August 25, 2013
Drugs radio haze
Yesterday I drove to the US, when I sat into the car that morning the radio had an interview with a film maker who sounded like a politician (he kept repeating himself in stout declarations that did not go any place) but had made a film on Oxycontin addiction in a West Virginia town called Oceana. The film has the word Oceana in the title, perhaps it’s OxyOceana.
On the way back later that evening As it happens featured a Washington Post Journalist (or was it Wall Street Journal?) phoning in from Malaysia to talk about the epidemic of crystal meth in North Korea. That story was quite perplexing since as the interviewer pointed out North Korea is a country associated (or we associate) with deep poverty and famine. Crystal meth apparently suppresses appetite and he explained the North of North Korea has a bit of money because of the black market dealings.
In between the two stories on every single newscast was the story of Justin Trudeau taking a puff of a joint and Stephen Harper needing to take one and blaming his asthma for not being able to rather than his monumental uptight personality. Also, if he was really asthmatic he’d be doing a great deal more to curb pollution. It began to be quite ridiculous listening to this non-news-story on every hourly newscast with it bracketed by these much more compelling actual news stories. The thematic consistency began to feel slightly ridiculous. There was something Ned the Donkey about both Trudeau and Harper.
At one point just before the border I looked left and noticed a terrific haze on the mountains or whatever precisely was to the left since it was very hazy. In front of the haze were green houses and poly tunnels. A less than pleasant but necessary farming stink provided the aroma to accompany the haze. (forest fire? pollution? low cloud? I have no explanation for it).
August 25, 2013
RTE Arena radio interview
Here’s a link to the interview I did with RTE Radio One’s excellent art show Arena, if you scroll down you can find my bit. It was a live interview which is always anxiety inducing and exhilarating.
Thanks to Sean Rocks and the gang at Arena for having me on. I had a fun time indeed. Also there are some film reviews on that program if I remember correctly.
August 19, 2013
Flight read
I’ve been reading No Place To Call Home: Inside The Real Lives Of Gypsies and Travellers by Katharine Quarmby and today a documentary recording the eviction from Dale Farm crossed my Twitter timeline. I recommend a read and a watch. The documentary can be viewed here
Next up is NHS SOS: How the NHS was betrayed – and how we can save it which comes with a foreword by Ken Loach. I met a Polish taxi-driver working in London who told me his tale of having his life saved on the NHS. He collapsed, woke up in a hospital to learn he had a brain tumour. He expressed strong support for the NHS and appreciation for the treatment and care he received.
August 19, 2013
Metro-Herald Review
I was delighted to learn of this review (click multiple times on image & it will be readable) for Malarky from a bookseller at Hodges Figgis (sp?) book shop on Dame Street. The reviewer it turns out hails originally from Longford (and thus would be reliable on the turn of phrase and made no objection to the humour.). He interviewed me after the review and I appreciated his lively questions, exchange and insights on the book. It especially meant a great deal when he said of Himself in Malarky “I know that man”. Another reader who lives now in Vancouver but hails from rural Ireland, Co Cork I think it was said the same of Himself. This review was the loveliest surprise I can’t tell you. I particularly loved that it would be in the hands of people en route to work or going about their day. I have great faith in readers and the idea Our Woman might meet a few on the bus was uplifting. Thank you to the book seller who told me of this and to Daragh Reddin for his enthusiasm.
August 19, 2013
Debut-Litzer Fiction prize nomination for Malarky
I had a lovely surprise on landing at YVR to learn Malarky has been nominated for the Debut-Litzer Fiction Prize along with two very interesting sounding short story collections: Garbage Night at the Opera by Valerie Fioravanti and Favorite Monster
by Sharma Shields. A shortlist of three women writers. Yippee!
I am not entirely sure what the Debut-Litzer Prize is (a play on Pulitzer) but I am never fluent in book prizes. I am fluent in weather speculation and inadvertent ways to kill my dill plant.
I understand it’s given out by a wonderful sounding arts organization in Portland and Brooklyn called Late Night Library. We salute anything with the word library in the title and is awarded to “talented writers early in their careers”. Late Night Library also organize multi-genre events, reading series and most importantly have a national campaign to support independent bookstores and publishers. (sound the trumpets! + again!)
Thank you Late Night Library for this lovely surprise of a nomination and your splendid work to support bookstores and publishers and writers. Congratulations to all the writers nominated in the different categories.
August 18, 2013
Irish Times article: Book Prizes are a fishy business
Here’s a short piece I wrote for Saturday’s Irish Times on the matter of trying to stuff my dinner under a chair at the First Novel Prize event at the Four Seasons in TO.
August 18, 2013
Irish Times Malarky review
Firstly, thank you to the Irish Times for reviewing Malarky. Secondly, thank you to the Irish Times for handing it to the mighty Éilís Ní Dhuibhne for review. Thirdly, thank you to Éilís for her labour on such a thoughtful, warm, hopeful review. I’ve long admired Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s work and would encourage all readers to engage with her body of short stories, novels, non-fiction and Irish language works. Her contribution to Irish literature is an important one.
Here’s the last paragraph of the review (click to read): “..Anakana Schofield is in the ranks of the best. She weaves her words well and demonstrates many of the gifts that the novelist has to own. This novel is deeper and more thoughtful than it seems. Clever, witty, imaginative and intriguing, Malarky is a stunning debut from an exceptionally good writer.”
I’ll add my comments on some of the points raised forthwith, especially that of place.
From the review..
“The elimination of physical setting is a feature of much of this voice-based writing: characters interact in places that could be almost anywhere, were it not for the funny way they talk. They operate on an empty stage, without the sky or the fields, or any of that rich backdrop so intrinsic to the texture of 20th-century Irish novels.”
I think new forms and prodding form are essential and we need to move away from the over-dependence on place and poesy on trees, landscape and what have you with which Irish fiction is sometimes lazily besotted. Rather than a rich texture or backdrop I find it increasingly limits what the novel can become because it’s sowed or pre-soaked instead with what we expect it or already know it to be. It can give rise to a stifling linear that I find at odds with the lives that intrigue me and it does nothing to speak to memory, which is rarely chronological. I have found in my readings of some of this work latterly that I hear notes or tone I’ve heard too often and I like to hear unexpected notes. I, personally, am more interested in the depiction of place through the sounds or behaviours of people in them and/or imaginings therein. I’d cite DM Fraser in this regard. His influence or his tipping me towards this. Fiction is a space for language, form and imagination and to some extent Irish fiction remains a little over fixated on authenticity and some kind of ache for its own social anthropology. Beckett, however, dispensed with such 80 years ago. (I am surprisingly and ashamedly poorly read on him, but have ingested enough to see this)
Curiously I am a complete contradiction in terms of my interest in the local of where I now live Vancouver. (I have lived in Ireland and had a relationship to/with Mayo since I was born) Thus we could probably throw both schools of thought into the blender and mix. I am fascinated by the psycho geography of place and read endlessly the likes of Ian Sinclair. I have old books here like the Diary of a London Explorer and clearly my interest in Vancouver labour history is steeped in place. But all of this interest tends to occupy a non-fiction space. If anything I’d want to subvert this in fiction. You only have your own instinct as a writer, you must follow that instinct and see where it takes you and which excavations it insists upon.
However, in regard to fiction and the novel I recall the writer Jenny Diski saying something along the lines of why would you expect to believe what you read in fiction? (This is not a precise quote, I must source precisely what she wrote) and I would add to it that fiction is a place or the place where we make stuff up. We should expect that invention to extend to language and form. For some reason I often felt compelled to create buildings in Malarky because as I discussed on the Urban Underbelly panel at Indian Summer Festival I was more curious about Our Woman’s emotional underbelly, her emotional relationship with the city when she visits it and how she nearly confides in certain physical buildings. (shops, art installations, bus stops etc). I also like remix as an approach. It’s a nod to the fact as readers we are occupying virtual spaces collectively, we are moving through reviewed space every day of the week. (But that’s a whole ‘nother strand worthy of a long form essay). This brings me back to the point of dispensing with place .. I would contend that as a writer I am more curious about fluid interpretations of place rather than predictable denotations that demonstrate a Jimi Hendrix ability with description and also that, the different social classes inhabit place differently and that fictional depictions to date often pay no regard to this and pander to novelistic expectations set down by whom? The predominant social class who have written fiction! Hence it’s more vital to create cartography around where this woman was consumed emotionally (kitchen table, Penneys, Farmer’s Co-op, bus) than where she was physically anchored on any map. Not least because the pov in the novel is utterly 360 degrees hers. She doesn’t sit about contemplating which parish she lives in and how it might physically present itself to her each day. She lives in that parish. She goes about her working day. She contemplates instead, for example, the woman who might be staring at her in the shop when she’s breaking down, interpreting the action of her husband’s fingers on the jars and bottles on her table. From those motions/responses she detects the indicators of her life.
OK I seemed to have added my point on place, despite insisting it would be made forthwith. I also seem to have ventured into multiple departures within it. As it says somewhere in Malarky, I can feel fingertips separating out my brain and must take my jet- lagged mental string of sausages out to fresh air and the pavement.
August 12, 2013
Thunder clatter
There are vital things to tell you about Malarky reviews and what have you, but much more vitally at this late weathering hour I heard two reports today from Vancouver that I had missed a clap of thunder.
I consider it class that both parties who let me know were aware that I was not bearing witness to it and bore witness in my absence. In another coincidence both their names begin with the letter J.
At the time I was missing the clap of West coast YVR thunder, I was in the West here and amid the patchy Mayo weather perks. The breeze and those 5 raindrops on my reading glasses which I forgot to remove when I went for a short run. See how the weather provides. Three drops and I realized I still have my reading glasses on.
We worked in the bog on Saturday and there was a bit of patchy drizzle, but mostly a lifting wind gave towards the end of the day. Your hair is always blown forwards. Always lovely to be out there amidst the sods and reckles.
August 8, 2013
RTE Radio 1: Arena
The Mail on Sunday selected Malarky as their Novel of The Week and published a great review of the book, which I shall add to the reviews section of the website.
Today I visited an old favourite bookshop of mine, an independent bookshop Dubray Books on Grafton Street — they had a stack of Malarky by the till and were lovely warm people. Thanks for your warmth.
Thursday evening I will be on RTE Radio 1 Arena show live at 7pm talking about Malarky with Sean Rocks.
Thank you so much to Arena and RTE Radio for having me on.
Today I did an interview with Hot Press magazine. Hot Press is a leading music and arts paper in Ireland, which I read for years and years when I lived in Dublin. I was very fortunate to be interviewed by Anne Sexton today. Anne writes a sex column in Hot Press and she writes about books.
More to come!
*
I’m in London next Weds & Thursday doing publicity, if anyone else wishes to interview me or chat about vacuum cleaners or weather calamities in the national press. (Hello BBC Radio 4)
August 5, 2013
Welcome Irish & British readers
A big hearty welcome to British and Irish readers. I am delighted Malarky is now published in the UK and Ireland. (and Aus, NZ, S Africa, India & all commonwealth countries). I very much hope you find my novel engaging and thank you most sincerely for reading it.
There was a lovely review in Saturday’s Irish Independent and a nice shout out from Colum McCann in today’s Sunday Independent, Colum chose Malarky as one of his summer recommendations. Thank you to Colum, a writer I have long admired and respected.
This week I am in Dublin doing interviews about Malarky. I’ll be on TV3 The Morning Show on Wednesday. I am enjoying being home. The big story is my sister’s greyhound Sally. I send special love out to greyhound owners, rescue services, since this dog is exceptional. Affectionate and both snoozy and sweet. (Not quite what I envisaged from a greyhound). Today we walked along the canal with her. I am not so much of a dog person, but Sally has converted me to these wonderful creatures. I may have to revise my ambition to be reincarnated as a penguin.
There was patchy drizzle this morning in Dublin, which by night gave way to a stronger downpour. Gardens are looking terrific from the recent hot spell. And it’s good to have access to Cadbury’s Turkish Delight and more importantly lively exchange and great friends.
Next week I will be in London talking to the media about Malarky. If you wish to interview me please do contact either me (mrsokana@gmail.com) or my publicist Henry Jeffreys at Oneworld in London. Or Cormac Kinsella my publicist in Dublin.
More weather reports to follow.
Best to all for now, AK.