liar but liars are often the most truthful amongst us and I love them. For me poetry is a subversion, something expressed that you can’t or won’t or don’t know how to in a conventional sense. I am adventurous so I love the advice above but nope I don’t think it’s necessary to live an extreme and dangerous life to write good poetry but it might be necessary to be open to extreme and dangerous thoughts and ideas...I will think about that.  I have never met a writer who did not have a disturbed psyche, but then neither have I met a vet or a car park attendant or a parent etc etc etc who feels at ease ( to misquote Paul Simon)   

I don’t have any issue with ‘rock star’ poets though rock stars mightn’t like being emulated? J To my mind the joys of poetry and self expression should be encouraged rather than restricted, performance is not a secondary or lesser art form it is only a different one, but people, poets, critics, parents, lovers, anyone  should welcome it if it can help to bring people towards creative self-expression  and fulfilment. People often say that performance poets can get away with poor writing if they perform well and that might be true, but it offers us no counter argument for the acres of print pages of woeful verse that someone thought worth writing, worth publishing and reading; let everyone do what they want so long as it harms no one else, that's a decent motto for most things I think including poetry.

13. Do you feel Aosdana is the best use of the Irish government’s limited funds to promote the arts or do you think the money could be better spent in another way?

I don’t know really about Aosdana, I am too new to the game to be concerned with that, though there are also other funding opportunities bursaries and things for artists and writers, however this government has no funds other than the funds we give it in taxes or from our national resources, and I entirely object to their use of billions of this money and future such money to bail out our defunct banking system. When a government pays financial speculators in preference to special needs assistants we have far more pressing concerns than what it does with the few quid for Aosdana.

14. 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?  

That depends on what a contemporary Irish novel is; Is it John Banville’s The Sea? If so no. Is it Colm Tobin’s Brooklyn? If so no. Is it Colm Mc Cann in Let the Great World Spin? If so no. Is it Keith Ridgeway’s British policemen in Hawthorn and Child? Again if so; no.

I would need you to give me a few names of contemporary novels that do contain such characters to see if he is still alive and well...

15. William Butler Yeats said in "The Literary Movement"-- "“The popular poetry of England celebrates her victories, but the popular poetry of Ireland remembers only defeats and defeated persons”. I see a similarity of this to the heroes of the Philippines. American heroes were all victors, they won wars and achieved independence. The national heroes of the Philippines were almost all ultimately failures, most executed by the Spanish or American rulers. How do you think the fact Yeats is alluding too, assuming you agree, has shaped Irish literature:

Hmm, the contemporary poetry in Ireland is about anything and everything now, and rightly, it is also starting to include more and more work by first generation immigrants which is helping to blow some more of the cobwebs from it.  I think many very traditional concepts have shaped or contributed to Irish literature; landscape, spirituality, death, religion, love, nationalism, fascism, the sea, censorship, migration, poverty, wealth, violence, war, oppression, music, wildlife,  jealousy, pettiness, beauty, philosophising, endless lists of influence exist depending on where you begin. If you begin with legends and folklore you will find plenty of hubris and rabble rousing, and valedictory tales, if you move to things like Merriman’s The Midnight court, you’ll find an epic celebration of bawdiness, merrymaking and the battles between the sexes albeit all taking place against the back drop of some imagined bleak future for Ireland. To my mind and I am not an expert at all I would say you could find work that supports or contradicts Yeats’ theory in equal measure.  Also I think in some ways perhaps a poet is not needed as much for victory speeches, but they may indeed find a role in seeing what is not seen and reporting or noting uncommon suffering.

16. Tell us a bit please about your academic background please

I finished school originally at around 16 and began working immediately with horses, training and buying and selling them, I did go to an Agricultural College place for a while and got some horse riding instructor qualifications and then I worked first with horses, then in industry, and then in various other things and other countries including in a travelling cinema for a number of years. In my 30s then I began to re-enter the world of education and studied firstly Community Development, then Human Rights Law and eventually did a Master’s in Public Advocacy and Activism

17. 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? 

 I think people have a role to play in contemporary Ireland, and poets are not excused from this. In some senses our abdication from the responsibility of being ever vigilant over the state and our ‘representatives’ has been a factor in allowing our economy deteriorate until the people who live in this country lack the basics needed for a fulfilling life, this does not excuse those who made and are making corrupt and flawed decisions, we know the culprits and unfortunately are still allowing them to make important and long lasting decisions. That said I think creativity is often better when it’s directed towards whatever moves and inspires it and so the difference between the work and the person is probably the issue here, not whether the writing itself needs to be ‘political’ in topic.

  

18. "To creative artists may have fallen the task of explaining what no historian has fully illuminated – the reason why the English came to regard the Irish as inferior and barbarous, on the one hand, and, on the other, poetic and magical."-is this right? Kiberd, Declan ). Inventing Ireland (p. 646).

I don’t really know what ‘the English’ think of us or who in fact the English are, are they West Indians in London? Manchester Irish?  In some ways that statement seems to me to be some form of an excuse or a diminution of the greed and adventurism of expansionist colonialism; any individual or institution who wishes to inflict harm on another usually somehow de-humanises that person for themselves through conditions, labels and categories. This has been true for slavery, for the holocaust, in Rwanda where those to be slaughtered were called cockroaches, it’s still true in the new empire’s weasel words like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘nation building. ‘ ‘Barbarous, Magical’ etc all seem designed to highlight difference and so be a means of providing the excuse needed for people to be treated as non-people. My writing is not for that purpose, but in the unlikely event that someone finds a way to use it to tell empire to cop the hell on that’s fine with me.

19. 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.

I think they should have whatever they want. I have an issue with the word ‘Granted’ in that question, I mean who grants who what is the whole issue in a nutshell. But seriously I think, if the spokespeople for the various Traveller communities in Ireland have identified that achieving recognition for their status as an ethnic minority would help them to access the rights and resources they need to combat generations of stigma then of course they should organise to get that or any other thing they identify as necessary .  I have often had my own reservations about this, as I don’t like this state to legislate for ‘difference’ but rather for inclusion but really it’s not up to me, respecting other people’s dignity involves not thinking that I know better than they do, particularly about issues they are the ones dealing with. In the words of the Zapatista movement in Mexico, I would like a world where many worlds fit.

21. Death, natural and otherwise is a central factor in your stories and it seems to me to play a bigger factor in the Irish short story than other cultures-can you talk about this a bit please?

I think death often isn’t death in my stories, it’s a way of examining the futility of a lot of the trivia that torments us and makes up the fabric of our lives. In the poems it’s a little different, it’s both representative of violence in general and specific about people I know who risked or lived and then lost their lives.

22. I have posted on a number of books published by Doire Press and Salmon-what do you find most gratifying in dealing with them and what, if any elements of frustration did you experience?

I also published a book with Lapwing in Belfast. Each experience was different but all of those publishers are similar in one way and that is that they have a genuine interest in promotion of poetry and the imagination and the bravery to publish what is not exactly a bestselling genre in tough economic times, and though I and probably they, had plenty vague disagreements or panics about what I was publishing I count myself privileged to have had such opportunities- I am still at the stage where I am grateful and excited that my work gets published at all! The publications with Doire Press came about because I was runner up in a competition that they run twice, so it’s not that I have been swapping publishers or anything.  Jessie Lendennie from Salmon Poetry, who I am now with had already agreed to publish my collection Hippies, when the Doire press publication came about.

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

I’ve lived in loads of countries for various periods of time, I love everywhere and would and will go to as many different places as possible/

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

Oh too many ideas. I am not too fussed about rich, more about what I might experience and understand by it. I would go to the Paris Commune and see what the crack was there ;-)

25. I know you have attended creative writing work shops in Galway-please tell those of us who have never had or never will be able to have this experience a bit about what the best things about them are? If you gave a workshop what would be your biggest goal, besides any economic considerations.

I facilitate loads of different types of workshops – not literary now, but for other issues and I would say my considerations would be the same; to create the atmosphere and conditions whereby people could learn themselves.  I attended the Galway Arts Centre Workshops in Galway; these are facilitated by Galway poet Kevin Higgins who has been a great source of encouragement, enthusiasm and help since the very first day I brought a poem there. How they work is everyone brings something they are working on and each participant that has a suggestion for an improvement on a poem someone else has written puts it forward for discussion, sometimes others will disagree and sometimes the writer of the piece will prefer their own version but usually the poem will have had a few rough edges knocked off and had its first public airing by the end of the session.  That is what happens in the workshop as in the technique or method used, however what really happens is a group of people reinforce the validity of creative self expression for each other, they provide encouragement, comradeship and also in exposing their raw or rough poems they take risks with each other that are not a part of normal casual relationships and as a result a whole network of supportive people is created, who with very few exceptions are all delighted when one of our/their number achieves something or even just writes a really good poem. I couldn’t recommend the workshop process more. I don’t go at the moment and that is the same with many others they flit in and out depending on what else they have going on and on where they are with their work.

26. Flash Fiction-how driven is the popularity of this form by social media like Twitter and its word limits? Do you see twitter as somehow leading to playwrights keeping conversations shorter than in years past?

I don’t know really, Somerset Maugham, Kafka, and William Boroughs all wrote very short fictional pieces with not a twitter in sight. I tend to be a bit long winded rather than a writer of flash fiction. I like short pieces of unconnected fiction – this differs from Flash fiction I think in that it’s not confined by the rules of having to have had a plot and activity happen. I suppose they are snippets. I have been writing a lot of these recently and find them addictive like something overheard that you have no context, beginning or end to.  

27. How important in shaping the literature of Ireland is its proximity to the sea?

I’d say it’s important that we are an island. A lot of good work though comes from the midlands and north midlands – think Pat Kavanagh, John Mc Gahren, Marina Carr etc etc so maybe less than we might think. Us poets are always on about the sea but you know that’s kind of an obligation...

28. Irish writers work in the shadows of the great giants of world literature, how do you think this impacts the neophyte writer?

I would say a mixture of permission and intimidation, the literary legends give us permission to be writers, and they also intimidate us out of thinking we’ll ever be any good. This though, I would say is not only true in Ireland. If I was a Chilean it might be Neruda or Nicanor Parra I was busy feeling inferior to

29. Quick Pick Questions

a. Whitman or Yeats - Whitman

b. dogs or cats- Dogs

c. best city to inspire a writer-London or Dublin - Neither

d. favorite meal to eat out-breakfast, lunch or dinner? Oh Breakfast with good coffee

e. RTE or BBC , Neither? I don’t have access to BBC unless I’m in a hotel or something. I quite like Al Jazeera.

30. Loaded question coming from me-through out the world there are fewer outlets for book reviews as Sunday Supplements to Newspaper close down and the print world loses to the internet. Professional book reviewers and academic often say that book bloggers are a negative force in that they can post what ever they want with no check on them and in most cases they provide no sense of their own credentials and background and feel no need to prove at all they are right. Of course book bloggers such as myself say they are just concerned in that book bloggers will do for free, and often better because they have a real passion for something, than paid reviewers do and they just chalk it up to fear of losing their jobs. How do you see the book blog as a vehicle for promoting literature versus professional critics?  

I think the more different sources and formats for discussion of books the better and I admire what you have been doing as I do several other blogs like the Poethead one I linked above.

30. OK let us close out on this note-what is your reaction these lines from Michael O'Loughlin, a famous Irish poet? 

I was born to the stink of whiskey and failure

And the scattered corpse of the real.

This is my childhood and country:

The cynical knowing smile

Plastered onto ignorance

Ideals untarnished and deadly

Because never translated to action

And everywhere

The sick glorification of failure.

Our white marble statues were draped in purple

The bars of the prison were born in our eyes

And if reality ever existed

It was a rotten tooth

That couldn't be removed.

I love Michael, and his partner Judith who is a great poet too. I think there is a danger in allowing any poem to be taken as a definitive statement of how a poet feels about something for all time.  When I write it is a feeling at particular time, in a particular place(s) or about a particular thing and may have changed in an instant. The poem then records how I felt at that time. So in response to Michael's lines below, they certainly resonate and ring true for how I have felt about this country at times but not always and I wouldn’t like to second guess him but he might not feel like that everyday ?. 

End of Q and A

I offer again my great thanks for Sarah Clancey for taking the time to answer my questions.

Dave Lordan has a very interesting interview with her in The Irish Left Review.  

I will shortly publish another of her short stories so look for that soon.