 Welcome back to our second session of the first day of the Irish Writers' Weekend. London. My name is John Fawr, so I am lucky enough to run the events programme at the British Library. A few months ago, as we thought, it's time to time we got to know our friends in Ireland that bit better. We had the idea, let's create an Irish Writers' Weekend. And we're absolutely thrilled that we're finally at this moment in time. We're having a wonderful collaboration with the Coarch International Festival of Literature in Galway. So thank you to their amazing team, Manuela Ashlyn and former director, Sasha, for all the amazing ideas, contacts, collaborations that has been such a joy as we put this event together. I also want to thank Culture Ireland for their generous support, the Embassy of Ireland in London and our wonderful hotel partners, The Doyle Collection. So the next session I'm particularly excited about is at the Art of the Essay, and one of our speakers, Sinead Gleeson, said that one of the new session about the essay is an amazing art form that's really flourishing at the moment. And once we started identifying potential writers, there was absolutely no shortage, so I'm very excited about this one. I'm now going to introduce you to the stage, our panel with them will be chair Brian Dillon, who is Professor Creative Writing at Queen Mary's University of London. His most recent books include a supposed sentence, essayism, obviously an expert on the essay, and The Great Explosion, and has a new book coming out in February called Affinities, so do look out for that. So please welcome our panel. I don't know where anyone sits. Good afternoon, and thank you, John, for that introduction. No, I can't. There we are to do that. So I can see you all slightly better. Thanks so much, John, for the introduction. Thank you all for being here, and also welcome to those people who are joining us online. We're going to speak, we're going to have a few readings, and then a chat between the five of us, and then we'll hand things over to you for the last 15 or maybe even 20 minutes or so. And please be aware. I will remind you of this before we leave the room at the end. Book signing will be happening over in the main library building straight after this event, just as after everything else that's happening this weekend. So we're here to talk, as John says, about the essay. I've got very used, and I'm sure that other people have, to having conversations in which we talk about a certain kind of renaissance, rediscovery, sudden excitement about the essay in Ireland. Maybe this is true, and maybe this is one of the things that we'll come to in due course. Maybe we want to think that the essay has always been with us, and we might go back through a lineage going back to Edmund Burke, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Bowen, Maeve Brennan. We might want to think about the kind of literary ecosystem that makes essays possible in Ireland and among Irish writers worldwide at the moment, including publications like The Dublin Review, Gorse, Banshee, Winter Papers, Tolka, and many others. We're talking about this form, the essay in a context where it is true that there has been, if not a resurgence, a certain kind of visibility of Irish non-fiction writers, and some of the people who are not here on stage today might include writers like Emma Dabiri, Mark O'Connell, Carl Whitney, Megan Nolan, Rob Doyle, Claire Louise Bennett. In other words, including writers of fiction, writers in other forms for whom the essay is one of the things that they do. That's true of everybody on stage today, but I think we have a group of people here that are really well placed to think hard and to give you some insight into their practice of the essay as a form. So I'm going to introduce people more or less as they go, as they read from their work. I think we've kind of agreed to read for less than five minutes, so it's sort of three to five minutes. I've sprung this on people at the last minute, so we've hastily cobbled together copies of people's books. I'm amazed that anybody turns up to a festival, not carrying a well-thumbed copy of their own book that they want to read from and harangue about at length. I think we're going to begin, Patrick, with you. So Patrick is an essayist, obviously, but also a short story writer, a journalist, most prominently for the Irish Times, where he's a feature writer and columnist. His essays have appeared in the Dublin Review. You will find that the Dublin Review will get name-checked many times in the next 55 minutes or so, and I hope that everybody will rush out and by show your work, recent anthology, from the pages of the Dublin Review. And Patrick's first essay collection is Okay, Let's Do Your Stupid Idea, which was published two years ago. Patrick. So all you need to know about this essay, or a particularly ridiculous extract, although there are serious things in here as well, is that the essay starts, or this extract starts with me, in a plane about to jump out and do a parachute jump with a bunch of people who've just trained how to do a parachute jump. Let me tell you how to jump from a small plane. First, you reach out of the plane above the tremendous void of air that falls for thousands of feet beneath you, and you grab with your right hand the beam that runs diagonally to the base of the plane to the wing. When you step on the step below the door, your right hand is still grasping the beam and grab another bit of the beam with your other hand. Then, despite millions of years of evolution during which we did not grow wings, you step off the aforementioned step and hang by the arms from the beam, your legs flapping in the air very, very high above your mortal enemy, the ground. Then Steve, Steve is the instructor, counts to three, and if your car is another guy who was in the plane, you do not let go and you continue to hang there with a panicked expression on your face. Let go, said Steve. I've changed my mind. He didn't do that because he'd have fallen. I've changed my mind, says Carl. No, that's wrong. I'm getting the tone wrong. Let me try again. It was more like, I've changed my mind, screamed Carl screamingly from his screaming face. You can't change your mind, said Steve. I want to go back in, screamed Carl, hanging from the wing of a plane 5,000 feet above the ground. I can't let you back in, said Steve. It's too dangerous. Ah! said Carl. Sorry, Carl, I can't let you back in, said Steve firmly, as though talking to a toddler. A toddler who was forcing to jump from a plane. Ah! said Carl. Here's something important I learned from my time with Carl. There is only so much time you can spend hanging for dear life to the wing of a plane before you lose strength and have to let go. In Carl's case, it was around two minutes. Then he lost his grip and plunged to what to him must have seemed like imminent death, but was really just a sensation of imminent death that humans flirted with because we have no natural predators and have evolved into something ridiculous. So. Thanks so much, Patrick. Sinead, would you be happy to go next? Sinead's going to read from her essay collection Constellations, published in 2019, which won the Nonfiction Award at the Irish Book Awards. Sinead writes essays for publications like Granta, Gorse, Winter Papers, and many others, and has edited three, I think, at the last count, short story collections, including The Art of the Glimpse and The Long Gaze Back. And her most recent book edited with Kim Gordon is This Woman's Work Essays on Music. But are you going to read from Constellations? I am. And because we're in London, and I think coming up to Christmas makes me think of people who aren't here anymore. In 1992, I spent a summer living in London because I thought I couldn't wait to get out of Dublin. And the same year, my grandmother also died and I write about her in the book. And I guess maybe being here is making me think about herself. I decided to read a little bit of the haunted, haunting women. I see women coming over the hills, walking down into the towns and cities, pulling coats at missing buttons tighter, balancing babies on worn hips, saving pennies and counting cents, not shaking off the boss's hand when it lingers too long, the multiple jobs or work turned down, rounding the corner with a buggy only to find a flight of steps, criss-crossing the supermarket aisles with stop, stop, stop, asking me wiping noses and undrunk cold cups of tea, pristine kitchens, lives without a minute to spare, fury simmering in their heads. I see one woman in particular, all the moments of her life piled up like bones, the countless actions, the days of her youth, she recounts to us a drip feed of her past, and in the midst of all those addresses and moods and cigarettes, all those sighs and each way horse bets, she's embodied by two things, weeds and ghosts. It was spring and in the back garden my grandmother pulled up dandelions from the lawn. There were never any flowers in this garden, saved for this unwelcome yellow. Tearing up roots, pulling, pissed the beds from the soil. My grandfather records that she walked back into the house leaving the sunshine over the coal shed and just collapsed. They'd shared a bed for 50 years and he knew her breathing, each rise and fall of it, but he never heard her breathe like this and not her pneumatic snore. My mother arrived and her brain flooded with panic dialed 888 over and over, wondering why she couldn't get through at the hospital a doctor declared it a catastrophic heart attack. That morning, she'd smoked half a cigarette, extinguishing it with her bare fingers for later. As the paramedics worked on her, the upright blackened butt looked down from the mantelpiece. She always told ghost stories, not the ones about spooks and banshees or bogeymen who'd get you in the dark, the ghosts she knew. You should be more afraid of the living than the dead, she said, in any situation, whether it called for supernatural advice or not. I knew she meant her father, but she took her time telling us a story. My mother still tells it and my aunts do too. Thanks very much, Sinead. Next up is Emily Pine. Emily is a professor of modern drama at University College Dublin. Her essay collection Notes to Self was published in 2018, won the Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards on the Butler Literary Award. Her first novel, Roof and Pen, was published earlier this year. Emily. Thank you. I'm poised between reading two different pieces. It's really hard, isn't it? One of the features of the essay is that they're varied. I was going to read an intense piece about my dad being in a hospital bed, and I spoke to him this morning and he said, will I ever get out of that hospital bed, Emily? So I think I'm going to read a slightly more light-hearted piece, because it's a Saturday. OK. Growing up, I had no bicycle. Coincidentally, I had no friends either. And just as I pretended I was fine hanging out by myself, I pretended I didn't care that I couldn't ride a bike. Then I got too old to start learning. Too big for the baby bikes, and so that was it. I didn't learn. While other kids used their bikes to go out into the world, I stayed home reading. If I had to go somewhere I walked, and I told anyone who would listen that I didn't mind because I loved walking. I convinced even myself. Then, in my 30s, when I moved by myself to another country, I thought I might revisit the whole bike thing. After all, if I failed while abroad, it wouldn't matter because no one would know. So I went to the local cycle shop and in a tiny voice asked if I could rent an adult bicycle with stabilisers. As soon as I said it, I wondered if such a thing even existed. But the bearded man behind the counter just nodded and asked me if I wanted to sign up for their adult learners course starting the following month. I blinked. I found it hard to imagine that there were any other adults who did not know how to ride a bicycle, let alone enough to run a course. Even so, I didn't want to wait. I asked again about renting a learner bike, but the guy shook his head at stabilisers. Then he offered to give me one with the pedals taken off. I said I thought bicycles needed pedals to work. You learned to balance first, he said, then graduated pedaling. So I took the pedal this bike he gave me, found an empty car park with a slope and started pushing myself along. First taking one foot off the ground, then scarily both. I did that for the whole morning going round and around the car park. Once I got good at cycling, I started to think about going round the car park. Once I got good at that, I pushed the bike a bit further up the slope. I turned and then I halted hands on the brakes, feet welded to the ground. It looked less like a slope now, more like quite a steep hill. Maybe I'd done enough for one day. Maybe I didn't really need to learn at all. But I knew the real failure would be to not even try. So I let go and I glided for the first time ever. I glided and I felt the air whoosh past me and the ground move under me. At the bottom of the hill I skidded to a halt, terror giving way to amazement, amazement to pride. Then I pushed the bike back up to the top and let go again. All I did for the next two days was push myself and that bike to the top of the same small hill, letting go over and over. I was happy. I taught myself to ride a bike. I practically taught myself to fly. I recall that feeling of gliding and flying and whooshing all the time and I wonder what was I so frightened of and then I think why can't I just do that? Let go more often. Thanks so much, Emily and Jessica's going to go next. Jessica Trainor is a poet, essayist, librettist, author of poetry collections, Liffy Swim, The Quick and most recently, Pitt Lullabies. She has an essay in the current Dublin Review, is that right? Winter Papers. Where's Reset? That was the Dublin Review, yes. She's going to read from a recent essay in Tolka. Thank you. I'm going to read a little extract from this essay which is called Arcana which is about my fascination with and slight scepticism around things like the tarot and small town psychics. The Hermit. One day when I'm in my second year of college, my mum calls me. I'm sitting in my boyfriend's flat reading as I lay dying while he smokes spliff after spliff and plays Grand Theft Auto Vice City. We're going to see a psychic she tells me, are we? Yes, he's in Mullingar. I've booked us in tomorrow afternoon. We drive to Mullingar. I'm feeling a bit resentful and impatient with the whole trip but any small distraction from my vast unhappiness is welcome. We park the car and make our way to a dingy pub in the town centre. It's early and there's no one there. Not even the owl lads you might expect to see propping up the bar. We sit down and finally a barman arrives. He seems much less surprised to see us than we are to be there. He makes us some tea in tiny chrome pots which leak most of their contents on the sticky tables when poured. He tells us the psychic is on the way or rather he says, oh Billy, yeah, he'll be running a bit late with the car and hang tight. After a while we get the nod. I go first. I sit at the table in a back room and a slight man in early middle age comes in. He wears mud-stained work trousers and a fleece. He's slightly stooped. How are you? He says, taking a pack of cards out of his pocket. I watch him shuffle them. They're yellowed playing cards, not a tarot deck, and he worries and flips them with great speed. He stops and looks at me sharply for a second then back to the activity of flipping the cards. His movement is like that of a card-sharp constant dizzying as if trying to draw the eye away from some sleight of hand. But he talks all the while responding ostensibly to the things he is seeing in the cards. He doesn't tell me my future much. He tells me everything I know about myself and it is quite remarkable. He tells me I am burning the candle at both ends. He tells me I am with the wrong person. He tells me I am stuck and that I know it and that I know only I can help myself. The only predictions he makes are also linked to the things I already know about myself. Privacy matters to me so I will live somewhere where I can withdraw from the outside world when I need to. Intimacy is important to me but also autonomy. And though my current relationship is doomed I have already met the person who will offer me the stability I need. But he seems less interested in these things. He seems more concerned gently but insistently about the mess I'm in now. You can't go on the way you're going he says not looking at me. But sure you know that. I do I think. I do know that. I come away feeling like I've just had a counselling session. I've come away thinking that what we know about ourselves and each other at a glance is not really because some of us possess psychic abilities but because our small, tired problems are all the same. Thank you all for that. I have lots of questions about all four of those but we'll come to some specifics in a minute. Can I fire a quotation at you about the essay? Something that I've always found consoling and at the same time terrifying. And it comes from Elizabeth Hardwick writing in 1986. And she says it is an occasion for happiness since it is always astonishing that anyone will write an essay. To wake up in the morning under a command to activate the stones of an idea the clods of research the uncertainty of memory is the punishment of the vocation. And all to be done without the aid of end rhyme and off rhyme and buried assignments without an imagined character putting on a hat and going into the street. And I just wonder whether it's possible to describe what the happiness or the punishment is like for you. In other words what does the process of making an essay feel like? I suppose that one of Hardwick's points is any idiot can have an idea. Right? What's the next step? And I wonder maybe Patrick if you... Yeah, so like my book is literally called okay let's do your stupid idea so I genuinely think any idiot can have an idea but I also kind of think any idiot can write an essay. Like I think the other thing that isn't mentioned in Hardwick's, like my day job is as a journalist with the Irish Times and everything is so specific in newspapers. We were talking about it before like if you're writing an opinion column it usually starts with a very fixed idea and the reason I've never been an opinion columnist is I don't really have very fixed ideas and one of the things I love about essays as a form is that you can literally start with an instinct or an intuition and you write your way into the form and so like I do get joy from them and I haven't been as prolific with them recently but I do get joy from them but often the joy is like and I don't know everyone might have very different views but when I was writing my book I realised in retrospect I kind of had a rule of thumb that every essay in it had to be either entertaining or helpful and if it didn't fit either of those things I wasn't comfortable with it so I had essays I didn't feel comfortable with putting in the book and when you do something helpful or you think it's entertaining you get joy from that and when you transfer a bunch of experience into something that you can transfer to someone else and give them something useful and I know not everyone agrees that essays should be useful but I'm a very utilitarian person Great, thanks Anybody else? I don't know if it would be joy necessarily for me and I think a lot of essays also get asked about catharsis about getting this off your chest is writing this down make you feel better for me the answer is no and I like the Louise Gluck line that at the end of my suffering there was a door and I think some people feel that with the essay they go out the other side but they feel something I've never had that what I do like about them is same as Patrick I often don't have a very straightforward idea of where I'm going and I write my way in have a look around literally and see what's there but what I do like about them is that I find the answer to a question and you'll hear that very hackneyed about essay to try but for me it's always how do I feel about a subject and that can be sport or a grandparent who saw ghosts for me it's about digging in and how do I feel about the subject what's the answer to a question and often for me essays start with a question and that kind of curiosity I enjoy in a way being curious about how it's going to go when you do start digging into it I think I want to come back to curiosity in a while Emily I think that I love the line about the door because then the thing that you find you go through the door and oh there's more suffering so for me it is and this is sort of the for talking about titles notes to self I kind of wrote them for myself in a strange way out of an intense need to have some kind of witnessing of my own experience and that is autobiographical that's not just the essay that's autobiographical writing which is one of the things I always say you don't have to be mad enough to publish your own life writing to find value in writing it so there are two stages to it there's the private writing where you really get to do what you want on the page and Jan Carson was talking about this earlier in terms of writing in an uncensored way for your first draft making it public like bringing it out into the world and editing it and trying to make it take on some kind of beautiful shape where it can be entertaining or helpful to someone outside of your own brain which is a crazy place sometimes so I think for me it's helpful to think about those two stages because the form works differently in the stages and it serves different purposes whereas privately it can be very cathartic it's quite dangerous to make the work you put out into the world as a form of like serve a cathartic purpose I suppose I'm really interested in coming from a poetic background and looking at the process of how I would put a poem together and the luxury and the space that the essay form gives me in comparison because I find that my starting points are often very similar it's around looking at a memory or a time in my life or an incident or an anecdote that is obsessing me for some reason or another that's preoccupying me and then much like you were saying, Sinead coming into it not really knowing where I'm going to end up and following the lateral drift of those ideas and juxtaposing them together and with a lot more space than I would be able to in a poem and I find for me when I'm writing an essay I'm less interested in creating poetry or lyricism on the line level and I'm interested in using those poetic juxtaposition techniques and placing things beside each other and seeing how they speak to each other and I definitely find a kind of a joy in that when it works and a lot of the opposite when it doesn't I very much like the idea that an essay or maybe also a collection because I want to ask you all about collections as well I think it's somehow just the act of putting one thing beside another thing and seeing what happens Emily raised I thought it would take us a while to get to this but I'm going to ask it now and I suppose it's a question to do with the personal and it seems that in all of your cases possibly even in mine it's not just personal experience that we've all written about but it's something more intimate and it's either very precisely physical in terms of physical experience of whether it's of illness or childbirth but also writing about mental illness, writing about depression writing about anxiety which more than one of us has done and I suppose I have a slightly different version of the same question which is when you're writing about that level of experience what's the kind of process of transformation so Emily's talking about it in terms of like two stages is it going to cast one of those as sort of indulgent and then the other almost is if then you have a kind of responsibility to put a form on it only if indulgent is a really good word Yes, I'm definitely using it in quotation marks but I wonder what that process is like when you're writing about something so specific I teach some students on a course writing about illness writing about mental illness and there's always a kind of moment after a month or so where I have to say to them great you've all got these fantastic ideas about your own experience about family experiences and so on and then I have to say who cares and why should we care why should the rest of us care and I just wonder if it's possible to kind of describe how you get from that focus on the physical to something that then matters on the page and matters in the larger context I think it's also to do with the fact that this is where the distinction between memoir and essay comes in the great Vivian Gornig who writes brilliantly herself and brilliantly about the form of the essay says that the memoir tells all and the essay is to selects and I think that's the kind of difference and I also feel that I if I had just written a book about my own life I wouldn't have been interested in either writing that for me it I think a really good essay looks inwards and outwards I think Rebecca Sol that calls it writing as a citizen and writing in the dark where you're looking both at connecting it to art and science and the world and the medical world and politics and religion sexuality whatever it is but you're also threading your own experience to it that's the kind of work I tend to grav towards it's the kind of work I hoped to make myself and it would have been it's already difficult enough and Emily and I did a lot of panels together with our books that want to be completely rooted in your own pain it's very difficult and exposing to do that so that if you do have these sort of like tenets that you can project your work onto that are looking outwards at the world it doesn't feel as exposing if you do have those very dark moments if you're writing about your dad in hospital or me in hospital if you're writing about other aspects of it or digging into why those things might happen how the medical world is patriarchal how religion is patriarchal how you might link the two up with hospitals and churches I think you can definitely guard yourself a little bit from that kind of exposition and feeling that kind of vulnerability because it is hard to put this stuff on the page as we all know I think part of the distinction is just that some drafts you're thinking about what happened and you're putting it on the page as soon as you start thinking of a reader which any writer should do I think maybe that's wrong everything I say there's an exception but I think once you start thinking of the reader and who the reader might be or even just one person it becomes a different thing so like I wrote in my book I have an essay called Brain Fever that's about my own various trials and tribulations at mental health and I wrote a version of that about three years before I wrote the version that's in the book and that was I looked at it afterwards and it was just raw and pointless and painful and it didn't really like it has all the same material in it but in what I was saying earlier I just felt that it would be of no use to anybody to read this and when I wrote it later like I totally I didn't even use that draft to just start it again I was kind of thinking more of a reader and what you'd transmit to the reader and in that sense I think there is something cathartic in just for me like I know there's that for you but just in explaining yourself but not so you're explaining it to someone else which actually makes it easier to explain it to yourself so that's more you take and I think as well the more you write into a subject the more you realise that nobody's experiences take place in a vacuum or in isolation and it kind of becomes like the rings of a tree or the circles of hell whichever way you want to visualise it but there are links between your individual experience out into the world and those are the interesting routes that present themselves for you to follow I think as you go through the process I think though as well that question of like putting private details into the world and trying to transform it into something that other people will read is really difficult it leads to a lot of soul gazing and I would write in this tiny little room that was meant to be a children's room in my house and one of the things I write about is not being able to have children and so it's not lost on Phoebe Irony that it's now my writing room and I don't even call it it's now the laundry room and I happen to write in it as well but I would come downstairs and I would say to my partner who is also a writer and I would say no one is going to want to read this no one wants to read this and he would say in the best, nicest tough way he would say go back upstairs and think about that question write it and write it to the best of your ability and the extraordinary response to notes to self and so I mean I work in a university and so my email address is publicly available and so I have had contact from hundreds of people who have contacted me about parents with alcoholism infertility and drug use sexual violence and all the cheery things that I put in my book that oh these are the things that connect us the things that we and I say this about the work all the time to get it out in the open it's about making vulnerability public in a kind of political way and saying the things that we hide and work so hard to hide so much of the time are actually the things that we share it's testimony too right so there's a kind of thing like there's a similar thing in my book like there's a mixture of things like I just read earlier which are purely about getting gags in there and then I've written about the things that people have responded to most and I still get emails about or there's an essay about me not having kids there's an essay about care work because I was a care worker for a while and there's the essay about mental health and those are the ones that are kind of most exposing are the ones that people still email me about and there is a weird like I didn't really realise that was going to happen no idea and if I had and I wonder if it's the same for other people if I had had an idea I might not have had the nerve to do it that's what I mean about never thinking about the reader it's just because it's too terrifying to think about the reader that I would stop myself and I think also in writing this kind of non-fiction and this kind of personal essay censorship of yourself is fatal and I think when I when I read work and I know somebody's gone white and they've stepped back and they haven't gone there it's really easy to spot on the page and I think the reader spots that in authenticity and it's always a disappointment as a reader when you see it so if I thought about the reader I'd be holding back all over the place so that's why I pretend that no one's ever going to read it and that gets me over the line then but I wonder how that relates to what you said earlier about the politics of it and in my long list of questions politics question mark comes towards the end but we're already there we're very advanced I totally understand what you're saying about a sense that a sense of authenticity but is there also a sense of a kind of responsibility in terms of the kind of wider political context of an essay, impact of an essay I wonder how these things kind of sit alongside each other because it seems to me that it's really obvious that a lot of the work that you're doing and that some other writers in Ireland and Irish writers elsewhere are doing can sometimes feel in its putting of that personal experience into the world can feel automatically political does that make sense but I wonder how that then kind of affects you as you write maybe it doesn't at all as you say, Shanae No, I think it can and I think again you and I were asked this question a lot and we did a lot of festivals over here and there was a lot of what's the resurgence and what's the resurgence in the female voices and I think both of us said Ireland has changed more in the last 60 years and has in the last 10 years socially, politically, culturally and I think a lot of that and it's funny I was talking about my Brennan recently and about a lot of those quiet short stories where there was a lot of rostrofovig rooms where everything was kept behind closed stories so I think a lot of this as you and I both said was this breaking down of silence has happened and a lot of voices, a lot of essayistic voices, a lot of female voices came out of that because again people didn't talk about these things they didn't talk about sexuality and reproduction and again the idea of the political you'll remember around the time of marriage equality and repeal a lot of people had a huge impact on campaigns because they told personal stories often at great expense about what it was, what had happened to them in the hope that it would affect legislative change and it did so I think there is a kind of umbilical link between the personal and the political sometimes in the Irish essay it's hard not to make it political when we've gone through so much flux and change and I think definitely lots of things about the essay now are about saying the unsayable where we came from a country where there's a lot of oppression where you couldn't say anything and I don't think that's a coincidence everything was told through fiction so the unsayable before was told by people like John McGarrett and I don't know of Brian but through fiction and I think it's no coincidence that your books I think not that you were thinking of it consciously but there's no coincidence that your books came out around the same time as the marriage equality campaign and the repeal the amendment campaign because there was a change there was a switch in the country when people started talking about things that were never talked about before and it became a more open country and also I think people were hungry for I don't think that the type of responses we were talking about before would have happened if there were short stories and I think part of it was oh this person really had this and I really had this I want to send them an email so there is like there's a political thing on the other hand I think anytime I was tempted in this book and I did write every now and again versions of the essays that had more self consciously political stuff in it where I became Jesus on the Mount it was fucking awful and I removed it on reflection because I don't think I don't think anything in any of our books would have worked so well if we were very consciously trying to write something political I do think it is just still a very political act of being a woman in the world today even in privileged western Europe and you know what you're saying is this outpouring of voices was really important but it's not a straight line and there are still things that get pushed back I think we've all talked about the things that people have responded well to but there are other things that you write about and even you know at draft stage where people will say I mean I think particularly around the area of things like gender based violence there's still a lot of discomfort and do you really want to say this out loud and people advise caution with that which always comes from a good place but still strikes me as something that's a little bit retrograde and surprising I think I was thinking about I mentioned a sort of like handful of of essayist, Irish essayist going back centuries earlier and you could imagine a kind of lineage that would go back at least to the 18th century in terms of like Burke and Barclay and people when I first I'm not sure that I ever thought to myself I am an essayist this is my ambition but I do remember maybe 25 years ago thinking as a writer I know I don't want to be an academic so what's the alternative and sort of fleetingly thinking if only you could write essays and sometimes I try and remember what did I or reconstruct what did I mean by that and for me I think it was definitely a way of not being an Irish writer in an important sense because it felt to me as if there weren't models for that and I wonder how you have felt whether or not any of you thought of yourselves when you started writing as essayist or had that as a term kind of even on the horizon because I think it's one of the peculiarities of the essay is that many of the greatest essayists never described themselves as such they think of themselves as novelists or autobiographers or critics or whatever it happens to be journalists and so on and I just wonder whether for you historically in terms of your own writing careers there have been those kind of figures where it made sense to you to think of yourself as a non-fiction writer or as an essayist because I certainly felt that when I started a real lack of those models what do you reckon? So I would say that a lack of a model and an explicit model because in the dark room is in period essays but not wasn't, sorry I'm pointing at you but talking about your work but it wasn't packaged or sold as that which it might be now to know that sense so it was about as well I remember when I said to because I am an academic I don't want to be I'm a sort of academic I know we grew up to do in the end but I said to my friends because I kind of wrote notes of self quite secretly because I didn't really know what I was doing and I would say but I didn't think I told you about it for a long time you told me a bit of when it was finished surprise but I said it to a couple of friends I'm writing a non-academic book and they went oh brilliant and they said is it a novel and there was that sense of like oh we did that in school and we're in college and now we're done and weirdly in hindsight it was very freeing not having Irish models because I didn't quite have to define what I was doing if I had models and I did and I just happened to be my favourite genre is American women non-fiction writers they just extraordinary John Dillian Gornig John Dillian's obvious example but Megan Dorm, Ariel Levy's work just amazing incredibly strong voices and I remember me reading Megan Dorm and I had a bit of a crisis of confidence and I was reading her essay about the death of her mother and I won't go into it but she's just brilliant and she starts off by describing how her mother's apartment at least was due and her mother's dying in the apartment but they didn't have enough money to pay the next month's rent so they just start packing up the apartment around her as she dies and this is just the most horrifying thing and I thought well I can do that like if someone else has done that so that sense of a different voice but it was really important to me that it was American like that it was from outside of the small world that I think we think of as Irish letters but writing within an Irish tradition in that way then I think the notion of politics would be writ large in a way that I think most of us prefer to approach in a much more side-long manner and I too would have looked to writers like Maggie Nelson or Ulibys who I've really enjoyed recently for that kind of freedom of form especially as well and coming from a kind of a poetic background and admiring writers like Ann Carson where there is no rule book that was a kind of an interesting segue or a point of access to me and I didn't necessarily see that in the Irish scene but then having really enjoyed over a long period of time Maeve Brennan and the long-winded lady and things like that and that kind of skill of observation and yet that still feels as being quite outside of the Irish milieu as well I was definitely influenced by Yee and a lot of female writers because a lot of the models for this book would have been without that would have been kind of humor writers like David Sedaris or Clive James and people who influenced me when I was younger and then when I read your books and then I was reading like Deborah Levy and a lot of American and British writers I kind of realised oh you can kind of go deeper and I've always liked things that are kind of managed to go from funny to quite serious and dark and then back to funny and then serious and dark and I think having those two roots was really important to me and the fact that there was an opening in the world of essays like suddenly you could do it and not just be a humorist which would have been the only avenue I'd have seen for myself before I just remembered that I had written a tiny little piece about January 5th which is the day I got a leukemia diagnosis and I had been driving behind two a hearse with two coffins and there was this very short piece in a really big publisher who got in touch and said do you want to write a book and can you write a few bits by Patrick's Day and I did and they were looking for a memoir and I went back and they were like yeah great this is great great we want more death, we want more grief more kind of sad stuff do you want to do that and I just went no I don't so I kind of said no and then I started to kind of find people like I think Michael Collins Roxanne Gay and people and it was all the Americans and there was a lot of essays kind of the golden age of the American Essay who were all writing in fragments writing in kind of like really deconstructing what you can do with ten pages which is essentially what an essay can be that wasn't linear, that wasn't chronological that wasn't a whole life and that was for me it was definitely the Americans and of course reading Maeve who wasn't golden essays at the time she was a columnist those long-winded lady columns like you kind of look them now and they're a thousand word essays that are so hard to define they're also just about the quotidian there's an essay about broccoli there's an essay about just looking at the windows of what you call the home fires of New York they're small restaurants they're about very minutia and small things and I think people often think the essay has to be about something landmark, a bereavement or a change of country or a terrible relationship can be about something very small and that's what Brennan does so well but there are also some of the greatest essays about New York in the mid 20th century I think maybe 20 years ago when it must have been when Visitors was republished around 2002 and a friend of mine said you have to read this but you also have to read this weird book of her New York columns and he said it's like reading Walter Benjamin but Irish and in New York not Paris that is also what she is she's one of the great city essayists she's a flanoos as well a lot of the psychogyography the Benjamin stuff they're amazing nothing happens in them but they're so well observed it's often I went for a walk they're very melancholic as well very lonely she's all in her own they're sad they're lonely but I think that brings up sorry these people shall we do that now as far as I know there are a couple of microphones roaming or roving whatever it is that microphones do in these situations so we have a question down the front and another one here do we have mics there's a mic on the way do we absolutely require the mic we probably do exactly so there's a microphone coming down to you right now thank you very much folks I have a question but first I used to get a double review on a regular basis though my other reference for essays was Zedie Smith I live quite closer the question is what's the difference between an essay and a short story in olden days I used to think that essays were there to put across a point so we're often written somewhere like a spectator or somewhere like that to push a point of view with a few personal touches so what would you say as a lecturer teaching essays is the difference between an essay and a short story because I always thought the double review was short stories I'm definitely not going to try and answer that question I'm going to hand over to my... is it fiction and non-fiction is that too simple and yet the boundaries are getting more blurred as well now I think you've got all this auto fiction Maggie Nelson writes what she calls auto theory there's a lot more blurring there's a lot more hybridity now and I don't think anything is just one thing anymore I think the thing for me and you had said this Patrick which is like to write an essay and to publish it and call it an essay is to make a claim for its non-fiction status and that to me has a lot to do with its value and its impact but it also has something to do with some of its costs so I was working with a student who was writing a collection of essays and finding it incredibly difficult to describe the things that she felt she needed to describe and so we had some conversations and she turned it into a collection of short stories and strangely fiction enabled her to tell the emotional truth that she needed to tell that she couldn't publish it as non-fiction because of what it would do to her family so there's also thinking about what each genre can offer to writers and to readers I try and write short stories as well and one of the things I realised very early on is that certain things because I'm a journalist as well and I do a lot of long-ish form reportage is sometimes when you transfer something to a fictional medium that had been an essay or had been a bit of reporting it doesn't work anymore because the thing that making the claim that it's an essay does is it says this is true and some things that people say are in real life are too good to be true almost and when you put them into fiction people go that's completely implausible like there's stuff I've had people say to me when I've been interviewing people on the street about things and if you put it into the voice that didn't happen so I think the claims to truth are really important in the essay there's a question up here so oh yeah and then there's a gentleman over here can you hear me? I'm a journalist and I've noticed a kind of strange trend especially with younger people that they're often encouraged to capitalise on their pain or their trauma in order to gain a foothold or to write an interesting think piece so if someone has a mental illness or a disability or is experienced something traumatic because of their sexuality there's the tendency to turn that into a sort of think piece do you think that's the same in the essay writing world? I think me and Emily have talked a lot about this before and we feel very strongly that some editors are very exploitative of young writers and shouldn't be doing that there's a anything I put into my book and the people kind of different views on this was processed emotionally it was when I said earlier that the early draft of the piece about mental health was raw and painful I think if I was a young woman in my 20s an editor would have made me publish that and it might have flown away online but it would not have been good for anyone to have that out there so I think I would think any of us have thought very long and hard about the things we put in like we selected what we put in and we had processed what we put in to our pieces and I don't think the trend you've identified is good or healthy and I would recommend to young writers that they don't apart from anything else Rowan and I would say you're wasting it in your 20s write about it in your 30s or your 40s when you're a better writer and it will be a better bit of work and you've processed it and I'm sure you get the same we get sent copies of books in proof and I quite often get sent memoirs from young women and I got one it's a while ago now but it came with a cover letter saying you've never read trauma like this before and I just wondered is it reminding that person who wrote that book because it's just it's really explosive on an individual level I worry about readers as well and I say that as a partly as kind of a teacher with a strong sense of pastoral care but also I worry about what that does to the genre as well where it starts to become identified not with broccoli but with trauma and what does it do in a cultural level as well I think sometimes these kind of very heightened responses to horrific incidents like that you get this great public outpouring of outrage and then nothing actually happens and it almost becomes a corrective to any action so yeah I think it's a really dangerous dynamic and I've certainly had editors in the past when I'm writing in the area of mental health kind of asking me almost to be a little bit crazier you know like could you be a little bit crazier you know could you be a little bit you know and you're kind of going no that's not the point the point is around writing about the mental health issues that many of us live with on a daily basis not about proving that I'm the winner in the terrible low stakes game of mental health collapse you know so yeah there was another question here there's a microphone coming behind you hi I just wanted to pick up on the socio-political aspect of the short the essay that was mentioned earlier on in particular something Patrick and Sinead alluded to which was the notion of the unsayable and I just wondered if the panel had anything to say about the unsayable as a kind of facet or feature of the contemporary Irish essay it feels to me that there is you can say anything you want now it's whether you want to or not I teach workshops on the essay there's often people who are if I publish this I live in a small town no one speaks to me if I publish this my mother never speaks to me if I tell this story this secret whatever it is I'll be cut off from the family all of these things so there is a price to be paid and again all of this as Patrick has said have weighed this up very at great length because I think writing for some people can be cathartic and help you don't have to publish it and I often say to people somebody said to me once I'm going to publish in this tiny little journal people take pictures of pieces of writing and they post them on Instagram and Twitter just because you think it's no one's going to see it it's still a piece of published work there are certain things there are pieces in constellations I wouldn't read at a festival on a stage like this because it would be too difficult to do so so you have to weigh up whether you want a piece out in the world and your kindness can be just for yourself and sometimes it really can work for people to get it down and to grapple to figure out what they say I always figure out what I feel about things when I put it on the page don't necessarily have to publish all those things and I think that's maybe not often said to a lot of young writers you don't have to perform your pain on the page for other people but only you can make that decision I think I think socio-politically a lot of what happens is by writing about things that are unsayable like I think he both did in your books in different ways it makes it sayable for other people so my book doesn't go as far in anything really but about things like looking after disabled relatives or I was a care worker so it wasn't relatives I was working with or the children issue which is really touchy for lots of people a lot of people contact and go I was really nice to see someone put words on that so there is a kind of interesting thing I think in Irish culture there has been a thing about the unsayable becoming sayable over the last 15 years and I think I say I've been part of that process sometimes people just need to hear some of the things that are said and I think both of you writing about children that was a really big one for a lot of people because the thing is the unsayable is not just I think about social taboos or social norms or social agreement but also how it makes you feel as an individual coming up against those taboos which is isolated and lonely and like you are losing your mind and like no one else is like you and then as I was saying earlier you realise that other people are parrying things or have these vulnerabilities in common with the community and the vulnerability hangover is something that we haven't kind of mentioned but it is there and it is strong and even when it's processed and you write about it so I think there is a cost to saying the unsayable and it's not a coincidence that the book I wrote after notes to self was a novel written in the third person because I really needed not to be writing non-fiction in the first person for a little while you just got to say novel coming out soon I think we're going to have to stop so I'm sorry for the unsayable questions that will now be unhearable but thank you all so much for that before we applaud our four writers remember we're all repairing straight away to the main library building to sign books so hopefully we'll see some of you there thank you