 I always hate disturbing the warm buzz of conversation that precedes talks like this and the only reason I don't mind doing it too much because I know what can I continue through the whole afternoon and then come back bubbling after we're to talk and that's the kind of warm buzz of conversation that we want to keep going here this evening so if I knew all of you were coming I'd expect even though the weather would have been a few more filtering in the nearest the aisle which is the one way out of this room these more come into to settle down and make room for more my name is Christian Dupont and I'm the director of the John J. Burns Library for Bear Books Special Collections and Archives here at Boston College and it's really my pleasure to welcome you here and on behalf of the D.C. libraries and before introducing Donal Ryan to you I would like on this occasion of his Boston College debut to introduce you to Donal and I say debut because as many of you know we greatly privileged to be acquiring Donal's literary archives in the D.C. library and so we can look forward to having Donal back with us on many occasions in the years and indeed decades to come. You and your work Donal have a new home, second home here on the Heights and so we'd be welcome on behalf of Boston College, the Burns Library, the D.C. libraries many of my library colleagues are with us and if I may, I would like on behalf of our Council General of Ireland, funeral equipment to offer a very special warm welcome to you we're delighted to have you with us on this occasion such as we'll be doing a little leave taking from us here in Boston for a couple of weeks back to Ireland so it's a pleasure to be here with us tonight because you've really given us such tremendous supports here at Boston College and of course for the greater Boston community for Irish arts and cultures in so many ways and I trust that you have been seeing announcements about Boston's second annual Irish Writers Festival, Bull of Boston which we know has helped organize and sponsor along with the Irish Writers Center and Poetry Island and if you didn't catch the summer wordplay Bull of Boston, I mean Bull of Boston for applause in Irish but some of you might recognize it as that 2009 Cranbridge live album in W.K. knowing this to Laura Saroon on this occasion so Bull of Boston will be held at the Harvard Club Boston on March 2nd and 3rd so not this Friday but the one following so coming up very soon it's free, everyone's welcome we do ask you to register online if you just googled out our Irish events there on March 2nd and 3rd you'll find it through, you'll have some brochures which will go out afterward even at the book signing table, okay so let's do that but to give you a little foretaste of that we have poets Paul Odun and Robert Pinsky on Friday evening Saturday afternoon we'll feature a conversation with one of our former Burns visiting scholars Alan Jackson and Boston blow columnist Kevin Cullen and also West of Ireland novelist Mary Costolo and Sally Rooney will be introduced by Mary Malio Pusky so we'll be looking forward to that soon here so pick up some information afterward we're also very pleased to have with us this evening Professor James H. Murphy director of the Center for Irish Programs here at Boston College and wonderful collaborator in many ways and events like this and the cosponsors of the program so thank you James and the Center for Irish Programs speak of our Burns visiting scholar program many of you come to our Burns scholar events regularly the fall and the spring and in the spring we're very pleased to have with us Jason Kirk from Central Washington University who will be hosting coming up in April a provocatively titled symposium is there an American school of Irish history? and the answer will come on April 7th to find out we've probably debated among a dozen panelists that you've assembled and we thank you for doing that and then we'll give you Jason the spotlight there on April 18th Wednesday evening for a lecture on the development of parliamentary opposition in the Irish Free State which is your specialty so we'll see announcements about that and look on the Irish Studies website the Burns Library website if you're not getting emails from us see me afterward make sure to get you on email with us also present with us this evening are so our regular faculty members who teach in our Irish Studies program I'd like to mention in particular James Smith James Smith because he has collaborated with me in many ways putting together donals for the two and a half day visit with us here and bringing your experience as director of our renowned Lowell Humanities series and planning events and coordinating like this so thank you Jim for doing this and don't only join you in class tomorrow but for lunch afterward and we really thank you for the time that you're giving to our students and on that note I can mention Elizabeth Fravers Suzanne Mattson who are sitting together as co-director of our creative writing concentration and just before coming up here this afternoon we had donal with us with several students in the concentration Elizabeth in Burns Library looking at and talking about donals archives and what it's meant for them to have them come here to Boston College and help me recruit as a writer so it's really a special moment for many of our students I think some of you have come over for us we thank you for joining us for the talk this evening especially now that you're teaching creative writing full time at the University of Limerick so that was a nice thing to do with our program here we're very pleased to have with us faculty members so we know there are a number of other Irish Studies program around New England even this evening certainly Tom LaGradie is here from UMass Boston Kelly Matthews from Birmingham State this is helping to co-organize the American Conference of Irish Studies annual meeting in spring 2019 here in Boston Boston based conference so we're delighted there Mary Burk hasn't come in yet I think she's still on the road from Stores, Connecticut we talked there this morning University of Connecticut so she'll be joining us here this evening as well so we're delighted we really try to as I say go on introducing us to you that's a lot of what we do here in Boston Irish Studies together in so many ways we also have a very good friend of yours so this is introducing Alan Hayes actually in the back corner there who's the publisher of Marlin House who's been doing research visits with us this week in Burns Library before I made that in New York it was a very nice Alan that your visit coincided remarkably with Donal's talk here this evening I also see in our audience Donal Tom Carty President of the Irish Society of Boston an Irish cultural organization that has had close connections to Boston College since its founding in the Irish Constitutional year of 1937 and I also see members of our charitable Irish society the oldest Irish organization in North America founded in 1737 and raise your hand if you're affiliated with, I'm going to rock a list here the Irish International Immigration Center the Irish Castro Center of New England the Irish-American partnership the Boston Irish Business Association the Kuwanak Wailing in Boston or if you remember the AOH we're the AOH, we're Tiara okay so, and you were hoping to get a little breathing space for the Irish to have you guys playing this in the Enshan but here you go but be assured those of you from all these various Irish cultural and immigrant aid societies but we're also making sure that Donald gets a taste of literary Boston at large, so tomorrow afternoon for instance, we'll be visiting a meeting with the director and program staff members of reading groups from the Boston Athenaeum we're one of our literary centers in the city here earlier this afternoon we had planned a chat with Chris Boucher also managing the magazine, so again it's really important for us to recognize that although Donald of course is not simply an Irish writer in the way that the literary press likes to categorize and manufacture as writers, so in the few short years since Donald broke on to the scene in 2012 with the publication of his first two novels, The Spinning Park and The Thing About December he's been gaining increasingly international reputation he's staged adaptations and translations now with four novels and short stories in more than 20 languages and in further recognition of that international reputation Donald was awarded the European Prize for Literature in 2015 now there are writers who become famous because they win a number of these literary prizes and you could certainly put Donald in that category The Spinning Park won a Guardian First Book Award it was long listed for the Booker and it does with Elliott Prizes shortlisted for the Impact International Literary Award it was named Irish Book of the Year and then Irish Book of the Decade at the 2016 Dublin Book Festival meanwhile, The Slapping of the Sun won an Irish Book Award in a short story category but it's not for the awards that he is one or will win we're very confident that we've invited Donald to read for us and much less engage in the acquisition of his archives because beyond writers who simply garner awards are those with the literary critics esteemed as significant and we can certainly put Donald in that category for me, significant writers are the ones who capture really the essence of their times and as a novel written about and even for post-Celtic Tiger Ireland the collapse that infected Ireland even more precipitously and harshly than our own economic and housing collapse here in the United States it documents that it certainly does, it preserves the moment, it captures its essence and with his background in law which you may not have known about the moment and that will be telling us more about yourself this evening around reading selections of work has been profoundly affected by social crises of various kinds so not just the boom and the bust cycle and the Celtic Tiger Ireland but other types of social trauma very tuned into whether it's mental illness in some cases, domestic abuse violence, there's a dark side that's there in social crisis that you've seen post-hand and committing people and it's really quite moving in that sense captures again more of that social documentary or I think you'll speak to us and be reading from your your forthcoming novel here from the Law and Quiet See about how profiling the Syrian refugee crisis has affected you Donald in that sense is significant in that kind of social documentary side if you will other writers are being significant really for the way they work with language and I think Donald in that respect deserves our respect as a significant writer for his use of language and particularly in capturing speech and dialogue in a very authentic way you'll hear and read from his novels and I would recommend to those of you who even if you've already read Donald's work in print, tune into Audible there's some very, very fine recordings that have made not in your voice role but in other readers who really captured that authentic dialogue and speech it's a really good way to get into Donald's writing so I really recommend that to you but it's in yet another category it's really in transcending that significant writers but important writers and so that's how I would like to present Donald to you this evening as a reader as someone whose work really transcends his own time and gets into those categories of the universal and the transcendent and the truly human dimensions of our life that love that goes beyond death and you find that in his characters who are dark and disturbing in some of the experiences in his character space and he's bringing to you as a reader who confronts you with your own humanity there's a profound sense of hope love that pervades that a real empathy that you bring that transcends that so that's how myself as a reader would like to present you, Donald Ryan I really appreciate it it really is an honor and a privilege to be here it's quite a life changing experience actually so I can't thank you enough I'd like to begin by reading a poem in Irish and I don't speak very fluent Irish so I apologize but it's written as a reaction to the recent sudden passing of my dear father and so it's called The Kitchen Falling Irish is a language that's been tuned over the ages to the complex rhythms of grief it is the most moderately autonomous it offers warm and loving refuge to a broken hearted but this poem is as much about hope as it is about grief and I'd like to dedicate the reading of this to my dear friend Helen Hayes who reminds me constantly of the infinite and eternal importance of hope The Kitchen Donald The Kitchen asks the language which gave him August and he failed her name the fuck in the name of my dear daughter The Kitchen and I want to thank you for telling me that you know me and I want to thank you for your kindness and for the love of my dear son The Kitchen is a poem by the father Tom the Malie who is wearing a pair of glasses and a hat I'm saying earlier that John Manuel says that it's a curse for a writer to best know his first novel. So I don't know exactly why it's such a curse, but I ban myself by saying it's not really my first novel because I wrote the thing my summer before, Spinning Heart. It's just that I decided to publish Spinning Heart first. Spinning Heart is a polyphonic novel. And I somehow managed to avoid the word polyphonic in my whole life. I'd written the novel in polyphonic form and if it had been published and well received and it would have been a few words before I ever heard the word polyphonic. It's really strange. I knew words like concupacent and dialectic and tendentious. I didn't know polyphonic. And really it's a very simple word to put together in your head. You know, if you're not shocked when you first hear it, you know, obviously poly in many funny voices. But I was in London and I was speaking very clever in the smoke because they'd be nominated for the book when I was thinking surely this is the best thing ever. And the word is challenging, I'm right with you guys. And the journalist for London Independent said, so why did you decide to write for government in polyphonic form? Luckily my friend, Connor, had just given me a gift of an iPhone. So I bought today a restroom in Google the word polyphonic form. So I read, if you could say a polyphonic public has a main character and in this book it's a guy called Bobby Metton. And I suppose Bobby is kind of a distillation of all the heroic, decent men in my life. Bobby is the kind of man I wanted to be growing up. So they're part of my father and my uncles and some of my friends and guys who were good at sports basically. No, but you know, he's very decent, straightforward, honest guy. And so every character in the book really relates in some way to Bobby Metton who appears kind of a paraben of goodness and decency. And they're not going to set in a village that can be helped dead waste by the recession. And I saw it myself in a place called, just for example, a place called Karakari, called The Limerick, around 1909 every single guy in the village had worked for a small number of construction companies and most builders and employers were very decent and they went under and they did their best to stay afloat. They treated people very well, they subbed it. And Bobby has been a victim of an unscrupulous employer. So I'll read a very abridged version of Bobby's chapter in spinning art. Now he sounds quite dark and he doesn't sound great to start as he's thinking about killing his father, which is never good. Which is soon realized the day since she came. My father still lives back the road past the weir in the cottage I was raring in. I go there every day to see as he did, and every day he lets me down. He hasn't yet missed a day of letting me down. He smiles at me, that terrible smile. He knows uncommon check as he did. He knows I know he knows. He laughs, his crooked laugh. I ask, is he okay for everything that he told me he laughs? We look at each other for a while and when I can no longer stand the stench after him, I go away. Good luck, I say, I'll see you tomorrow. You will, he says then. I know I will. There's a red metal heart in the centre of the low front gate, skewered at a rotating hinge. It's flaking now, the red is nearly gone. It needs to be scraped and sanded and painted in oil. It still spins in the wind though. I can hear it creak, creak, creak as I walk away, a flaking, creaking, spinning heart. When he dies, I'll get the cottage and the two acres that's left. He drank out Brenda's farm years ago. Once I have him buried, I'll burn down the cottage and piss on the embers, and I'll sell the two acres for as much as I can get. Every day he lives, lower the price I'll get. He knows that too. He stays alive despite me. His heart is caked with muck and his lungs are dribbled and black, but still he manages to draw in air and wheeze his half and spit it back out. I was getting off from my job two months ago, and it was the best medicine could have got. He gave him an extra six months, I'd say. If he ever finds out how pokey Burke shafted me, he'd surely make a full recovery. Pokey could have liked to be re-applied then, had he had America inspired to him. I was as smart as any of the passionets in school. I was well able for the English angiography in history. All those equations and visits in Max made sense to me. I couldn't ever let on I knew anything, though. That would have been suicide in my head. I did pass Max, even though I know I could have done others. I never once opened my mouth in English. I left for the village, wrote an essay one time, and the posse Rogers praised him from a height. He said it showed great flair and imagination. He got kicked the whole way back to the village. I had that King leader's number from the start, well before the teacher started to break things down slowly for the Ticlats. He was a stupid prick. He had it all and wanted more. He wanted the whole world to kiss his arse. I had gone real and Reagan pegged for bitches too, and I knew that Cardelia was the one who really, truly loved him. She wouldn't lie to him, no matter how much he wanted her to. You're a man and no more, she said. You're not perfect, but I love you. Cardelia was true of heart. There aren't too many Cardelias in this world, but Trina is one. I was scared before I knew I was, of facing down the burks, and she told me. I was scared, imagine, even though I was in the right. Having a wife is great. You can say things to your wife that you never knew you taught. It just comes out of you. When the first you're talking to her is like the part of yourself. We went to a play inside the town one time. I can't remember the name of it. You couldn't do that without a wife. Imagine being found out that you went to see a play on your own. But a woman, you have an excuse for every kind of suck thing. The play was about women and wife. They just sat on the stage, on either side of the table, facing the audience, talking about each other. Your man was like my father, only not bad. The wife was lovely. She was dubbed higher than your man's, out of selfish ways, but still she persevered with him. He sat there, drinking whiskey and smoking fag after fag, bringing back his two ears as she read into the audience. He had no smart reply for everything she said. They aged on stage as they were talking. I don't know how it was done. For a finish, they were both old and their lives were near spent. And at the very last, your man turned around and admitted he thought the world of her. He'd always loved her. He put his hand at her cheek and looked at her and cried. Cryed your man was so natural. At the way home, the car tears spilled down on my face. Trigna just said, oh love, oh love. I said, it's Bobby, my old friend Bobby. He had to get me out of the right hold on time, so he did. Because I was saying earlier, my motivation for it was getting hard. It was quite cynical. I needed money badly. I was about 50 grand in debt and I couldn't really pay half because we'd lost a fair chunk of our household income after the recession and the public sort of paper. And so I was thinking to myself, OK, I wrote a novel to think about December and my wife loves it and my mom loves it. And that's nearly enough, you know? Really something that's loved by my wife and my mom really felt like I had done my life's work as an artist. And so anything that happened after that was just icing on the cake. So I thought, OK, the thing I set out to do was done. Now I can write a novel just to make money. And unfortunately, that was how I thought it was getting hard to start. But it became something else, really, because the voices were all so familiar and they were all voices of people so adieu to me that it became an English almost part of myself. So this is the thing about December. I started writing 12 years ago. And I started to write a book about what we call in North Tiberary a room from a bit of a bad help. So I suppose you could say the main character, John C. Cunliffe, is in some ways deficient. But really he's extremely insightful. He's just almost completely silent. And I know most of the people who are like that. I know people from North Tiberary and rural Limerick who are almost fully silent. But we'll have these raging internal dialogues. They have all these things going on in slide and they're so astute, perceptive, and they're so exhumed. But you'll never see it. You'll never hear it. Because they just have got a very oblique way of dealing with the world. So this novel is written in the calendar before. It was described once as the worst novel ever written. But I thought it was spectacularly unfair to be honest. Here we go. Yes, you risk your own and you put it out there. So I'll read a little bit from March. So it's written into 12 chapters, 12 months of the year. And in March, John C. is in a very bad form. His parents passed away and he's kind of done on the dumps. He's struggling. He's living alone at a farm. The land he lives on, that he's inherited, is his own. So he's under this intense pressure. The book set is the start of our so-called Kenti Tiger. And so land prices were inflating exponentially. And everything was, you know, incredibly artificial and constructed and we know these notions about ourselves. Land prices were just ridiculous. But John C. is under pressure. But he feels this terrible inability to act. So it starts with each month in the novel. John C. reflects on how that month looked in his childhood. And he forescribes how that month looks in the present moment. Christ was a great stretch in the evenings. March, already imagined. March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. He chases the years pure solid flying. The worst of the cold has gone anywhere thanks to the kebab. Daddy would make these same observations every year to start March. He would also give his predictions for the weather to come. The quantity and location of slugs and beetles and other pretty trolleys. The hop of a cockroach. The zigzag of rabbits and foxes across fields. The color of the evening shadow cast by the Arra Mountains. And the fields that couldn't up to their feet. The early or late parter, a return of migrating birds. And the height of their flight. All of these things and more spoke to Daddy. A temperament of the coming season in a secret language of signs and signals. Arra stops pouting, mother would tell him. And roll with her eyes towards heaven. But then you would hear her repeating Daddy's predictions word for word to her friends in the ICA. While they drank tea and ate currant tea and stuffed in the kitchen. And it would eye and wonder at Daddy's knowledge and skill and nod to each other knowingly and say now, how is this infectors in the mech office? And all their smartness would tell us that. Loneliness covers the earth like a blanket. It flows in the stream down through the callows to the lake. It's in the walk in the yard and the briars in the haggard and the empty outbuildings are bursting with it. It runs down the walls inside the house like tears and grows on the walls outside like a poison choking weed. It's in the sky and the stones and the clouds and the grass. The air is thick with it. You breathe it into your lungs and you feel it might suffocate you. It runs into hollow places like rainwater. It settles on the grass and on trees and takes their shapes and all the earth is wet with it. It has a smell like the inside of a saucepan, scraped metal, cold and sharp. When it hits you, it feels like a wrap of a hurly across your knuckles and a frosty winter's morning in PE. Sharp, shocking pain. But inside you, so it can't be seen and no one says sorry for causing it. You're asked so you walk away and no kind teacher wants to look at it and tell you it'll be grand, good lad. But you know if another man stood where you're standing and looked at the same things, he wouldn't see it or feel it. He'd see that the fields are only wet with dew and the walls only running because the vents are blocked with dirt and grime. And it's Virginia creeper that climbs the house that people used to stop to admire for its lovely, fiery colors under passage up the air towards the front door. So it only exists in your head. It only occupies a tiny space. Is it even an inch squared? Probably not. How big could it be? Not even as big as one of those atroids that science teacher used to be on about. It's nothing and everything at the same time. The world doesn't change or anything in it and someone dies. The mountains keep their still strength. The sun it's heat. The rain it's wetness. Blackbirds still hop and flutter about the back lawn fighting over worms. The cats still screeches and haws at the back window for a grove. Bees still dance about the flowers and the happen trees, all of us searching, searching for an awful cruelty in the business of nature. The brutal sameness of things. The sky was the same blue the day after that he died as it was the day before. The uncaring rain didn't stop while the buried mother just buckled it, eating her into the down and ran in muddy rivers from the height of the road below. So as fast forward to July, where Judzie's cheered up considerably. He has been hospitalised in the meantime but he's met a nurse. He first of all calls a lovely voice because he can't see her and in this passage I give out some sentences because I always have a sense of my late grandmother my right shoulder as I read in public and she's always saying don't be saying dirty words don't make a show of the family now for the people. You fill in the blanks you know where you are. July. You all know what herning is, don't you? Herning is kind of a cocky lacrosse and a murderer. No school in July you could give every day knocking about the farm with Eddie I'll have to say in English. Judzie's around 54 in the victim's prison but he takes back his shout at the start of the day. You could give every day knocking about the farm with Eddie or if he was right busy or had to go off laying blocks he could stay in the kitchen and one of them would help you sit in the rock top and watch your baking or you could walk over across the river field and see if you spot a rabbit or a hedgehog along with liches or maybe even a diving kingfisher. The sun didn't always split the stones but even if it rained it was never cold and you could even swim while it rained and you kind of know then how the wild animal is felt being freed. Eddie would bring Janzey to the monster finder and to Eddie work with the victim as a rule. If it was on a car it stopped at a hotel in Mitchestown and away down for their breakfast. They always did a beautiful breakfast in the hotel. One time Eddie was going to bed looking for more toast but the waitress must have gone off for a break or something. So Eddie bowled off into the kitchen to make his own toast ahead of him and Janzey was scared in case he got into trouble and Eddie shook his head and said you're Eddie's a madman and a few minutes later he came running back out with a big plate of toast and a load of more rushers and the one behind him with a wooden spoon where he actually was off and crossed with him but she was left in and Eddie and Janzey roared left in too and they all cheered and had a pure hug. The pecker done would always be possible below outside the stadium with a big pile of wild looking children and Eddie was mad about him and he'd always put money in their box and salute the pecker and the pecker done would salute him back and it wasn't everyone got a salute after the legendary pecker done and Janzey would be pure proud. If the bed car in the monster finder July is a kite on the way home he shouted we've caught bit in the hay saved now we have a proper summer it's easy to be happy in July Janzey knew now what it was like to be in love one way, hopeless love he knew, but still love it was like the time it had a standing teacher who sat in the tech a little blonde lady straight from university she was a fine pink all the tangy boys said and he gave many a break time over to discussions of her Janzey admired her brave talk but secretly he preferred her pale green eyes to any other part of her and a soft sound of her voice she went out his poem at gasping time Janzey never forgot what it was called the dong with the luminous nose it was about a wolf an ugly creature called the dong who was head over heated in love with a beautiful woman who could never return his love his love for her was on re-quite hate miss had written that word on the blackboard and underlined it twice and Janzey had not forgotten the spelling nor its meaning and were quieted not returned, not given back the whole class stayed quiet for that whole long poem and afterwards instead of guffaws and all smart comments there was only a strange sort of silence like some kind of desperate sickness had befallen lads who just a few minutes previously had been full of the joys of spring he was one of the tickest lads in that class but even Janzey knew where she was at that little blonde lady from university that shining angel of malol those dirty levels she was telling them all there was only a shower of lovesick downs and she also knew each one of them was in some way in love with her and they could sail away in her little boats and drown themselves in a sea of longing for all she cared she never returned her stupid sweaty love it was unrequited that's for all Janzey and you know I kind of based Janzey as well and I think I know what I was saying already obviously that you have to be ruthless you have to be you have to be devoid of conscience you have to steal and plunder all around you from your family and your friends if you love, if you hate just steal, steal, steal all the time so I do so I wrote a book called How We Shall Know and I based one kind of a few different women in my life father for my love she came out and people hated the main character despised her called her herdimable and evil especially because she was quite in love with her so How We Shall Know is a novel from the point of view of a pregnant woman she's had an affair with a young traveler by whom she would teach her to read and write so I suppose that's not the way it starts if you really make somebody be loved and she's on her own and she kind of uses it with her life and her past and she befriends a young girl called Mary Crappery who's also a traveler and I actually based the character of Mary Crappery and a traveler I knew are kind of new because for all the travelers I've known about life I've never really known any of them but then I suppose who you ever really know but Mary was based on a girl I knew who lived in a motel site near where my friends lived and whenever I went to visit my friends and she saw the front row of the house talking she'd come over because she seemed kind of fascinated by this she couldn't believe that four guys lived in a house with no wives and they're all over 25 it was crazy and she was very funny and she always seemed a little bit cross for some reason she talked, she laughed and she had crossed and she walked away this went on for months and months what we did gauge from the scant conversations we had was that she had kind of been sensed to have entry or passed out somehow from immunity and she'd done something unforgivable something that had to take time to be forgiven and we were never sure what it was but something to do with an engagement or marriage in the broken down so despite the story of Melody Shee originally it was called Melody Shee but Penguin said no one knows who you are this point, right? Melody Shee went on the ride and the cover, people won't know if it's Donal or Melody Shee or Melody Shee went on the ride and so I opened my collected forms of Yates and I said the first line I see would be the title of the book and luckily it was all you shall know from the hooking salad but thanks Yates for that Steve of Plunders and so this is arranged because I tend to rely on very strict requirements from my books so that I don't need to do the flat and do the paste because I also have a very hard case I spent 10 years living in an apartment in Los Angeles but I opposed to I knew fairly well and we're pretty close to being in the ghost feeling really well and it was quite romantic actually to live alone in an apartment with broken arcs because I had various orphans and I had a broken arc a lot so I spent 10 years in an apartment and I was frustrated by a share of the civil servant I had loads of time to spare and whenever I tried to write a novel it just never worked out I always felt a little bit sick at everything I wrote and I was too self-critical but one thing I could really not do was paste my pasting with all was not good so I decided I had to give myself a very strict structure to never arrive and so that's why I've written a book for pregnancy from week 12 to week 40 because in Ireland and I think they love this week 12 is when you traditionally announce your pregnancy because you're kind of some way up the wooden desk stage and it's just nice things so it starts on that week so I read from week 35 at this point many of these husbands left her and she had befriended a young tribal girl Mary Cotter she was in more danger because of the feud and Melody and Mary have moved in with Melody's father the fatness of me suddenly all swollen and puckered and filled Dad gave me sausages and rashers and fried eggs and white toast, butter, thick and coffee with sugar and cream in the mornings and chops or steaks or chicken roasted in its cracking skin and draped with bacon with spots and gravy and vegetables mashed to a watery salty paste in the evenings and he makes me graze all day on sandwiches daintyly cut and filled with dangerous, delicious things and slices of slathered fruitcake Mary Cotterie watches Why Died? picking like a sparrow and says Lord Savelessness you're the size of a house you'll have Ireland day before this baby is out and my father laughs at all the proclamations and says it's hard I stood today in the kitchen watching out the window from the sink then he was standing facing the hedge at the bottom of the garden for the maples and the elderberry meat and he was gesturing making little pictures with his hands it seemed as though he was talking to himself or to someone who was hidden in the greenery but then I saw Mary sitting on the bench behind him half hidden by the last in a row of apple trees that by sexed the garden and she was facing back looking at him while he talked with one leg tucked beneath her her arms crossed at the top board of the bench back her chin resting on them and now and then she seemed to laugh or to shake her head in wonder and I knew that that was explaining something about the wildlife hydro or the flowers or the plants and I imagined to myself that Mary's face bored impatient, willing him to stop and I felt a little bored of pain, a singly moment of regret and then they both were silent and Mary's chin was raised now from her arms and they were watching a spot beside the trunk of the maple tree and they were perfectly still and after a long moment a minute or so my father turned slowly around to her and he was smiling and Mary at one hand crossed her mouth and her eyes were opened wide they walked together back along the gentle slope to the house so easy in each other's company I have expected her to link his arm but I knew she never would it's not a thing that she would ever do I know this for a fact and yet I don't know how or why I know they came into the kitchen carrying cut grass in their shoes and I gave out to them and dad rolled his eyes inside and shook his head in mock censure and Mary laughed at his little act and towed her heels to slip her runners off and there in her storm watch jeans and her pink hoodie and her bare feet with her toenails painted red and dad stood behind her saying ab eyes, ab eyes she's with good looking to bees at me Mary and Mary's eyes were shining and burning with some excitement something she had to say to me that she'd learned just moments ago to see if I knew this wondrous thing that she now knew and the sky and the earth and the cut grass and the chirping of birds and the scent of insects and the slant of light across my father's happy face and the gleam of wonder in Mary's eyes and the smell of the morning air and the weight of life inside me all seemed even and easy and massless and perfect and right and every deficit seemed closed in that moment so I'm going to read from a short story called Tony and Moon and it's actually I know I keep a point to Amanda saying recently it's a shame to have every single thing he ever wrote he doesn't mean at all I'm going to say that because I mean he's made it and you know I kind of feel there's some truth in it because I'm not back at things I wrote and they go back but you know we have this thing we're oppressed by infinity as writers because there is infinite possibility fiction offers infinite possibility to say anything in any way there's a nominal number given to the number of words in English as a million the authors said about six years ago that the number of words in English had nominally passed a million words so if you consider a number of words and the possibility of combinations of those words it's almost infinite and this knowledge actually instead of being liberating comprehensively can be very oppressive there's literally every story out there so I can say anything I can do any prediction so what the hell do I do and most often you do nothing they all know it's too much and then we do something we think well it could have done so many other ways was this the best way to do it but the guy in commission wants to be BBC and because of BBC it's kind of anything you know he always really trusts BBC management and actually I'm not sure actually I have probably performance rights to this story because I never read a contract so if you read it from the BBC just go and mention it you heard me read it Tommy and Moe so it's based actually on an uncle of my wife's called Dan Murphy and Dan was a person who had a really powerful effect actually and you know I only met Dan a handful of times before he died but he was so tuned in to the world, to nature and he was a very quiet man another person of people who would possibly very clearly dismiss as a guy else you know somebody who was just pure enough kind of just to be kind of left at home you know he could be really good reasoning because he was a very very quiet man who lived in a cottage you know on a back road and walked to fields every day and looked at animals and drew pictures and when Dan died my mother and my sister opened a huge chest I guess it was full of books there was a lot of mythology and science physics and novels you know and literature and he was just the most amazingly well-read man but nobody would know that but so it based this story Tommy and Moe and Dan so I just read Extraction of the Story so hopefully you get a flavor of the story and Dan was and he's actually narrated by a writer who's suffering from regular black and it's time when he stopped illness and this kind of opened up for me and the pressure and the pressure of a commission from BBC I rented a house for a year one time at a very ancient town and I made friends by dint of passing up and down with a man who lived in a small building down the road I was meant to be writing a book but I wasn't able and so I walked and waited for the words to come back to me and he paid in advance and the weight of expectation attached to it had crippled me and he was up on 80 I'd said though he never spoke of his age he was sprightly and lean and he had most of his hair and he kept it carefully combed and he tried never to show me his pain but I felt it and he told me things in fits and starts across the ancient table in the kitchen of the cottage his grandfather built Tommy had a friend he called Moe he'd fallen out of their bay but and never fully met up and he said I'd been here to this house to a Yulu he told me and sit down there and drink this up of tea Moe was from big land from a right swanky crowd I often met Moe on the road at the cross before Tommy's he lay a cold eye on me as he passed on his bicycle straight back and stated and the odd day Tommy would be keeping an eye out for me from his garden gate and I'd hear them exchange he'd drawn of Moe with a steady and skilful hand and he'd say look how stupid Moe looks in this picture have you ever seen anyone delightful of Moe? and I'd allow that I hadn't and Tommy would shake his head in mock sadness and crumple his picture and fling it into the grate for fear at all he'd said and nod towards the door and wink at me when the griffins were all gone his neighbors one time Moe, their house and bit of land fell to a cousin from town who set it and sold the cottage to a queer crowd to all his witnesses they came to Tommy's orphan time and frightened him with their litany of certitudes the things that were going to happen to him and not one thing would he do to save himself unless he was born again Lord God! he said to them but enough to be born the once but he had his the heart to run them over the same there was a woman he'd like to marry but he knew no way to cover the ground between them and not achieve he read the thing in the book one time about a tribe in Africa who considered themselves to be the rightful owners of all the cattle in the world he taught often about them at the mart in the middle fathering the cattle he was guardian not owner of in the unknowable minds of those lean dark nearly naked herders he imagined himself going to where they lived to their plain of sand grass and prickly bushes circled by jungles and low hills what would they make of him if he were always white-faced and wellington booted out from the undergrowth into the light of their campfire would they laugh at him or welcome him thank him for feckning their freezins half a world away would they call him brother would they kill him there now would be a dead, speared bleeding out beneath a white hot sun turned quickly to carrion by the savage jaws inciting beaks his son leached skulls saved to adorn a secret temple wall he milled back molecules in the bellies of beasts and besprayed with their spool across the savannah along their ancient trails he said wouldn't that be a glorious execue and I was startled to quietness by the word, by his words by the talk of it he kept the hope that he found by a river on the edge of death the wind was too pronounced and there were balls of light shot and meant to live it he straightened and set the wrist of the hawk's wing put an elastic band and stood with cardboard and plucked out the shot with tweezers and fed it bits of raw chicken and sat still and siphoned for days and nights with the hawk perched on his hand the arm of an old coat he fashioned and sewed and used on his hand in place of the letter of love used by professionals and by echoes of memories of things told to him in childhood he knew to be still to put the bird between needles so he could associate the sight of him with food to gradually show the bird the world perched all the while on his hand he flew the hawk free when it had the full of its head back and his heart tonked until it looped around against the sun and swooped back to him it lived with him for seven years in the back kitchen and a stout perch he'd made from boughs of oak where it would meet his eyes sometimes and hold them and tell him in its dark silence all the things about the world could be known by a bird of prey and tell him that it loved him pure and perfect the hawk flew in one summer evening wet with blood full of shackles and died it had come back to him to secretly say that again and he couldn't and his breath went from him and his reason for a time and the world tipped a bit and never fully write it he could never take a pet again after that a few old catties mooched in around the yard and he had tiny feathers perhaps but they never belonged to him he never loved them nor did him and a few old catties came and went and he never pet them the way some do tie him occupied him the notion of it being a thing how was it the present moment what's the moment a thing infinitely divisible downwards so the smallest part of a moment doesn't exist so a moment doesn't exist so time doesn't exist only the trick the mind plays in itself to stop all things seem to happen at once these are the things an evening can hang on that can give form to an hour of standing at the haggard gate leaning resting the foot on the second bar regarding thistles and bees and distant mountains with a little eye the idea that everything has happened and nothing has happened yet that existence is a singularity of infinite smallness that mam and dad are still alive and were never born that the hawk is unhunting and might come home yet the seeming uselessness of existing occurred after him the depth of the water had depended the river occurred after him where it seemed sometimes in flood to rage against its own rushing the kindles of rope in the lap of the barn the discs of poison led for rats but yet each morning hope peeled from the eastern sky and rang all day in his ears or for as much of each day as was needed so I finished up by reading well almost finished it up this is a short extract from the Loan White Sea which is coming up next March next month in Ireland and in July in the States so the first section it's a book in three sections and the first section is about a civilian refugee who's coming down from what happened today so it's based on a short story actually I read about a guy who I start out of conflict in Syria gave all of his money to a so-called high-end human trafficker a grizzly braver he was told that the boat that would take him and his wife and daughter across Mediterranean would be sound it would be almost like a pleasure cruise and halfway across to a big island from the Turkish coast they hit bad weather and so he and another passenger went to the bridge to confront Captain and crew about the situation and realized that the boat was on a manned on a crew and it was hooked up to a GPS system and that was doing them across Mediterranean and of course the boat sank and his wife and daughter drowned so yeah, I read the story it was a very small story in the Guardian and I felt I needed to tell the story to make this a bigger story than it was but then I was thinking this is my story, can I take this, can I do this I thought it's a mature ghost of course it was an occasion I was only allowed to talk so at this point Farouk and his wife and daughter are in the boat and his wife is telling his daughter a story the subbing lies was in his ears a while before he realized he was coming from his daughter his wife had been speaking to her in a low voice a story about a girl who had been taken prisoner by a king who wanted to marry her but he was old and very ugly and she would never love him so he kept her locked away in a room in a tower filled with pretty things all sorts of jewelry and clothes and music instruments and performers and clowns and storytellers sitting by a window feeding a tiny bird that landed on the sill and whispering to the bird and they came with visitors in the evening because the girl would never speak to him and he asked his best archer to kill the bird one day and he watched from afar through a looking glass there's a slender arrow pierced the bird's breasts right there in the window sill and the girl was whispering to it and he watched as she sat there crying silently for hours and her tears formed around the bird's little body and eventually the king regrettably had done and he tried to command all the birds of the sky to visit the girl and to sit on her sill while she whispered to them but the birds wouldn't listen they wouldn't even stay still while he shouted at the sky with trees and the king's rage flooded through him and drove him insane and he asked all of his archers to kill every bird in the kingdom and they obeyed him because they were afraid of him and the killing of the birds took years and years and he asked the king all of his gold and all his castles because he had to recruit archers from all over the world to kill the birds but eventually the skies of the kingdom were empty and birdsong was never heard again and the king was a feeble old man living in a tiny shack in a silent forest and the girl had long since escaped the tower and returned to her home and her family and the king had long forgotten why he hated birds so much why he had killed them all because of their annihilation and Farouk wondered why Martha had chosen this story so sad why she had made her daughter cry and he realized that every other passenger had fallen silent and they were all looking down his wife and the only light there in the hold was from the slit along the jam of the hatch above them and from the torches of phones but he could see that some of the women and the girls had tears in their eyes and some of the men had thoughtful expressions and some looked angry and the only sound was his daughter's blow-sabs as she clung faster on her mother and the sound of his wife saying hush love it's not a true story, it's a feeble and it's moral is how useless it is to blame others for things not being reluctant to be and then a man stood and Farouk expected him to rebuke Martha pretending such a story and he compared himself to defend his wife to cut the men down to size telling him to be quiet and to keep his mind himself and he should be ashamed of himself for taking so to heart a story told by women to her child but a complaining man just said the life jackets we gave them to that boy because he said they'd be replaced come on my friends we have to see the captain and the crew we can't just sit here in the dark like fools and another voice behind him said there are no life jackets on this boat there is no captain there is no crew there's nothing on this boat but us we'll show up to the definite end of Mike Nurtre's report there's a short poem called sweet man in loving memory of Donnie Ryan my dad had a coolest job and he took it out on us he was a perfectionist gentleman so he drove a van full of sweets around the country in summer I was big sweet man Einstein said time was an illusion anyway so somewhere we're still picking stock from the shelves of any of the women's warehouse driving west across the channel, over the clanking boards of the bridge at Parthanna, my eyes closed against the fear of falling through. You're still singing Big John with the sun warm on your face through the windscreen. I'm still holding back my tears at the bit where Big John dies to save the other miners, because a boy old enough to go to work with his dad is too old to be crying at suns. Not that you'd ever have minded my tears. You'd have laughed and reached a hairy knuckled hand across, swiped it gently down my face, and sang a different song. In Einstein's time, you're singing still. Thank you. Thank you all. And actually, just as an encouragement to ask anything, my wife gets constantly all the time provient to others. I can't lie, I just can't do it. So anything you ask that you would please me, you have to answer them. I can't even help us get these days, you just talk to me. Yes, I'm sorry. I'm like, come on, come on. Hi, my name's Emma. I'm in a professor at Smith's class and I'm just writing a professor here. And we talked about the variety of voices and kind of like mining from people you know. Do you feel like you kind of get enough of that from the sort of like living life and kind of getting out there? Or do you feel like to build characters you like intentionally like try to meet people to like add variety to your life? Yeah, it's a good question actually. And you know, I know writers who are kind of permanent really. I know one writer who has very much donated a cottage and country to him and he lives there and he eats cheese. He's no money. And he very rarely eats people. He goes to the Art Book Launch where he drinks as much wine as he can and he eats as many kind of things as he can. And he writes the most amazing prose and he has the most visceral insights about humanity. It's amazing. I know he does it. Maybe it's just an inborn with him. But for me, I need to meet people already. You know, I definitely have to have a store experience draw up on. But having said that, I mean, it's kind of a glib piece of advice given to sometimes given to students of great writing to write, you know. I mean, by doing that you will narrow your range of experience. You know, in addition, we'll create a turn into fiction very much. So I think it's always good to have a starting off point of something you know very well. Or I think you know very well. It's kind of like Hans says, it's very important to always write towards what you don't know. You know, stretch and discover things yourself. Because literature is literally the casting of light. You know, and it will always necessarily be a very dim light. I mean, we're not going to be, we're not going to illuminate anything completely so it's talking on because we can never know anything for sure. Now it's one of those conundrums. I mean, how can you ever know how it is to be somebody else? And so fiction is just a series of guesses all the time. We're just trying to grasp that it's something limited truth, but we'll come up with a better people. Which you kind of have to be, I mean, you kind of have to be. Yeah, thanks very much. Yeah, your talk was really very moving. Greetings. And I think sometimes it must be really difficult for anybody to elbow their way out to the very credit stage on Irish writers that you have today. And still you've managed to do it to carve out a space for yourself and on a successfully. What would you say that you bring to it? That's enabled you to, to do this. You've already hated it really yet. And whatever it's said to be, you're ignorant, you know, I'll just take them well. But it is, it's kind of a stage of writing. I mean, someone said to me the other day, we've passed a point of being a writer. I mean, there are so many books out there, at the moment there are about eight million books in print, you know. How many million books have been written? So let's point to then more stories, but it's just, it's a very, it's a very human impulse. In a way it's quite a natural thing. I mean, we're trying to impose order and chaos. We're trying to make all these incoherent, inquisit happenings seem like in the pattern. You know, that's, that's why we always, that's what we have stories. I think it's why we've always told stories before language even there were stories. And so we're never going to stop. But it is, I mean, you know, I think it's just important not to think about art in terms of competition. You know, even the rest of the way, it's going to happen. Once you get out there, it's going to be in competition for other things, television and, and every sort of media. And you know, I mean, the way that we experience stories now is, is, is reducing, reducing, you know. And narratives have actually taken a lot of action involved in some ways. But then we know, we agree, sometimes we can have a, you know, maybe a normal traditional sense of what narratives are, how it should be presented. Because there are so many ways to tell stories. I was very lucky, to be honest. You know, I mean, I was talking earlier about how, how, how, how Sarah Devastoff, who had done to found Tram Press, and we even in her infancy is, you know, in a kind of a, in a kind of a outfit. She was an intern, I could do with Press, when she happened to pick up the manuscript of The Thing Where Summer. You know, and she lobbied her employer in New Florence that published it. And he did. You know, he saw a great thing when he went from there. It was, you know, I, I ate huge, huge look. I ate, I kind of laughed at them as I looked at it. So you need to have a good look, and you need to be a bit thick-headed, and you need to be a bit, um, thick-skinned. I'm not actually thick-skinned at all. I'm very sensitive. That's where the terrible, the bad things we face as writers, you know, because you need to have a certain level of, kind of, finely tuned, instead of everything. You need to be open to things, and you will be open to pain, and rejection, and to all the hours of, of, of being judged by people who read you. So it's, it's kind of hard to close it out sometimes. You're lucky to take it something that most of us have. I loved, um, All We Shall Know, I've been it twice. I just, I, I wanted to get your, uh, expression of how you broke, uh, in the first person, broke a woman's side, and I guess it's a male. I'm not sure I got it hard to understand what you're going to tell me, but it's hard to hear what your thought process was in the beginning. But first of all, I got to know a Muslim. No, I always did. I mean, I'm not really sure, um, I literally just, I have a kind of a process where I try to inhabit as fully as possible the character of a writer, and I get the best percent of all certities, because I do feel that certainty is an aftermath of creativity, where you have, I see people these days who are well-intentioned, but are, are stuffed almost to bursting with certainties. You know, we ship them to things they hold, be absolutely inviolable, you know, and the kind of you are, are good against. And I, I, I kind of, I try to find that state of being, so everything is a question to me. And so when I try to inhabit a character I'm writing, I ask, how would this character react to this situation? How would it feel to be in this situation? Because you never really know, you just think, you're best staff, possible average. And also, um, I, I rely on my wife. She's dark. Yeah, exactly, yeah. My wife, my mom, I do, uh, actress critics, and I go to supporters. So this kind of, uh, you know, piggyback down the last question, really used it to know how you felt your way into the Syrian character, which seems very different to me, um, to cross cultures that way. Yeah. And, um, it's much easier for me to understand writing across gender, um, that, that seems like something, you know, through your intimates and through your intuitions, just as, you know, being people of the same culture, you can flip the mirror and see a product enter. But, um, can you tell us, like, how, process-wise, how do you, how do you prepare yourself for that? And the second part of the question is you said you'd give yourself a structure for every novel. What, what structure is the novel? Okay, well, certainly, actually, it's a novel in three parts. Um, it's, it's, it's about three men, Farouk, Lampy, and John. And Farouk is, his story is, and I described, um, Lampy is a bus driver in Limerick. And John's a former political lobbyist. And their stories converged. He thought that at the end, you know, and it's not really about the ending, it's about their individual journeys to life and in that moment. But, um, when I kept writing Syrian character, I was, I was really upset by, upset by Syria. I was, I was kind of obsessed with the town of Aleppo. And I, I said that story about Lampy, actually, in Aleppo a few years ago. And, uh, I didn't do very assiduous research for it. Because I find when I research into deeply, I start to be didactic and a little bit telly, as any writer can say about it. I start to try to tell the reader everything about this thing or this place or this time. And it stopped being fiction. It stopped being a story. So it didn't, um, go too deeply into, um, place or culture or even the topography. Um, I just wrote a story called Lampy about a Catholic priest who befriended young boys in this town or, you know, teenage boys in the town of Aleppo. And it starts to play early. And it starts to have Lampy competitions to see who can hit it early or should it afford us with early. And I was asked to read the story in the town of Ternes at the Breary where about 80 Syrian people had resettled. Um, and as I read I was starting to sweat and I was thinking, God, I'm really being found out here now. I'm really rumbled now. You know, my, my, my, my, my latest research is going to really bite me now, you know, in a few minutes. When I finish the story and just end up and say, put it in your ear. And so I finished the story and I said, I don't believe your story for a second. I, it doesn't sound right to me. But it turned out she was Irish and she'd never been to Syria either. So And this beautiful Syrian lady stood up and she saved me. She was an angel. She said, I'm very surprised that here in Jordan hasn't lived in a level because he described his soul exactly correctly. She said, I felt that was all again. Oh, thank God. So we're very lucky. But I felt grateful obligation when I came to Farouk the other to get the right. And so, I mean, I based Farouk on an actual, an actual story. I mean, the story I appropriated from the news story. Well, I think I got the voice very right. And I got Farouk's top process very right. And the process of grief. Like, I didn't experience this sort of grief until very recently. And I've been writing about grief for years, you know. And it was a strange experience, to be honest. To have this book written, a book that's kind of about grief. And then, you know, to have it finished and printed and bound for experience, actually really grief was out. And it was kind of hard to be honest in a very strange way. I think that, yeah, I imagine it correctly. This is how bad it is. And so, you know, I did, I feel that the application that I fenced towards Farouk, I feel that telling the story, it paid off. You know, I think it might do some good. It might make these stories less of an English that happens every day. Because we hear stories all the time, we hear numbers now. It's all statistics, the work that was to went down. And the souls that were saved, the souls that were lost. And it's really in the area between Turkey and Syria and Europe. It's great, great, guys. We're becoming immune in Europe, but we did a lot of things, really. Because we have to kind of ignore the exhibit. If we did all these things the same, it couldn't exist. If there are no more questions, thank you so much for coming. It's a pleasure. You know, this is actually the first reading you've done, since you watched that. Yeah. There's something very, very serious. And you, there's actually somebody that has copy of what I see and figures you read that. So, it's not even for you, but I have some permission to write it real hard. A humor. Thank you for all the ways you made us laugh was a little bit of that. We will have a chance to talk a little afterward and do a kind of some books. Yes, we go around. It's okay, there's some outside if you can bring your own. Let me just interject this little pause in the stream of events. I mentioned on the way in, of course, that bullet, Boston coming up two weekends. And Jason's symposium and other things. So, I wanted to mention, especially with many students, very early this evening, we have this weekend, Saturday, I don't know if we have Kathy who's participating in our graduate student conference all day at Connolly House, right James? And that under the term of living Irishness. So, it'll be really wonderful when we have a lot of work that's going to be at the end of that day there. So, please look at that. It's a, let's see, look on the social media in particular, the Post and Front Campus. So, living Irishness, Connolly House, starting yesterday, the economy as well. All right, thank you very much. But beginning, I think at 9 a.m. on Saturday, okay? And then, I'm reminded by the redoubtable joke that we have Saturday, April 21st, right? Our Joyce and Journalism will be the theme this year for the annual Joyce Symposium. So, who might be guess would come to it? The Joyce and Journalism Conference. Maybe Fintlal too will be there. Maybe we'll see our own local Charlie Sett will be there and then some other characters. We'll see you right here, like Joe Elanti and also Garrett Leonard, I guess, from the University of Toronto. So, thank you. I'll be the Saturday, the 21st there. But I'll have you go, all right? So, another word for...