 Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to the Burns Library at Boston College. We're very pleased to have our first YouTube live webcast here of an event during this pandemic season and what a better way to do this than to have Ehlers-Nagiva with a book launched today in conversation with James Smith from our English faculty and Irish Studies program. My name is Christian Dupont and I'm the Burns Librarian. What is the Burns Library? It's our collection of rare books, special collections and manuscripts at Burns at Boston College where we are renowned for our Irish literary collections, historical collections, music collections. I'm looking at my colleague Beth Sweeney who curates those and the home of a program that we call the Burns Visiting Scholar and Irish Studies in partnership with our Irish Studies program. I see my colleague Rob Savage who's our director of the Irish Studies program and we have brought scholars to campus for residency programs for more than 30 years at this point. So we're delighted to have again Ehlers here is our writer-in-residence and teaching and I think we'll hear more about your activities on campus during our conversation here. We have a number of your students here as well. There are about 10 of us in the room. We're thinking about all of you who are joining from the state side here, especially in Ireland. We feel that much closer to you today because for this one week during daylight savings time changes we're actually four hours apart only. And so we're thinking about all of you who are joining us here online. We're going to, after the conversation, have a little time for some question and answers. Some of you will see on your screen a live chat feature which you can use for that. I'll remind you of that afterward. I also want to recognize, speaking of the presence of Ireland here today, we have our Consul General in Boston, Lisa Moore who's come over from downtown Boston. She comes many times to our campus events and we're really pleased. Thank you and honor to have you here. And not to upstage you, Lisa, but rather to compliment your presidents. The Irish Ambassador Dan Mulhall really wanted to provide a video greeting on this occasion. And so I'm going to play that now and you can. It's one of the great pleasures of mine as ambassador of Ireland to the United States to travel around this great country and to meet wonderful Irish communities wherever I've been. And also to come across so many people who, whether they're Irish American Irish or indeed just having affinity with Ireland who treasure and value Irish culture. There's probably nowhere in the United States where that tradition is more apparent than it is in the Boston area. And in Boston itself, I guess the place where that tradition of Irish, of regard and cherishing Irish culture is found most strongly is in Boston College. And I've been to Boston College many times and of course in the last six months I've done quite a number of virtual events with them and I'm always delighted to do so. I value greatly the work that Boston College does in promoting Ireland and Irish studies and in deepening the understanding here in America of our country, its culture, its people, its history and so forth. It's a pleasure for me today to speak at the launch of the latest collection by Elish Niguivna. Elish is one of Ireland's finest writers. She has many, many publications to her name. She is highly regarded in particular in an art form which is one in which the Irish have excelled in particular and that is the short story. And this I believe is her seventh collection of short stories which is a great achievement in itself and I know that she's currently a Burns scholar at Boston College. Again it's another program which Boston College runs which is extremely valuable in fostering deeper links in culture, history, politics and so forth and people-to-people links between Ireland and the Boston area where there's such a strong Irish heritage which goes back centuries and the Burns scholars bring that tradition up to date by contributing to the contemporary field of Irish studies at Boston College. I know also from diplomatic sources which of course as a diplomat I would never betray if you torture me that Elish Niguivna is the world's greatest grandmother and I know there are many who would claim that title but my sources assure me that that is the case. So I want to wish Elish and her colleagues at Boston College and the publishers of her new book all the very best for what I know in Boston you call pub day and that might cause a bit of confusion in Ireland but but it's a day when a book is published and that's of course a great moment for an author like Elish and Elish deserves every success with her latest volume. Thank you Ambassador Moho. I think there's going to be no confusion today about what kind of pub day this is going to be. We're thinking again all of you and Dublin around Ireland where you're under a tighter lockdown in the last few weeks. So this is pub day is in publishing book day. Elish, Jim we look forward to your conversation. We have been for quite a while so take it away. Thank you. Thanks Christian and again welcome. I'd add my welcome to Christians to those who are here with us in person and a special welcome to those that are joining us online remotely and perhaps especially those in Ireland. We know that you're enduring level five restrictions right now and as you can see we're doing our best to navigate the current trying circumstances with a brave if still masked face. My hope is that this event then which brings us together to celebrate the creative writer and acknowledge the gifts of the imagination will make today just that little bit more tolerable. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the renowned Irish writer Elish Nagivna to recognize her ongoing contribution to Irish letters and to help launch her most recent collection Little Red and Other Stories which has been published today by Blackstaff Press. I was first introduced to Elish's work by my former colleague and teacher Philip O'Leary when we read her short story Midwife to the Fairies. I teach her award-winning novel The Dancer's Dancing published in 1999 most years here at BC including this semester in my graduate seminar where we were so lucky and lucky enough to have Elish come and visit and talk about her work to my students and I hosted Elish back in 2009 here at BC when she first visited us. So given that history of engagement with her work it has been such a joy to have her here with us this semester as the Burns visiting professor in Irish studies. I know she is busy with her own writing conducting research on the Irish antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker in the famed Burns collections here and teaching her creative writing fiction workshop. But speaking personally it has been a gift, a salve against the felt isolation of the times that the two of us have arranged our Tuesday afternoon walks around the reservoir a chance to chat about things here in the US and at home in Ireland to discuss our teaching and our respective research and writing. Elish Nugivna was born in Dublin she was educated at University College Dublin and holds a PhD in Irish folklore. She worked for many years as the archivist as an archivist at the National Library in Ireland where among other feats she was instrumental in assisting my good friend and fellow graduate of the BC Irish studies program Anne Butler secure and catalogue the papers of neglected Irish writer Elizabeth O'Connor Una Troy. She has taught creative writing at Trinity College Dublin University College Dublin the Irish Rider Center the Faber Academy and elsewhere. She's the author of more than 30 books including her recently published 12,000 days a memoir of love and lost 2018 seven collections of short stories several novels children's books plays and many scholarly articles and literary reviews. Her novels include The Bray House 1990 Fox Swallow Scarecrow 2007 and The Shelter of Neighbours 2012. She has been the recipient of the Stuart Parker Award for drama the Butler Award for prose several O'Rochthos awards for novels in the Irish the Penn Award for outstanding contribution to Irish literature and a Hennessey Hall of Fame award. Her novel The Dancers Dancing was short listed for the Orange Prize in fiction. Oilish's stories have appeared in many anthologies including The Long Gaze Back an anthology of Irish women writing Writers 2016 and The Granta Book of the Irish short story published in 2010. Her work is widely translated including into German, Italian, Czech, Japanese and most recently Bulgarian. She is a member of Estona, an ambassador for the Irish Rider Center and president of the folklore of Ireland society. Before we turn to our discussion and I'll hand off to Oilish for a few moments before I we start the discussion let me just finish with a few insights from critics of Oilish Nagivna's contributions to my field of study our field of study. Writing over 20 years ago Tina Mahoney presciently recognized what all of us who read her work now more fully appreciate and I quote Oilish Nagivna's voice is a distinctive one in today's Ireland. Her trenchant social commentary is delivered with humor and a sprinkle of magic and can be devastatingly on target. It is a sustained and highly imaginative voice that is all the more distinctive in that while answering a feminist imperative it is not constrained by contemporary feminist fashion our critical dicta. Fellow writer and novelist short story writer Mary Robbins sorry Mary Morrissey in her 2017 review of Oilish's selected stories a copy of which we have here beside me suggests that she is and I quote a polymath she writes in English and Irish and across the genres young adult crime and literary fiction in both the short story and novel form. Lightness is what marks out Nagivna's style. Lightness coupled with serious intent she is a deceptive writer deceptively light in tone deceptively erudite in her references deceptively irreverent in her treatment form and lastly Martina Evans in her Irish Times review of the same collection identifies what she refers to as quote the Nagivna magic and points to the quote delicious interweaving of old and new as a hallmark of this writer's work Evans review then quotes directly from Oilish's story illumination where the narrator wonders quote if it was possible to make new fiction like which I meant find a new template and new mode I'd ask you to join with me in welcoming Oilish I know Oilish wants to say a few remarks and then I'll come back and maybe I'll ask some questions thank you very much I'm smiling under my mask it's um thank you very much Jim for that flattering and wonderful introduction and I feel after all this magic and humor now we're going to come back to earth with a bang but um I'd like to first of all say a huge thank you to and briefly to to to a few people first of all to Brian Burns who sponsors the the Burns Scholarship which makes it possible for me to be here and and secondly to everyone in Boston College who has made my stay here even in during the pandemic absolutely magical and um well magical in various ways and very extremely enjoyable especially to Jim who who Professor Smith who's doing the and our walks on Tuesday afternoons and to Robert Savage the director of the art studies program Christian DuPont who has organized all this the director of the Burns library Suzanne Mattson and my colleague in the English department with whom I also have walks and um oh yes and um father Oliver Rafferty who has been very very helpful to me as well he's he can't be here right now and to my lovely students a few of whom are here today Mary and Joe and and the others may be watching um so so thank you everybody and thank you my friends the book is dedicated to my friends which is a good wide category of people and many of them are watching in the U.S. of whom there are more than 100 and more online right now good congratulations and well wishes are pouring it over the chat there yes yes and they're scattered around they're in Ireland of course neighbors in Glasnevin um England Portugal Spain Italy Joanna hello and not forgetting of course Sweden Denmark Bulgaria and possibly a few other places as well so so so so I really I really appreciate your support now as as as always and thank you Ambassador Mulholl for your nice um introduction and to Lisa uh more the council here in Boston for actually braving coming in person thank you okay thanks so my last line I quoted from Martina Evans quoted your own narrator in the story illumination if it was possible to make wondering whether it was possible to make new fiction by which I mean find a new template a new world so I was wondering what might start by jumping off that assertion and ask you to talk a little bit about your new collection because that's what you've done you found something new to write fiction about um and perhaps signal whether or not there are ways in which this work connects to your work of old but also the ways in which it might be different does this collection offer a new template a new mold for readers of Eilish's work I I I'm not sure about that I think when I wrote those lines I was thinking of finding a form which would be a kind of hybrid maybe between memoir and fiction um this collection short stories yeah some of the stories maybe maybe um a little bit like that um the collection came up when I when I first thought about you know does this collection have a unifying theme I said no no it doesn't because um I think one of the great um advantages of the short story as a genre as a form to write in over say the novel with which it's usually contrasted is that um um you you you you you you write the stories in a short space of time at least initially individually and um and you can grab life on the hot as it were in a short story in a way which is almost impossible to do with a novel just because of the relationship of the novel time that it's written over quite you know a lengthy period um the stories um I think allow one to um to I think a short story every short story has its own integrity and is relating to the moment in which it was conceived um I like um you know Shelley's famous line about um the mind and the act of creation is uh as a fade in coal and and the coal kind of fades more and more as you actually do the writing so that you're getting further and further away from the moment of inspiration and he's talking about the lyric poem obviously but um I think with the short story you have more of a chance of kind of holding on to that fire um in the writing of the story so the energy of whatever inspired the story which would be something outside yourself kind of resonating with something inside yourself I think that's what starts it and I think the stories can do that so each one has its own integrity so I thought no not much unifying then when I looked at the collection I realized hey they are unified they're unified by me um of course um but they're also unified they have um common themes and you want to talk about running through them a couple of those that you see and maybe we can talk about some well well um I I don't know why I was surprised um but um when I look at the collection and most of the in this case um the stories have all been written over the period of maybe two or three years from certainly from around 2015 to 2018 let us say um so of course they reflect concerns in my life um things that interested me and at that time yeah and those things um surprise surprise and are getting older and the kind of challenges and maybe opportunities of of of aging as well um travel seems to be a theme that comes up uh time and again in the stories not surprisingly since I do a fair amount of traveling um so so I think they were the two themes and I suppose I should say um that in 2013 just seven years ago or seven years ago my husband died rather suddenly and that was a very traumatic um event of course for him but also for me and um for a couple of years following that I had no real uh I had let's call it a writer's block I didn't really want to write fiction so um I wrote a memoir though because I'm used to writing something so um then and around 2015 16 I began to write again actually Sinead Lieson the who was editing the long gaze back asked me to write a story and I as a writer this is something I tell my students um I if somebody asks me for a story or anything I say yes I always I always say yes um so and then Belinda McKill asked me for a story um for an anthology she was doing a very good anthology um called kind of compass so I wrote another one and then I was back back into into into it yeah and I know there were other things as well and not that we need a catalog but as somebody who came to your work primarily through the dancers dancing a novel that I have this relationship with and has been a constant a constant in my teaching there's also a recognizable interest in language and language acquisition uh characters who learn new languages who notice dialect um and again it was it was interesting to see that as a thread through some of the other stories I've read in in between times um you had some of stories that you I know that you wanted to read extra accepts form maybe take a break and yeah I read I read a little bit and I'm going to slip off my mask because um when I don't do that my glasses slip off and then I can't read so um after all that talk about travel and um language and everything I'm going to read in the first instance um just two pages from a story called lemon curd which is about a woman who travels from the south side to the north side of Dublin a journey which few people seem to make ever in their lives apparently and um and yeah there's a there's a little bit uh well actually she's on her way to a class in russian um in this piece of the story um but she's also contemplating um aspects of the dialect that she hears around her on the bus so I'll cut the bollocks of your mother the voice is a man's loud angry miss Moffitt hears a lot of interesting mobile conversations on this bus for example the day before yesterday a young man asked someone so do you want that pony pony the word intrigued her miss Moffitt had a feeling it might be a slang word for something some sort of drug but she didn't really know she considered the possibility that he was referring to an actual horse I'll see you beside the garage at eight had been his next line you could have a horse beside a garage or even in a garage out in the western suburbs to which this bus would eventually find its way pony could be a little horse or some sort of drug the transaction of dubious legality in either case the voice of this man today's man is so angry that she's afraid to look too closely at him crazy people don't appreciate being looked at even though they're inviting stares she saw him getting on the bus though and waiting to pay his fare you could hardly fail to see him he's dressed all in black black hoodie black jogging pants one black shoe he has only one foot his right leg stops at the knee something about the way he is dressed suggests to her that it has been cut off and not by a doctor and not long ago the bottom of his trousers wrapped around the place where the short leg ends it looks like something packed in a shopping bag under his oxters two big crutches before he made his threat to somebody's mother or to her mother or maybe to everybody's mother she felt sorry for him but now she mainly feels frightened he comes down the aisle repeating his threat and sits down beside her not exactly beside just across the aisle nevertheless he's very close two feet separate them and she doesn't like the look of those crutches while he was walking they inspired pity but now when he's sitting down with the crutches sort of resting in his lap they look like weapons don't be silly he can't do much harm him and his one leg no the thing is standing he can't do much harm but from a seated position wouldn't it be easy to pick up a crutch and hit somebody with it the nearest person to him for example who happens to be miss Moffat herself i'll cut the bollocks off your fucking mother this is the third time he's expressed this rather strange intention since miss Moffat's mother even if she happened to be alive which she is not had never had bollocks could it be he's mixing up the word with something else breasts for instance boobs would probably be the word he juice but that word sounds too harmless and comical who knows what he's talking about the language of this part of the city is still foreign to miss Moffat bollocks might have more than one meaning over here miss Moffat is used to hearing words for sexual organs bandied about by angry men on some of the dodgier streets in the inner city the words of choice refer to female organs though not boobs anyway now it's not so much bollocks as the word cut that bothers miss Moffat she makes a snap decision get off the fucking bus see she's picking up the local dialect without even trying and that story goes on to talk about men who overstep and yeah yeah there's things that could be said about that just yes perhaps I will say it because I know Demeter my wonderful Bulgarian teacher and translator of the stories to Bulgarian is tuned in and there's a piece about the word priest upnick which means criminal in Russian and Bulgarian and means it's a wonderful word meaning somebody who oversteps the marks so yeah thanks for that so building off that um and just talking going back to something you intimated earlier this is a collection at this point of your career and you signaled aging as a potential theme or connecting theme across or a current across the the collection of stories I'm wondering do you think about yourself or do you see yourself writing at different or writing in a different way at this point in your career um I think possibly yes um I think my style and voice is pretty much the same as it has been in the past I think one's voice as a writer gets maybe just more stronger and more distinctive as one matures or ages um but I think in the with the stories in this collection I experimented a little more in a in a quiet kind of way um in that um I haven't written very much about um I haven't located stories or any fiction much outside of Ireland in the past um and this time I thought yeah why not do that you know I there are other countries that I spend time in and that I love Sweden and Bulgaria and other places so I took the risk of um at least locating stories in these places though usually with the protagonist who is Irish and I also took a few risks writing a kind of story that I would not have written much in the past um say the kind of story um that the Tarjan of rights and checkup sometimes where the narrator of the story meets somebody who tells them a story the tale within a tale and so I've done that with one or two of the stories here um and um and I've also done something that I have seldom if ever done in the past which is um I've I've I've written you know when you're a writer people sometimes say I'll tell you this this is a great story for you know and um and they tell a great story but you think yeah that's a great story for you but it's you know I'm probably it's probably not going to work for me and I probably won't write it but this time I did that with uh a story that friend of mine told me um quite a complex story um and I've been thinking about that I think that is exactly what I'm talking about when I say you get a story from outside but it resonates with something inside I think I grabbed that story because um it spoke to something that was going on in my life and inside me at the time so so so I've I've tried those um I would have thought that sort of way of writing might be a bit fakesy or something in the past but I I I risked it this time. Enish um you mentioned some of the Russian short story writers checkup and I know you've talked about the influence of Alice Monroe um when you visit a class are there other writers that are you find yourself drawn to that are different are you influenced by um oh I think um sorry I'm I'm influenced drawn to Alice Monroe is my favorite short story writer of all and I know I have an influence by her and to learn to know from not about how to write short story from Alice Monroe's short stories I mean other writers that I really like and you know would love to write like almost are Jumbo Lahiri I think you know some of her stories the American Indian writer um interpreter of maladies is an absolutely fantastic story um I like Edna O'Brien and there's plenty to be learned from Edna O'Brien she's she's she's one of the really great our short story writers obviously McGarron good and I think I write you know my sort of short story them and and of course how could I forget the person who taught us in Ireland how to write a short story it's Joyce and the dead and that's my um kind of I I think the the dead type of pattern of stories as as I've talked about in class the Mary and Jo will possibly remember this um is is the sort of template for how to put a story together that I and many others have been following and so including McGarron I think so um so all of those William Trevor I like very much and to but he writes in a different you know he's he's a different kind of short story writer so maybe do you want to give us another reading maybe one of the stories that that speaks to our exemplify some of that experimentation that you were talking about yes and the one I picked is my Bulgarian story Nadia's cake which was first published in translation in Bulgarian last year in the book Demetri Kamburov translated and this is kind of experimentation that I forgot to mention when I was answering um with this story I did this thing um I um I wanted to write I thought I'd like to write a story which has something to do with Bulgaria and I started with nothing except that and I decided just to let my imagination run wild so the result um I think is um a somewhat crazy story but um but that was an experiment I just wanted to it is a way of writing so um I read from the beginning of the story um which is actually the less wild part of it um but anyway um this is where it starts with with a place which is often the um starting point for me I think Nadia's cake a rooster is crowing the screech spouts up into the hot air and spreads over the red rooftops like the cry of a spirit from another world a healthy supernatural being this voice is loud and triumphant as well as shrill two old men drinking beer at a plastic table outside a ramshackle shop hey no attention at all they could be deaf in silence they sit wiling away the day on the lookout for something new with eyes that expect disappointment but today there is a new thing Jen the stranger who has just come to town they don masks of inscrutability and take every inch of her in as she walks over the cobbles in her shorts and thick sandals as she listens to the rooster scream to her it's as exotic and delightful as the soft sounds of the language of the village all shushes and shushes like the push and slush of the tide on a shingle beach or the plush of a waterfall in a mountainous pool more appropriate simile in this inland valley where she's the exotic one a surprising and welcome as an elephant or a giraffe the houses on the street are like farm houses but all huddled close together as if they are engaged in constant gossip they are silent though a fewer holiday homes with pretty terraces empty now on a Tuesday waiting for the weekend a fewer inhabited by old people and they nestle in gardens of flowers and fruit and vegetables with hens running about most of the houses look as if they haven't dead for a long long time where is everyone Jen asks Navina the woman she will stay with the owner of the guest house a guest house with one guest and no room for more either rose cottage it is called in the city Navina is chunky her body wraps snugly in a dark overall her white hair cropped she could be 70 or 80 or 90 as well as the guest house she runs a shop and a cafe and keeps chickens goats a garden where tomatoes cabbages onions herbs and roses grow also raspberries and peaches and watermelons are abroad Jen knows communism corruption emigration but you have to make conversation plus there's a strict limit to the things she can say or ask not for reasons of tact purely linguistic she can say very little in Navina's language I get up I dress myself I eat breakfast she's never met anybody who would be interested in the details of her morning routine although possibly Navina is an exception it's hard to create an opening though oh yes I wake up at seven every morning really and what do you do then I wash myself and brush my teeth Navina talks not seeming to care that Jen doesn't understand most of what she's saying and brings a meal on a tray tomatoes and cucumbers a stew of sausages and beans red wine raspberries and yogurt food is a language everyone can understand thanks I mean Bulgaria is somewhat off the beaten path for the Irish short story but it's so it's interesting to me no pardon not now not now exactly and and Jen in this story is like Miss Moffatt in the early one who's traveling elsewhere and learning a language but as far away as Bulgaria might be from Ireland and maybe it's closer than once was you know you still have versions of domesticity both Navina and Nadia you have men and criminality which we see earlier in the stories and you have an internally displaced and discriminated community the traveler community in Bulgaria which parallels the treatment of travelers historically the traveler community historically in Ireland were you conscious of some of these parallels when you visited or when you wrote about Bulgaria well I became aware of the parallel those kind of parallels and of course and when I visited Bulgaria the phenomenon or curse of immigration many of the young people in Bulgaria left soon after the fall of the wall and the opening up of the eastern eastern block and that's obviously something that we're familiar with in Ireland kind of periods when there's an exodus of youth from the country which is really a tragic thing and although it has benefits maybe for the places to which they come which in the case of Bulgaria was to some extent Ireland but yeah and then the I was very conscious of the you know this group of people who are marginalized in Bulgaria the the the Roma the Gypsies and and could see parallels indeed with our traveler community and in Ireland parallels and differences as of course so so even though yes exactly so even when I was letting my imagination run wild and these were the you know these were the aspects of Bulgarian life that seemed to pop into my head so I think you know sometimes when you write it is an exploration of yourself in fact and I and none of these things have ever happened I mean they're so outlandish that they couldn't I would hope could not happen to anybody but and as the story gets going and but I was reading the other day a great essay by Richard Pine a friend of mine called a writer in Corfu and and Richard writes either quoting or saying himself can't quite remember and and all the writing is about the writer and her writer tells you otherwise they're lying and I think that is spot on actually yeah just something you know Madame Bovary Seymour there's as Vibhara said there there's an aspect of and yeah the real true writing even if it's fantasy whatever it is it's really the writer expressing themselves thanks Ilish I'm conscious that I want to move shortly to questions that people might have and that are coming in online but I might ask two others and maybe change of pace slightly um you're here on campus you're teaching in a classroom at Boston College um you are obviously practised and experienced in teaching creative writing but you've talked a few times about the fact that on the far side of the pond that tends to be graduate students sometimes saying the equivalent of an MA class or an MFA program and here you're teaching our wonderful undergraduates um what are some of the the the different are there other differences what are some of the rewards and surprises of your semester what type of work are you doing in the class and well I'm teaching a workshop and a fiction writing workshop we've focused mostly on the short story but also on some other kinds of fiction writing so far and yeah the well the student I have a I have a kind of mix of students and but mostly younger students whereas in the post-grad programs in Ireland where I thought they were you know there'll always be kind of a good sprinkling of mature students as we call them and so here there's one wonderful mature student but mostly younger people I don't know that I find well I mean a big difference is I'm teaching on zoom sure that's a big difference and the students are very hard working and I'm impressed that because I think I give them quite a lot of them reading and especially writing to do and they always do it and they get it in in time and and and all that and they're yeah they're they're they're fantastic students and I I'm not sure that there is um otherwise a huge difference difference of course that are of interest to me are actually dialect differences and sometimes I see something and say hmm is is that um do you really say and and I but I ask my class and they say yes we say we say that that's okay you know we say lay instead well of course I know some of them I'm not on fear with American English but um but but you know language is changing all the time and especially the language of young people so um it's uh it's it's that's that's really interesting and um it's it's a privilege to be um introduced to that and yeah excellent so I don't want to stray too far from little red and there are some copies here afterwards and and people will have questions maybe about what else is in the collection um but you're also involved in another project which is soon to uh be published it's in the very late stages uh a collection that you are editing but also contributing to entitled look it's a woman writer Irish literary feminism 1970 to 2020 uh forthcoming from Arlen House um do you want to talk a little bit about that project and how you see it this being the right time for a project like that yeah and this is a very exciting book it's a an anthology of 21 essays by um Irish women writers there is one American writer a kind of honorary Irish person who's been over with us for a long time um and the criteria the criterion for inclusion was that you would have to be over 60 when you um wrote the essay um uh I had the idea that um people who were born around the time I was born women were born at a lucky time to if they wanted if as I say if they had a pen in their cradle because even though the 50s was um uh kind of it seems retrospectively anyway a depressed period in Irish life it was poverty immigration everything um it was all bad in the 50s and censorship of literature was um really strong um so and there were not very many women writers at all but um as these writers um came of age and began to to to as these women um who wanted to be writers I mean an aspect of the book is that they nearly all say they wanted to be writers when they were children and I think hey that's probably how it often has been um in the past with girls and women but they don't go on but the difference is that this group kept at it so they're still writing when they're in their 60s or well as as pump as pump day gets further away they'll soon be 70 or 80 if it doesn't hurry up but I I think the book would be published um just after Christmas um yeah I thought it was a good time because we're um very conscious of a kind of new wave of um young women writers in Ireland which is fantastic you know the Sally Rooney phenomenon just to use short hand um but sometimes you kind of get the impression if you're around in the 1980s that hey folks we were doing this sort of stuff back then we were discovering feminism we were saying uh we need to you know the women's voice has to be heard in Irish letters and so on so so I wanted to document that and I thought what better way than to you know they're all most of them are still there and they can write an essay about themselves and their writing careers and um so it's the story from the horse's mouse or the mare's mouse yeah I've seen the table of contents it's a who's who um I've read the introduction and I you know it was it was um it was eye-opening in some ways it also helped me read and read back your story from uh red uh the story white skirt because on one level that story might seem just to have a tincture of being anachronistic are set back in the day with the issues that it foregrounds the issue of shame within the Irish family uh our diaspora immigration as a way in which we lost people and people were sent abroad I mean it was so um it was so on the moment given what's been happening in Irish society in the last week yes um but but I I do think cataloging and providing a space in a forum to bring all of those voices who were talking about these things in the 70s in the 80s in the 90s I have to say I'm really looking forward to delving into that collection when when it appears and hopefully that'll be soon yes I I think it will be an a really important um collection and sort of witness to this particular history um because I mean my impression of the history of Irish literature since I mean I I started published my first story in 1974 so like it's ages ago um and um it was just such a lucky time to be I to to to be to be writing um I think I probably say this in my own essay there um possibly if it hadn't been for you know the introduction of feminism the um our our consciousness were raised we began to be aware okay there are a few Irish women writers like Edna O'Brien who was treated very badly um but succeeded as a writer obviously um uh yeah Kato O'Brien who did it as well helped to be living abroad I think um yeah Jennifer Johnson of course yeah there were a few but there weren't really all that many like the all the the big names uh well they're big names but mostly it's a literature dominated by by by men um and I think if that had continued and if we didn't have this kind of change and the um the the women's presses like Garland House and Attic Press and the Virago in England and so on and so forth that somebody like me who wanted to write when she was eight or nine and you know published stories in her teens and twenties I might have just stopped you know and because life gets in the way and plenty to do apart from right but because just at the right time in the 1980s I became aware there's something missing and um I almost have a responsibility um to Irish literature to go on writing that sounds rather arrogant but it was no longer just about me um it was so so yeah so so so I went on and so have these 21 writers and there are many more who you know could be in the anthology should be in that anthology and aren't for one reason and another so um everything we were lucky you know things changed and especially for fiction writers I think so that nowadays um it's you know we're normal people Irish women writers so so thank you so much I'll hand off to uh to Christian I might just in that context in that list of names maybe it's appropriate I hope it is to just remember Julio Fuelon who would also be not that generation who we just lost yesterday so I was going to mention that at the end of the hour and one of our commenters just mentioned her passing as well today and I have one last request Christian Joseph Nugent our our good colleague asked for an announcement so maybe I'll do that at the end I'll do that yes so this hour is going to end too soon but there's another hour that'll be coming on Friday afternoon and it'll be 8 30 um Dublin time 4 30 here and I will put at the uh in a moment here um the the zoom URL for a series it's called the Irish influence and so Elish is our special guest for that in conversation with Joe Nugent and Mike Cronin from our Boston College Ireland and again I'll put the um the URL for that in afterward and of course you can also just write to me for any follow up on this um my contact information is in the zoom in the YouTube live area there so Elish you are so loved we knew that already but the comments that are coming in which I have assured everyone you will have a chance to read afterward all right and there's more of us here at Boston College love you even more now your students alluded here one of the questions I have that's come in here is from uh from Desmond he asked the significance of the title so I suppose it's like a record album right you you have a number of stories and Little Red is the name of one of the stories but maybe you'd like to tell us how you put that one uh first or um or how you came with the title of that so well it's a reference to Little Red Riding Hood and um so the story is sort of grown-up version of Little Red Riding Hood um that's that's that's where it comes from a friend of mine suggested that I call it Little Red or EAD but as in a short story is a little read and also they're not read as much as they ought to be but the publisher is Patsy a portion of black stuff didn't think that was a great idea but so it's Little Red Riding Hood yeah do we have questions um so Suzanne Suzanne yeah Suzanne Ailey Shinjim thank you that was fascinating um when I read your memoir recently 12,000 days I was struck by the confidence of the young woman who started her writing career and did it with aplomb and despite the the polls of many directions raising children and so forth just sort of steadily kept at it and assumed that that career would go forward and that she would make time for it and it was interesting to hear you say just now that in the 80s you felt a sort of special responsibility to sort of keep going as a woman writer I'm wondering um how dangerous were any falterings along the way for you as a writer and what role other women writers may have played in keeping you going or a communal sense of the mission yeah that's a very good question and point Suzanne um I think uh well I mean for me um you know all things contempt me from this craft of verses and there were many temptations from the craft of writing just ordinary life you know falling in love falling out of love uh getting married getting children uh working full time I mean I sometimes when I look back I wonder how on earth did I do it um but um I just I just did but other women writers were very important because um something that happened um in the mid 80s um coincided with the time um I was a young mother and so on is that um we began to have workshops for writers in Ireland really almost the first time they were a new phenomenon there was no such thing as creative writing or anything in those days um and there were workshops specifically for women writers organized by the arts council and Ireland house and um gosh some some of my friends from those workshops way back or I think here today in looking at this event and um and we have been very encouraging to one another yeah so that was important as well the sort of sense of um solidarity with other writers indeed thank you anyone else on the other side of the room or this side or online I'm seeing so many congratulations but not questions here Misha oh Lisha there we are good thanks and thank you for this discussion it's really interesting I was just um interested to hear a little more about the process of writing a collection of short stories when you're writing your stories I mean are you consciously conceiving of them as a collection that will all be put together or just each one just stand on it then yeah um that's a good question in this in this instance no I each one is written individually and then at a certain point pull them together um into into the collection so I I didn't set out to write a collection but I mean at this stage I know that eventually my stories will be you know I will I will collect the stories into a book um and a volume um one of my that that previous collections um the shelter of neighbors um I I I tried to team that in using the device of having many of the characters in the stories living on the same street and interacting a bit with one another but I think I probably did that after I'd written the stories because I so I I I think those devices are good they work but um they are a little bit tricky and I I'm not enough of a joy scene to know this though somebody knows there's nothing that is not known about Joyce um but my guess is that Dubliners that he used that title for the collection I mean the stories were written over quite a while several years so um and I think hey Joyce he's so clever that's a great title because you know Dublin is a good big place with lots of different characters and it gives you a scope so um so so no I didn't Lisa but um as we were saying um I think because they're written during limited period of a couple of years they are thematically kind of connected as well whereas you know somebody's first collection of short stories like I remember my first collection which came out they were stories which hadn't written you know from the time I was 19 to is about 32 or something and like all the stories could have been nearly all written by a different person and it's often like that with a person's first collection but um but at this as you go on they get more samey I suppose I might ask myself is if anything of Boston and your experience here in Chestnut Hill being the neighborhood around Boston where we are but is sneaking its way into your your consciousness and into your your stories it's remarkable that you're able to actually come I mean it was so touch and go into the last minute now you find yourself here and it was an anxious arrival in some ways but but now you've been with us for a few years that's right it's been quite a an adventure um the the whole experience the great experience um it's I am writing while I'm here so yeah I think the answer is yes it will find its way so watch out anyone else here online we're getting here a couple minutes left three or four there we are you're gonna fight us all right we'll give this one to Rob here they'll come back to you I think thanks Alex um just a question about writing in the time of a bit of a pandemic how do you think um the pandemic will influence writers I mean do you think we'll be reading novels and short stories um about this time five years from now three years from now um well it's hard to make predictions but I would say yes because I think um this pandemic is one of those you know it's a pandemic it's one of those phenomena that affects absolutely everybody in the world really in some way it history and the personnel are intersecting now for all of us all the time some more directly and tragically um for some more directly and tragically than for others but we're also um affected by it um that yeah that yeah I mean at the beginning um I was teaching in the online course in the Irish writer's centre and I said to my students please do not give me a story about COVID but now I'm thinking no we we we should I I think the thing about something like COVID um is though that it is setting you know it's historical setting rather than um you know I don't think a story will be a story fiction is always about people it's are almost always um it's going to be about characters interacting relationships all those things that we write about when we write stories so I think COVID and the pandemic will be will be there as a setting yeah and and I would want to document it you know um absolutely personally because I like documenting things that are happening so all right on that I think we can combine two questions Suzanne maybe we'll hold you since you're here we'll do that afterward in person but uh there's one question about that just the future of the of the short story in Ireland but maybe you can tie that to this one here uh that Lucy asked do you set out with a plot or does that unfold as your characters develop in the short story and I'm very bad at plot so no I I would I never set out with a plot actually in short stories um with a novel and are a book for young people I would organize at least a tentative plot before I get going but um with the short stories no they kind of unfold and I impose are yeah a plot of of kinds emerges as I write the story and you feel the short story as a genre has a future in Ireland and elsewhere as long as you're with us right that is a big question well it's been there for a long yes I I I would think so absolutely uh I mean it's never been there's there's hardly ever been a great period for the short story maybe with the possible exception of kind of the end of the 19th century in rush open checkup and people like that were writing but um it's always been a bit of an underdog in the literary world um but it hangs in there like a bit like irish itself the language it's not going away well there are a lot of themes because we really focus on short stories a little bit on novels of course again Friday we gave some indications uh again it's in the chat there for those of you who are joining online or just simply write to me I'll provide information how to join the conversation on Friday evening we can maybe pick up some of the the rest of your writing there which covered Jim thank you so much for preparing this time with us it's great as a colleague and Ailish again you are so loved and I can't wait to share all the wonderful comments and congratulations in the launch of your book with us this afternoon so thank you thank you thanks all along