CloudNine

''On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf once observed. Relations between ''masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children'' shifted, she wrote, ''and when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.'' 1910 is often sited as the year Modernism begins. The first Post-Impressionist Art Exhibition came to London in May of that year and it caused a great deal of controversy. Woolf saw this exhibition as the turning point in culture - and therefore (being Woolf), in society. Three years later Nijinksy's The Rite of Spring is staged in Paris and is similarly controversial. I wonder if 2010 will bring us such curios. We'll all need to be as perceptive as Woolf to see it coming though. Have a brilliant and perceptive 2010!

As you might have noticed I have been away. Nowhere too salubrious – mostly my bed - and occasionally my study. Why? Because I’ve had a dreadful flu – probably the porcine variety – and man, it laid me up. If there is a good thing about being ill it’s that it gives you time to think, to get new pictures in your head. (I always remember Brendan Kennelly telling us creative writing students at Trinity that ‘daydreaming’ is vitally important to writers.)  I managed to get a lot of play ideas straightened out in my thoughts, and changed my mind about the direction I thought I was going in (as regards plays). I had a few ideas for some serious political dramas – but in the last week of my flu I decided on a whole new direction (I won’t say what). So now I see the rather odd benefits of the past three weeks of sniffling, coughing my guts up - and all that thinking/daydreaming. Was it a good year for you? I began my 2009 trudging through the snow and ice of New York looking for th...

I have a new poem in the new issue of Southword: http://www.munsterlit.ie/Southword/Issues/17/contents.html Some lovely work from Geraldine Mitchell and Theo Dorgan, amongst others. Enjoy.

Christmas books A peep down the rabbit-hole that is the literary blogosphere and one notes that there are many wonderful recommendations from the great and the good as to the best reads of the year.  My favourite reads of the year (and not all were published in 2009) are: The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds The Wolf (novella) by Joseph Smith Stepping Stones by Dennis O'Driscoll Nigh-No-Place by Jen Hadfield (Poetry - winner of the 2008 TS Eliot Award) Birds of America (short stories by Lorrie Moore - from 1998) I am posting here the recommendations/best reads of the year as published in the Guardian on the weekend - for those of you who missed this feature. Julian Barnes is a big fan of the Adam Foulds work, while Sebastian Barry is on the money with his selection of the Colum McCann novel. I most want in my xmas stocking the Paris Review Interviews. Hint, hint. Christmas books. Photograph: Graeme Robertson Julian Barnes Laura Cumming's A Face ...

The Quickening Maze Adam Foulds Jonathan Cape Mad, Bad and Dangerous Sebastian Barry’s review of Adam Foulds’ book-length narrative poem, The Broken Word, for which Foulds won the 2008 Costa Prize, is quoted on the back-cover of The Quickening Maze, Foulds’ second and most recent novel. ‘A miracle and a masterpiece’, Barry writes. The same can be said for The Quickening Maze. A few pages into the novel, this reviewer learned of its long listing for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. More recently the short list has been announced with Foulds’ inclusion. Rightly so. The Quickening Maze is an intensely poetic work with a poet as its main protagonist, the famed peasant poet, John Clare. Foulds tells the heartbreaking story of Clare’s slide into mental illness and incarceration in High Beach Private Asylum, on the edge of Epping Forest. The novel follows seven consecutive seasons in the lives of a group of people pivotal in the history of the asylum, namely Dr. Matthew Allen and his fa...

Some wonderful work in the most recent issue of Pedestal Magazine from North Carolina. I have a wee poem in there, too, if you fancy a look: http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=7051 I'm currently writing prose and am missing my poetry-writing, big time. I always find the journey from poetry to prose easy enough - but the journey back to poetry is usually fraught with difficulty for me. Something to do with what Kavanagh said about 'chinks': 'through a chink too wide comes in no wonder' and after a bout of prose I feel I need to narrow my 'chink' (as it were), i.e. contract a little in order to create some pressure and intensity and do the most difficult of all the writing forms (for me anyway) - poetry. I expect my first collection of poems to be out sometime mid-century as a result.

Lately, I've been having this debate in my head: are plays 'low art' or 'high art'? My conclusion was that, mostly, playwriting, the theatre, is 'low' art. Terrible conclusion to come to for a playwright, I know. (And yes, I have these very profound discussions with myself on buses and trains and even on my bike sometimes...) One can not honestly compare some theatre-writing with the work of say, Mozart, Ted Hughes, Martha Graham etc. But then of course SOMETIMES theatre, play-writing is 'high art', and one gets a glimpse of the plays of ancient Greece, the catharsis - all of that, though this rarely happens. What do I mean by 'high art'? Am I some sort of art snob or what? Well, by 'high art' I mean the kind of work that when you see it/ hear it, pins your eye sockets to the back of the wall . You know the kind I mean. And RARELY does a play do this. Ibsen, Beckett, Pinter, Sarah Kane, Edward Bond - a handful of playwrights have ma...

I've been busy slashing away at my first collection of short stories. I say slashing because I'm mostly cutting away at needless lines and phrases I should really have edited before (a lot of the stories have already been published). There's still a lot to do, and it feels a bit like making a patchwork quilt, in that the stories have to suit being beside other stories. One of the things that I kept to the fore of my mind in my most recent edit is something echoed in a recent article by Ian Jack in the Guardian about Diane Athill. Speaking about her accuracy and attention to detail, Jack states: Part of this comes from her considerable gift as a maker of sentences, which are so lucid and direct; some of it is owed to the breaking of taboos that then surrounded female sexual behaviour; most of it, though, stems from her triumphant struggle to "get it right", a lesson she learned from two of the writers she edited. [Jean] Rhys told her that the trick of good writing ...

NOTE: SOME OF THE DETAILS OF THE READINGS HAVE BEEN CHANGED!! 1. October 21st – a rehearsed reading of THE MOTH-HOUR, Soho, London, 7.30pm DETAILS: THE MOTH HOUR by Jacqueline McCarrick Directed by Steve Hubbard Cast includes: Jennie Stoller, Drew Horner, Elizabeth Elvin, Nora Connolly and Isla Carter. Michael McDaid lives at home and works in the family grocery store in the borderland area of County Monaghan with his mother, Connie. When his old flame makes a surprise return to town the two renew their friendship, causing Connie to attempt to tear them apart. But changes are very much needed in the McDaid household. This is a play about how the repressed dreams and ambitions of one woman cause her to squash and shape her children, with devastating consequences. Wednesday 21st October : 7:30pm : Above the Blue Posts, Rupert Street, Soho. 2. Sunday October 25th, 4.30pm - a rehearsed reading of LEOPOLDVILLE, Galway Arts Centre, part of the Galway Theatre Festival Details: http://www.poe...

I recently won a short story competition. It was for an on-line 'dark fiction' journal based out of Northern Ireland. My story is a modern vampire tale (a funny tale too) called BLOOD, and is set on the Irish border. I don't like to think of this dark tale - one of many I've written for my forthcoming first collection of short stories - in terms of 'genre fiction' - because that's not what I'm writing. I'm very conscious of political and colonial tropes in these darker stories and very aware that by setting them on the Irish border where I live that I'm tuning into a a certain liminal state, a 'no-man's-land', that will hopefully compound the sense of unease in the material. A fracture in the psyche reflected in a fractured landscape. One of the stories in this collection, THE TRIBE, is set 75,000 B.C. - so I guess this one is close to 'magic realism' - but again the story explores at its core - modern ecological and politic...

By its closing date of 7 th August, the 2009 Manchester Fiction Prize had attracted more than 1,700 entries (almost four million words) from over 40 countries. Judges Sarah Hall, M. John Harrison and Nicholas Royle were thrilled by the scope and quality of submissions, and say that judging the competition was “exciting and ultimately very rewarding.” They have short-listed six finalists (details below) and the winners will be announced at a gala prize-giving ceremony at Manchester Town Hall on Friday 23 rd October 2009. ==================================================================== The Manchester Fiction Prize 2009 Short-listed Finalists: Peter Deadman Peter Deadman co-founded Infinity Foods – a natural and organic foods business in Brighton – in 1970, opening a restaurant, shop, bakery and warehouse distribution unit. In 1978 he completed training in acupuncture and later in Chinese herbal medicine, practising both until 2001. He is the founder, editor and pub...

By now you've heard that Hilary Mantel has won the Booker Prize. I have long since enjoyed Mantel's column for the Guardian. She is always full of perceptiveness and originality. Her long novel Wolf Hall , is about Henry VIII ’s minister Thomas Cromwell - which the judges, led by the broadcaster James Naughtie , describe as an "extraordinary piece of storytelling". I'm looking forward to reading it.

My play, Leopoldville , has won the runner-up slot - i.e. 2nd prize - in the 2009 Kings Cross Award for New Writing. The winner of this award, given every two years to a striking new play by an emerging writer, was hotly contested and the play has done well to earn this prize. It will be produced next year and production details will be posted here and elsewhere. Meanwhile, there is a possibility of a reading in Ireland later this year. Watch this space.

Hello there. I previously crashed this blog purely because I found I had no free time to keep it up and to say the things I most wanted to talk about. Usually these were things to do with politics or current affairs - the usual rambling most blogs go in for. But I've decided I don't want to do such public spleen-venting here. That's why pubs or friends (real people, not Facebook digits) were invented: to chat, inspire, come up with possible solutions etc etc. I am too in control when I do this kind of rambling on a blog. In real-life company, social situations - the chat is more natural, we are not all feeding into a 'chair-person' figure, which is what a blog-holder is in a way. But there are - as I am discovering - many uses for a blog, other than pontificating. Such as: Sharing ideas, opportunities, tips, experiences. (I know someone who uses their blog to discuss bargains at Aldi.) And the blogs that give details of opportunities re, say, writing etc - are grea...