Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 62: Margo Gorman on “Sense of Self Alphabet” – In search of dialogue.

Margo, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your intriguing “Sense of Self Alphabet” which emerged as you “searched for a stronger sense of he self to face the future” after experiencing lockdown and isolation which Covid-19 brought to many and with this alphabet you also hope to dialogue with people.

SG: So this is a “Writers Chat” about a work in progress, a work that is evolving with you, and with the world.  I find it an intriguing idea and an interesting read – it feels like it needs to be a book more than a blog – have you any thoughts on this?

MG: The Blog gives me freedom and hope for a new form of publication which is interactive. I am more and more hesitant to submit my writing to trends in the publishing “industry”. My indie publisher for Michel-Michelle boycotts Amazon so marketing a book is a challenge. The internet creates a certain kind of intimacy and fluidity with more potential for connection. Sabine made me smile when she said she didn’t mind being on the blog as not many people follow it. I hope that will change when I finish the alphabet. I plan to do a summary including comments and maybe share that with friends and other networks. I like the way I can modify the content of the blog.

SG: I can see how the blog gives you so much artistic freedom. What started this project, and why an alphabet?

MG: The alphabet was inspired by discussions on gender fluidity when I published Michel-Michelle. LBGTQ+ is great but it is not enough and as a bisexual Ulster woman I suffered for decades from labels which boxed me in. Like Kathleen O’ Donnell in her novel  Slant, I want to reach out to young people. I am so shocked that they still suffer from gender inequality despite the liberation we fought for in the last century. During Covid, the alphabet merged with notes for a memoir although on the blog I avoid private details of family and friends unless they have given their OK or are dead. The alphabet commemorates ghosts who kept me company when I was in the Covid Cocoon. My alphabet is also a fun wood-wide-web slingshot to the global concern Alphabet INC which holds the shares for Google Services.

SG: In “Age” remembering some events from childhood, you ask “Is a search for hope in the childlike belief in innocence, magic, mystery, and interconnected humanity an illusion?” and perhaps you touch on the duality of human nature – we are both cruel and kind, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. In the same post you recall “I shake the wild mane of red hair over my face, no longer ironed into place, and hope no-body recognises me and tells the family in Ireland.” (This sentiment of shame, and hoping you’re not recognised also runs through O’Donnell’s debut Slant which was launched in Hodges Figgis on 31st May) And both of these thoughts made me wonder that in spending so much of our time trying not to be ourselves, that we still struggle to recognise who we are, at an age when we are led to believe we should be experiencing some sort of wisdom and settling. How can we, when, as a people, we have hardly rooted?

MG: It wasn’t shame which shook my hair over my face. I was just too much of a coward to challenge the double standards which dominated Irish culture  telling us not to make a show of yourself and keep oppression private. It was about protecting my personal liberation of owning my own body. It was too hard to express lesbian or bisexual liberation openly especially in 1970’s Ireland. I left Ireland because sectarianism made it impossible to campaign collectively for Civil Rights and feminism was seen as a distraction from the National Struggle. My sense of self ducked and dived through decades of duality of gender and sectarian polarisation. Now I seek roots in a sense of self which recognises the power of interconnection. Any progress made is not linear. My time spiral is more like the symbol of the Triskele – with its three curved sections from a common centre. 

SG: Interconnection feels so necessary now. In this same first post, you ask Is it possible to connect “pockets of liberation” in the solidarity of a Wood Wide Web?” and it strikes me that what you are doing is walking the land, similarly to Manchán Magan (and his great Listen to the Land Speak), and using this (unlike Magan) to track and link political and societal (and personal) changes in the past with those we are experiencing today. Do you think that in working on the personal that the communal can benefit?

MG: Yes, I do believe working on personal consciousness can benefit communal awareness.  I am a fan of Manchan Magan’s love of nature and language but I also intentionally seek connection between everyday life and economic and social change. The success of LBGTQ+ shows we can merge individual and communal consciousness of gender oppression to gain a majority for same sex marriage in Ireland, but we face greater challenges than that. Our self-image is vulnerable to economic and social forces, which dominate our everyday consumption and degrade human nature and the planet. It might take more than a walk in the woods to develop the potential of an alphabet on gender. I hope my alphabet provokes more exploration of private versus public; or personal versus communal; or human nature versus holistic nature. 

SG: For me it did, and I’m sure for others, too. I’m also fascinated by your examination of Ego and Eco. You say, “Ego needs to win in a battle against opposing forces. Eco needs interconnectedness – a network of interdependence and resolution of conflict” and it feels like it is eco that the world needs more than ever. Can you talk about your connection to the land and those connections to the generations of your family that farmed this land before you. Given the land is in the north of Ireland, I’m curious about two things here, epigenetics and the sense of the land having memory.

MG: For me Eco is an expression of communal ownership of place. Ego expresses individual power and control. My connection to the land where I live now is a mix of Irish sentimental family history and a need to belong somewhere. It was also an economic decision as a site on what was once the family farm was the only viable option for erratic self-employment in Europe after redundancy from Save the Children in the UK. A rural environment fulfilled a material desire for trees, vegetable garden, plants, and flowers. Donegal light creates what Kerri ní Dochartaigh calls Thin Places. The land has a lot more memory and history than four green fields. Donegal  is a good antidote to the limitations of  Ireland’s post-colonial inferiority and resentment. I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland and I I belong on both sides of the border through Ireland but I hope the nationalistic fervour of the last century is past its sell-by date. Vron Ware in Return of the Native: Learning from the land  gives a brilliant exposition of what the land tells us about the social and economic history of humans. She traces the impact of colonialism. capitalism, war, and ecological movements etc. on a small corner of Hampshire in England. This local-global perspective could help us face the huge task of stopping the degradation of people and place which we are all part of today. In Donegal there are still some places where we can find links with people who migrated here 5000 years ago. 

SG: It’s incredible to think of this! Of course it also ties in well to your post under “C for CIS/Closet/Council of Europe/Claire”, your brief exploration your ground-breaking work with the Council of Europe, and of a two-week training course you took with “ACC Au Coeur de la Communication/ In the Heart of Communication”, based on the work of Claire Neur, who is new to me. Given that people like Brené Brown explore the strength in vulnerability, it seems Neur’s theories as you summarise them, “Through exploring our fear of vulnerability, we could find a source of strength” were ahead of their time. It also strikes me that 1995 was a key turning point not only in Europe but around the world. I was teaching in Mexico that year when the rebellion in Chiapas happened (and continues today, as does the inequality).

MG: 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union and the maturity of Thatcher-Reagan economics was a key turning point for me. The shift in the balance of power towards a more global economy created new opportunities for corruption and inequality everywhere. Global finance and powerplay used technology and the internet to speed up exploitation of nature and lead us into more wars and more refugees. Speed, competition, and consumption distract us from a sense of community and connection. The proliferation of self-help gurus is a symptom of the dislocation.  I have found they help me survive  but usually miss the underlying structural causes which lead me to dip into despair. Claire Nuer worked in industry before she got cancer which led her to explore what the holocaust of WWII with its economic and social aftermath had unleashed in our collective consciousness. Her presence stays with me although her organisation was banned in France as a cult! A revenge story from an individual man who was threatened by divorce proceedings. Even anonymous individuals can be destructive to collective consciousness. I was glad to see Claire Nuer was resurrected by the nuerfoundation.

SG: As well as questioning and philosophical, much of the writing is quite poetic for example, talking of the lockdown in Covid, you say, “Memories of the mesh of murmured secrecy in the carved wood of the confessional box in the old church in Strabane wound their way up the spiral of time… Trees help me create a perspective on the time spiral.” It would seem that patterns from your past emerged, uninvited, with old wounds, into your present, and it made me think about time, and how we assume it is linear (at least we are taught to believe this).

MG: For me time is a spiral where linear time and space meet. Linear time is my way of coping with the limitations of my life on planet Earth day to day and season to season. Trees remind me that human life has a variable and short span.  Whooper swans migrating from Iceland to over-winter in Donegal remind me of the hidden connections that bind us together in space and time. A starry night in Donegal reduces the need to pick the scabs of old wounds.  I think of the defiance of women astronomers. The galaxy gives time a different dimension and challenges everyday oppression. I remember old  friends who have dissipated into universal energy. That sounds a bit high flown so maybe time is just a kite that the wind on Murvagh strand can snap from my hand any minute so I take comfort in the memories of past times. My failure as a writer through the  decades vanishes when I look back at my life choices. John Banville once said that he sometimes wished he had lived more and written less. Moi, je ne regrette rien.

SG: In the alphabet (E, F and G) that forms this conversation (and you’ll have written more by the time this conversation is published), you weave links between figures, saints, music, nature, politics and Gay and LBGTQ+ rights, and nature. You give a very personal history of activism and those you met during the years in England and at the same time you manage to connect all of this to diversity in music, therapies, poetry and resisting categorisation.  Everything comes down to asking how (and if) all of these can contribute to undoing the harm to our planet, and to ourselves.

MG: Yes it’s a bit of a mishmash but that’s intentional. The search for connections is a spiral of past, present and future. A lifetime of activism mixed with career has only scratched images in the sand. Faced with a tidal wave of climate crisis, I am searching for hope through the small things that make me feel better. The connections between everyday life in Europe and what is happening in Africa are closer than we imagine. Finance capital reaches into our everyday pockets and helps us dump rubbish on poor people.. Boycotting Amazon or giving up my Twitter account are OK for me with a pension. For a writer trying to sell more books, it’s only an option if we create an alternative movement which sells more of our books through indie outlets than Amazon can. That time will come and then maybe my blog can be a book.

SG: In “H” (Heterosexual, and Holy Halls/ Heilige Hallen), you “ snap a twig into the peaceful silence to protect the grove of memory where trees took root in my sense of self”. In this post, you allow the trees to help you very movingly explore your wounds of childhood through memories of Leslie, a forbidden friend whose family left Strabane for the countryside, while also holding aloft your worries about choices/polarisation of life – rural Donegal/urban Berlin. As in “J for Joy and Jealousy” and K for Kaleidoscope reminds us that how we perceive the diversity around us is important”, the threads between past and present merge and it seems again that if we look after our local (selves), then the universal (community/world) will also benefit. Could you talk about this?  

MG: In 2021, I unearthed the Act Local: Think Global slogan from the last century. This slogan was highjacked by US corporations who used it for marketing products which we consume. The UN targets for sustainable development from the Rio Summit were undermined by marketing campaigns from the fossil fuel industry. They knew campaigns only work if they connect local awareness and action to potential impact at a global level. We could take lessons from that. Planting 12000 saplings in 2021 in Donegal was a symbolic gesture to inspire others but who has time to know or care about it? 

SG: Unfortunately, you’ve captured it – people do care, but who has the time to actively care? I particularly enjoy the references at the end of your posts, and really loved the link to David Rothenberg and the nightingale in Berlin. Stunning. I’m really looking forward to reading more and learning more about fighting the good fight, and the repetition of history, patterns of human behaviour and polarisation (or as you put it US V THEM). So we’ll end with some short questions:

  • City or rural or both? Rural for roots and writing. City for people and proliferation.
  • Laptop or longhand? Laptop since my first in the 1990’s because it gives endless opportunities for editing. Longhand when I want to delve into my sense of self.
  • Cat or dog? Dogs because of their sixth sense
  • Boat or plane? Boat to get on and off the island but train is my favourite mode of transport so Germany is my second home.
  • What are you reading now? I like reading Irish writers from the Irish Writers’ Centre WORD Group such as your novel, Happiness comes from Nowhere. I dream of sustainable  cultural co-operation between writers rather than marketing one of my novels which may have the shelf life of a yogurt. In German I am reading Dörte Hansen’s Zur See which is an allegory for island life in this century. Her fictional island in the North Sea is an expert exposition of relationships between people and our environment. Tourists romanticise the life on the island and are unaware of the social and economic history they are part of. Big business is everywhere. Instead of B and B with locals in the last century there are hotel spas with Wi-Fi. The local crabbers no longer catch their own crabs. Parenting, creative life, making a living, belief systems, aging on the island are chronicled with the seasons and family history. The grounded whale is a reminder of the big wave which the traumatised “skipper” of the ferry survived when the fishing trawler was swallowed up by the sea. It’s a reminder Ireland is an island.
  • What are you writing now? I have a novel ready for publication but I am hesitant to go ahead. The German translation of my novel  Bone and Blood dominates my current writing time. A group of us have a proposal to do a commemoration in 2025 in Berlin of Irish women who  were imprisoned in Ravensbrueck concentration camp during World War II. Cathi Fleming from Cork has researched Sister Kate Mc Carthy and others who worked in the resistance to fascism in France. It would be great if there was a chance to do something in Ireland too so all interest welcome.

Thank you to Margo for her enlightening answers and I look forward to continuing to follow her alphabet series.

Margo’s novel Bone and Blood can be purchased on Books.ie

Margo has included details of some of the publications she mentioned in her answers: Dörte Hansen’s Zur See published by Penguin; Kerri ní Dochartaigh Thin Places; Vron Ware in Return of the Native: Learning from the land published by Repeater books; Nuer Foundation http://www.nuerfoundation.org; Shauna Gilligan Happiness comes from Nowhere published by Ward Wood.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 61: Katherine O’Donnell on “Slant” (New Island: Dublin, 2023)

Cover image of “Slant” showing three women standing in front of bookshelves, and smiling directly at the camera.

Katherine, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re going to chat about your debut Slant (New Island: Dublin, 2023) which I devoured, and loved, though it did make me cry.

SG: Let’s start with the title – taken from the Emily Dickinson poem “tell all the truth but tell it slant” – which, to me, seemed to describe Ro McCarthy’s life experience. She’s on the outside, spectoring her own life. Can you talk about this theme of not being able to face or talk about the truth head on, at always having to tackle it at a slant?

KOD: Dickinson’s line for me is a perfect summary of the super-power of fiction – which has the potential to make a world for a reader but only when it resonates as ‘true’. Fiction is created through sentences running across pages – slantwise – yet when fiction works for an audience it is not received as ‘fake’ or ‘false’ but as illuminating the real world – all the truth.

Ro McCarthy appears as a reliable narrator but we also experience her as a young, naïve woman; as foolish, duplicitous at times, unaware of danger, inexperienced, and sometimes cowardly. I wanted to write a young voice that we see mature. The older Ro sees more – but as you point out, both young and older Ro have their own particular turning into and away from the environments in which they find themselves in. Their perspective is framed by their orientation to the world and is always partial – just like all of our perspectives. In seeing how the experiences and hence the characters of Ro younger and older are shaped by their environment, readers get a taste of a fundamental truth – we are all formed in and through the contexts in which we move or remain stuck.

SG: Of course, the narrative of Slant is not only the communal story of life for Irish emigrants in Boston in the mid-eighties but is also a looking back novel, that of the formation of self, and ones place in the world. Towards the end of the novel Ro, sitting at her window, muses (quite movingly, I felt):

I feel a type of loneliness, a singular aloneness, that makes me feel secure and that the world I am in is full of possibilities. I know myself by my loneliness. This is me. This is me.

It struck me that she is right – despite the parties, the craic, the people, all with the wonder and grief of life – Ro is comfortable in her own skin and, in her fifties, is finally content enough to allow herself to feel that singular aloneness. Can you talk a little about the individual/ communal support in the community (especially the Lesbian community) that she seeks and finds in Boston in the mid-eighties?

KOD: I am very gratified to see how deeply you’ve connected with Ro and Slant. I am so glad that Slant has found such an engaged first reader! When I wrote those lines about Ro’s loneliness I was drawing on that wonderful poem by Adrienne Rich “Song” where the speaker is responding to the question ‘Are you lonely’. She answers ‘yes’ in four short, intensely lyrical and visual verses and she describes her loneliness as a sense of journeying, independence and expanding freedom. She answers that yes, she’s a plane riding lonely over the Rockies aiming for ‘blue-strung aisles/of an airfield on the ocean’; she’s a woman driving across country; she’s the first person awake in a house full of sleeping people, at dawn in a city; she’s lonely like a frozen rowboat at a lake at the end of December, ‘that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither/ice nor mud nor winter light/but wood, with a gift for burning.’ I have always loved that poem and it was a touchstone for developing the character of the older Ro.

Ro’s ‘ singular aloneness’ is buoyed by her deep experience of community so that she remains confident that world is still alive with possibilities. When she threw herself into the tribe of lesbians in 80s Boston, she had no idea where she would land – we remember that she didn’t want to describe herself as ‘coming out’ but ‘coming in’ – she came into herself, into a lesbian life and was caught in a safety-net of connection with Eily, Mels, the Boys, ACT-UP. We see her in her later life among deep friendships and in a ritual calendar of dyke activities that continue to structure her days and support her in joyful connection.

SG: Yes, “joyful connection” really sums it up. Ro also finds community through social activism – in the 80s she throws herself into AIDS activism and in the 2000s she’s marching the streets of Cork and remembering that in the 80s she

was part of a tribe moving as wind: sometimes salty, sometimes rain-drenched, sometimes howling, then playful, tickling, a gentle breeze; but always bringing more oxygen and possibility to the world, changing the atmosphere and dappling the light.

All of those times “were already an overlooked history” and she feels “the dissonance of that time” with her life as she now lives it. These sentiments echo not only the passing of time but also the huge changes in Irish society and attitudes towards sexuality and identification. And yet, going door-to-door, Ro finds that not much has changed at all. Can you talk about how the personal echoes the social throughout Slant?

KOD: Ro McCarthy’s personal trials and tribulations have allowed me to write a micro-history of Ireland from the last two decades of the twentieth century into the first two decades of this twenty-first century. It surprises me that fiction and film have not focussed much on the tens of thousands of Irish ‘illegals’ who lived in the 80s and 90s in cities across the USA. Even in more recent years the figure of Irish illegal aliens in America is reliably estimated to be about 50,000. The Irish ‘illegals’ are embedded in distinct communities and I wanted to write about that culture, particularly as I imagined it existing in the 1980s. I hope that acknowledging Ireland’s very recent history as a strong exporter of economic migrants during our dire economic recessions in the 1980s that we might remain sensitive and sympathetic to economic migrants living and working and enriching Ireland today.

Ro’s other community in Boston is her queer community who lived through the battle of the AIDS crisis – Ro remembers it as a war and her shell shock is reactivated in her experience of the Marriage Equality campaign. I wanted the reader to be able to witness the cumulative trauma-toll of social marginalisation and oppression on one individual who doesn’t quite understand herself that she has PTSD. In the reader’s empathetic experience of Ro’s life, I hope to inculcate an understanding of the undue suffering of all those whose social identities leave them vulnerable to prejudice and exclusion.   

SG: And you capture this cumulative trauma subtly, and well. Russ declares to Ro “I don’t know if fags and dykes will ever get to write the history, dear Rose Marie, but we will certainly make the art.” There’s a meta-narrative in Slant that of creativity allowing people to be more themselves – for some it’s through singing/dancing/ music and for Ro it’s through writing. Like many writers, Ro writes to make sense of the world, she often wakes with “a wisp of a story” in her head and she tries to chase it down. Can you talk about how writing, for Ro, is about (as she says) “re-membering” herself, reclaiming her body, trauma, grief and from always having “to be brave facing the public world”.

KOD: Yes, the central claim of Slant is that creativity allows us to connect with empathy and understanding, and kindness, and maybe even joy, both to our own experience and that of strangers. I hope that the ending reveals how readers as much as writers of fiction play their part in fostering these enriching connections.

SG: I loved the tone of Slant; Ro’s humour and wry observations of the world around her. She likes American people despite the fact that they “were astonishingly, uniformly intent on amplifying happiness…all that positivity was the perfect antidote to being Irish.” Despite the horror and devastation AIDS brings to many of Ro’s circle, it’s this humour – often self-deprecating – that allows her to be honest, and this can be seen in the wonderful employee/employer relationship she has with the elderly spirited Clara as well as the great friendship groups she has – the misfits – and Eily and Mels. Did this voice come for you through characterisation or theme?

KOD: What another lovely observation and question! The humour came from both the character and the theme – groups that struggle collectively to resist social prejudice and oppression can only survive if they routinely create spaces for joy and laughter. And Ro is simply very funny.

SG: Without plot spoiling, Slant manages also to cover power, abuse, control and silence in close relationships. Again, this seemed to me to echo society as a whole. I’m thinking here of two central relationships to the story – that of Jenny and that of Terri. Can you talk about this theme? 

KOD: In writing the dynamic of the ‘bad’ lesbian relationship I was inspired by In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado (2019) but also definitely prompted by that line in the glorious Lesbian Avengers Dyke Manifesto (1993) – “Lesbian Avengers are old fashioned: pine, long, whine stay in bad relationships”. That line – amidst the juicy rhapsody on LESBIAN SEX – has always made me laugh. I feel a bit apologetic to lesbian readers – as we are so starved of cultural representation – that I wrote a lesbian character who was so controlling and manipulative – but, dear reader, she was a complete delight to write and I remain very fond of her. I gave her a happy ending.

It is interesting that you also think that Jenny was in a similar relationship of control, I hadn’t quite realised that. I think that we are so culturally used to the conventional dynamic of traditional heterosexual relationships that we can be blind to their overtly transactional nature.

SG: Yes, for me, Ro and Jenny had a type of echo and call with each other from within their unhealthy relationships. And Machado’s Dream House is such an impactful read. So, we’ll end this Writers Chat, Katherine, with some short questions:

  • New York or Boston? Provincetown.
  • Sorry, I should have offered Provincetown as an option! So, coffee or tea? I need coffee, I enjoy tea.
  • Mountains or sea? Always, always the Sea. In, on, under, or within sight or smell of it.
  • What are you writing now? Reworking a novella entitled Close/Close and also working on developing more picture-book stories for infants (with my friend Soren Mayes) based on Buddhist teachings.
  • I love the title of your novella, and interesting that you’re also working on stories for infants. Tell me, what are you reading now? Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner (Faber 2023) and about to start Lara by Bernardine Evaristo (1999) – I missed it the first time around
Photograph of Katherine O’Donnell seated at a table resting her face on her hand, looking directly at the camera. Photo provided by the author Photo Credit: Emma Jervis.

Thank you to New Island and Peter O’Connell for the advance copy of Slant.

Thanks to Katherine for such an engaging Writers Chat – I wish her much success with this novel. Readers can purchase Slant directly from New Island.

Book launch, Writing News

Washing Windows III Ed: Alan Hayes and Nuala O’Connor (Arlen House: Dublin, 2023)

I’m delighted to have my poem “Some Thing” in Washing Windows III: Irish Women Write Poetry. This poem takes a look at an imagined experience of an older Irish woman in the War of Independence and is told from the point of view of her son. Thank you to editors Alan Hayes and Nuala O’Connor for selecting my poem.

Purchase Washing Windows III: Irish Women Write Poetry from Books Upstairs.

You can listen to some readings from the anthology at Strokestown International Poetry Festival 2023