Tag: Dublin

Collaboration, Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writers with Artists

Writers Chat 50 (Part 1): Mia Gallagher on “Dubliners”(Marinonibooks: Italy, 2022)

I’m delighted to publish – on Bloomsday! – the first of a Two-Part Writers/Artists Chat about “Dubliners”, by writer Mia Gallagher and artist Margio Sughi.

Mia and Mario, Congratulations on Dubliners (Marinonibooks, Italy: 2022) – a most beautifully produced collaboration between words and visual art, essentially, a capturing of stories of Dubliners from 2018 to 2022 but actually their imagined lives beyond and before these times.  

Cover of Dubliners by Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi (Green background showing drawings of figures in swimming gear in blue). With kind permission of the authors.

SG: Before we get into the details of the stories and images in this collection – can you talk about your experience of the process of this collaborative work, that dance between both art forms and then again, the re-creation of new stories in the way the prose and images are set out together in the book?

MG: Hey Shauna – thanks a million for having us onto your series and many thanks too for your kind words about the book.

Collaborations, in my experience, succeed on three things. There needs to be resonance between myself and the artist/s I’m collaborating with, a feeling that deep down, we are after something similar. There needs to be enough difference to make for real dialogue. And the third element, possibly the most important, is excellent communication.

Mario has lived in Dublin for over 30 years. He and I are roughly the same age, and we move in similar circles, so I can recognise his places – his Dublins – and his people. There is a congruence between his and my Dubliners but they’re not exactly mappable– which is great for collaboration, it sets up a necessary tension, a dynamic.

Mario’s concept for this book was to place his existing images near my existing texts so a play would happen in the reader/viewer, allowing for new connections and meanings. I write in a montagey way, piecing together meaning as it comes, and it’s always exciting to see how my work can be recontextualised. So that concept also felt right to me on a deep level.

But Mario and I were only the starting points. We worked with a team: curator (Melania Gazzotti), publisher (Antonio Marinoni), translator (Silvana d’Angelo), and designers (Maia and Claude at studio òbelo). This triangulated the collaboration process. With every new person there was more dialogue, more room to refine the vision, add dimension.

In any collaborative project things can go wrong fast. A simple misunderstanding can lead to a shitfest in hours. Factor in different countries and languages and the risk snowballs. But Mario and Antonio were extraordinarily skilful in how they managed the process. This enabled each of us to be involved as much as we wanted – or needed – to.

For example, I’m a book-making hound. I love the process of editing, typesetting, layout – turning a Story into a Thing, and I am very grateful to Mario & Antonio for letting me get stuck into that. However, I can get bogged down in details too, and I’ve always appreciated the person – in this case, Melania – who says ‘Okay, Mia, hands off the wheel, it’s grand’. As long as you’re talking with your collaborative partners, asking questions, listening, making suggestions, being heard, you can figure out anything.

I want to give a special mention to Silvana the translator. She’s a writer herself and as well as offering her own contained and graceful interpretation of the text, she was the person who selected the texts, came up with the underlying concept of character studies for the tinier fragments and proposed the narrative spine. This – along with the more granular writing joys of working out together how to translate the possibly untranslatable, e.g., how do you turn gerunds into Italian? – was an aspect of the collaboration I hadn’t envisaged and which was deeply rewarding.

Mia, 2022
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: I’m loving those details about translation and interpretation and it’s so fascinating to hear about the all the people who were involved and the support structure that seemed to work so well for you all. I’m particularly interested in how all of the stories and visual art explore how we inhabit places and how they inhabit us, too – with a particular focus on our relationship with the coast and parks, nature in the city – can you talk a little about your relationship to these themes?

MG: I rarely think of a character in isolation – oh there’s an angry man – and write from there. My characters usually come to me in situations – oh there’s an angry guy who’s a driving instructor. The situation often sets up an initial conflict (how can you be angry and a driving instructor, yikes). But it’s not just an emotional situation, it is material too. Where is this angry guy from? That’s often answered in the voice of the character, which in some cases I hear before I see. Then other questions follow: Where is he doing the instruction? How long has he done it? What did he do before it? When did he do the other thing? What happened to him doing the other thing – why did he stop?

I often start a story from the first person and this beg questions about time, which is in itself a form of Place. When is the story happening? What is the relationship between that When and the narrator’s When, the place they are telling the story from? These questions then beg other questions – and then, if I’m lucky, I’ve got a story.

For me, Mario’s work is all about people in place and place in people. You catch a glimpse of an image, which in his works is always a situation – someone doing something somewhere at some time – and you start asking yourself: how does that woman’s voice sound, what do those shorts feel like on those legs, where are those girls going after they’ve got their coffees? So perhaps we’re coming at similar hooks but from different directions.

Girls at Merrion Square
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: I really think you are – and this book, Dubliners, really shows this. I also love how you play with understatement, Mia, and how parallel to this, Mario plays with colour and seemingly simple lines in his work. Meaning is deep under the page. I’m thinking of, for example, “VII Slip, 2020” where you use humour to bring depth to the narrator and the story – there’s both naiveté and unease played out through the act of swimming in adverse conditions. Many of the stories and images explore transformation in some way – how bodies in nature – in the sea and lying on grass – as well as bodies in clothes – change and become another and other. Does this ring true for you in terms of intention and interest? 

MG: Yes, you’re absolutely right, I think transformation underlines all of my work. Human beings are always changing – time works through our bodies and our selves from moment to moment, constantly expanding, shrinking, twisting, tweaking us into new shapes. Nothing is fixed. In my twenties I remember being very freed by the idea that I didn’t have to be consistent. That the point of life wasn’t to arrive at a fixed point at 21, or whatever, and then go around presenting that to the world. For me, change is growth and learning and pain and all those things make life interesting. But I don’t consciously set out to write change, it’s just one of my obsessions.

People are very surprising and capable of doing ‘uncharacteristic’ things. It’s fun to me to shove a character into a situation they wouldn’t ordinarily choose and see what happens. Often the stress puts so much pressure on them they are forced to change their shape. Sometimes literally, like the water demon kelpie in Lure.

On a quantum level everything is connected. We are the universe. The ultimate transformation is from life into death and whatever happens – or doesn’t – then.

With Mario’s work, I feel there is always something happening. A character is always doing something, even if it’s ‘just’ watching. This is action. But action equates change in the fabric of spacetime. Mario’s people are captured for a nano-second in the ever-changing process of being. The next moment, they will be different as their neurons fire, their senses land on a new stimulus, they remember their dinner, they see someone they want to avoid. It’s like looking at a star. What we see has already changed because the light had to travel so far across the universe. The people Mario has captured are now gone, forever. I think there is a very moving quality to that.

TCD Cafeteria, 2017
Image provided by and used with kind permission of Mario Sughi

SG: It feels like you’ve encapsulated Mario’s work here, Mia! Dubliners also captures chance encounters, such as that in “IX: Found Wanting, 2018” and Mario’s image, “TCD Cafeteria, 2017” fits the story so well:

“…the edges of his consonants stroked the back of my neck…Pressing closer to share confidences, touching an elbow to make a point, accidentally – oops, sorry! – moving our pint glasses together so we’d have to brush each other’s hands when we went to take a sip.”

Can you talk about how the stories and images are informed by the urban setting?

MG: I’ve lived in Dublin all my life, with the exception of 9 months in Germany after leaving school. It was years before I had a car and now, because of climate change, I’ve chosen to no longer drive very much. As a result, I’ve walked, cycled, bussed, DARTed (and later Luas’ed) through huge swathes of the city as it’s undergone many, often fundamental, changes. I’m increasingly drawn to being in the countryside – my garden, the allotment, the forests, rivers, mountains, sea – but I rarely write about those places. If my work isn’t set in Dublin, it tends to be small-town Irish, or urban settings in other countries.

Even now, as I’m getting more exercised about climate catastrophe and injustice and more irritated by the way we plan (or don’t) our cities – my gut response, if someone asks me what I feel about Dublin, is to say I love it. And, in general, I love the idea of a city as a place of encounters, difference and growth. If a city is planned well, it can also be more sustainable as a place to live – so who knows?

Over the decades, I feel Dublin has made its way into me. It is me, in some way. When I walk it, I sense memories of older selves, older relationships. It can be a shock to see a street changed or gone – have my memories gone too? Maybe they’re still there, lying underneath the new build. For me, Dublin isn’t so much a setting, it is the story. Writing a story of Dublin is like writing a story of a particular part of me. The story you quoted from, Found Wanting, was written first in 2002, and set in the mid-late 1990s, when Dublin, and my life there, felt very exciting.

Mario’s work, to me, also has the quality of a flâneur’s vision. The urban observer. Mario captures moments that, by being captured, become significant. Look long enough at his work and I start doing the same thing, framing the everyday as an artwork. I think that’s a beautiful thing he offers the world.

SG: It strikes me that the book could also have been titled “Dubliners in Moments”….Yet behind the bright sun there’s also undertones of darkness, in “X Fairview 2022” and  “XIII Polyfilla, 2018” and, for me, how they bounced off Mario’s “Lockdown and Breakdown Series”, the juxtaposition of every day objects and the unspoken – the power of steam from a cup of coffee. Could you talk about the synchronicity of theme and interest in both art forms and perhaps even if this was a surprise to you both?

MG: I am intrigued by materials, the textures of things. Buildings, earth, trees, fabric, food, skin, cars. I worked as an actor and movement artist and I never feel happier than when I’m involved in some tactile activity. The challenge for me as a writer is to convey some of that sensation. How can I get a reader to sense, to feel, as opposed to think? I like to use sensation as a trigger for my characters’ actions. This happens in real life all the time. I’ll smell a person and suddenly I hate or love them – though I don’t know them from Adam – because the smell is calling up some ancient memory I may not even have words for.

In terms of synchronicity between my and Mario’s themes, his work resonates with me in lots of ways. It’s urban, it’s new, it’s off-kilter. I also see a similar preoccupation with textures and surfaces. At first glance I think Oh my god his Dublin is so bright and glowy and sunshiney and gorgeous, he makes Irish people look so sexy. But then I look deeper and there’s something else going on. An awkwardness in conversation, yawning gaps between people, uneasy isolation on a city street – which he emphasises very subtly in his Lockdown series. Under the gleam, something darker is at play.

I like how you pick up on our objects, e.g., the coffee cup. Objects are magical to me. They have a totemic value, and in literature I think they can reveal more about people than any amount of description about that person’s emotional toolkit. They ask questions too:

Who made that cup of coffee for the woman at the table? What is she going to say next?

And from there, you get Story.

SG: Yes and from story, life, and so we circle. To finish up, Mia, some fun questions:

  • Tea or Coffee? I love coffee but get very hyper on it. Usually for me: green tea before midday, infusions after that. Occasionally a teatime Earl Gray with a slice of lemon, no milk.
  • River or sea swimming? Both. The sea for the salt, the buoyancy, the space, the depth. The river for the tanny brown, the push of the current, the mystery, the trees. Both for the danger & the invaluable lesson to respect what’s bigger than me.
  • Beach or park? A forest park with a river or lake, amazing. But a beach, a strand, a shore, also amazing.
  • Music or quiet when writing? Quiet unless I’m in total flow, writing longhand with no inner editor switched on – in those moments I can have anything playing around me, it won’t bother me. Some music for when I’m musing but not physically writing.
  • What’s next up on your reading pile? What’s next up on your reading pile? Currently reading ‘Dschinns’, a book in German by Fatma Aydemir about Kurdish immigrants in Germany. Superb and engrossing – hopefully it’ll soon appear in English translation. Recently I finished Claire-Louise Bennett’s brilliant ‘Checkout 19’, and I am slowly working through Henning Mankell’s unsettling and profound memoir ‘Quicksand’. Next up: George Saunders’ ‘The Tenth of December’. 

More coverage of Dubliners:

  • LiteratureIreland: (Instagram) The sun is out in Dublin and the togs and swims will soon follow! This is a brilliant and bright bilingual Italian / English publication called Dubliners, by Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi.

With thanks to Gráinne Killeen PR, and to Mia Gallagher and Mario Sughi for being so generous in taking part in my Writers/Artists Chat Series.

PART TWO, featuring a three-way conversation between Mario Sughi, Mia Gallagher and Shauna Gilligan, and featuring art by Sughi, will publish next week.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 49: Eamon Somers on “Dolly Considine’s Hotel” (Unbound: London, 2021)

Cover image of Dolly Considine’s Hotel by Eamon Somers – colourful carpet with a black pistol on the floor

Eamon, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on Dolly Considine’s Hotel which was published by Unbound in 2021. I must thank you for taking the time to do a reading as part of this WRITERS CHAT – readers, you’ll find the reading mid-way through this chat so treat it like an interval!

SG: Before we get into the details of the characters, history, politics and love in Dolly Considine’s Hotel, I was struck by the honesty with which you describe the writing journey and path to publication. I think it’s very refreshing. Can you talk a little about this and your experience with Unbound and may I, in the same breath, comment on the perfect cover. I just love that patterned carpet and the revolver. It captures so much of what the novel is about.

ES: Hi Shauna, it’s an absolute pleasure and a privilege to be invited onto your famous writers chat. Let me start with the cover which was designed by book designers Mecob and has received a lot of praise. I tracked down the patterned carpet photo on Shutterstock, it was taken by Irish photographer Julie A Lynch and she called it “creepy old hotel in ireland carpet”. If anyone knows Julie, please pass on my gratitude to her for such a great image.

I submitted an earlier novel to over 100 agents and publishers. One agent was interested, and we worked for months to get it ready to send out. But without success. He told me to put that novel in my bottom drawer and to write another. I resurrected something I had previously worked on, and Dolly was born. But by the time I had an acceptable draft, the agent had moved on, and I started the submission business again. Eventually, just as I was about to give up and self-publish, Unbound said ”yes”.   

Unbound operates like a traditional publisher, except that their financial model requires publication costs to be raised through a crowdfunding campaign, run by the author on the Unbound website. That was hard work, but very rewarding especially because it introduced me to the world of promotion via social media. With so many books being published it appears that unknown and debut novelists have little chance of finding readers (and as, importantly, reviews) unless they embrace the world of Twitter and Instagram.  

SG: Yes, these days as well as writing the novel writers are expected to promote their work across multiple social media platforms – hard work when you need to be writing! But now let’s talk about the structure of Dolly Considine’s Hotel. There’s a split timeline for most of the book – between 1950s and 1980s – and it’s through the two stories, running along almost like parallel tracks that we come to understand the significance of the Dolly’s hotel as the main character. Coupled with the wonderful chapter titles (for example, “No Time To Be Squeamish”, “Julian Remembers the smell of chocolate that encircled the Cadbury girls”, “A visit to the theatre”) and the short, snappy chapters, the novel is a surprisingly fast read at over 500 pages. Did the structure play as important a part in writing as it does in the reading experience?

ES: I didn’t start out to write anything complex. I wanted to set the story in a version of an hotel I had briefly worked in when I was in my early twenties. And because I was very disillusioned with Ireland after the pro-life referendum was passed and the possibility of divorce was rejected, I wanted to portray life in the early ‘80s. I admit to wanting to write something a bit different from the usual linear story: hero/heroine overcoming obstacles to find themselves or love. More importantly I wanted to play with readers, to upset their trust a little, hint at unspoken complexities, cast doubt on the certainties they expected, give them shaky ground, like a fairground ride. At the time of writing, experimental writers were beginning to play with multimedia things and to give readers some power to control the story. But that wasn’t for me, instead I tried to give entertaining variety from which readers could choose what to believe and what to just laugh at. This may not answer your question, but the hotel building has been around for two hundred years, and I wanted to share the histories that made it the complex entity that it is today. History doesn’t happen overnight; it is built up and built upon over many years. Ghosts have to come from somewhere. And Dolly has lived/is living through periods. She chose her path (or it chose her) in the ‘50s, when she moved into the hotel, taking with her own family’s history.

SG: I found there was a lot to laugh, disbelieve, and wonder… but alongside this playing with the reader, one of the main themes is that of identity and gender; the names we call each other, the names we call ourselves, the limitations and expectations of society and of ourselves. Dolly’s hotel is a type of refuge for those who want to step outside the norms of 1950s/1980s Ireland. And of course, Dolly Considine – and through the hotel – plays with notions of power and politics, from her seduction of GI and Cathal, to her hold over the staff. Can you talk about Dolly, identity and gender?

ES: Identity is very important to me. I was married at 22 and was the father of two children by the time I found out/acknowledged I was gay and my marriage broke up. Often when I meet new people it is the fact that I have children that emerges rather than the fact that for nearly forty years I have lived in a committed relationship with another man. So (as a committed zealot) I feel obliged to correct any assumptions.  Less frequently, but equally, I feel obliged not to deny my children when I make new gay friends. This is who I am, as is my Irishness, and my confused class heritage.

If Dolly or other characters defy expectations, then I am pleased. The female characters perhaps try to control their environments, but I think they have to reduce their expectations, so they are in line with what is possible. And although it was Julian that was the inspiration, I had wanted more for Dolly than she got. So, in that sense I let her down and allowed the lion’s share of attention go to the male protagonist.

SG: And to be honest that is probably why I picked her out for that question! I wanted more for her too!

I loved how the meta-narrative of the novel that Julian is writing – “The Summer of Unrequited Love” – evolves with the main narrative (that of the hotel) in such a way that we have trouble distinguishing between the action in Julian’s notebooks and those in the hotel, just as Julian himself does. At one stage, “It had only been seven or eight hours, but his fingers were twitching as if they’d never hold a pen again.” And, for example, we’re in a scene in which Julian’s lover, Bláthín, has had most of the wine:

‘The wine was gone. She’d had the most of it.’ He whispered the words to fix them in his head. It would be a springboard line for his journal. He leaned into the low table to search for blank paper she wouldn’t miss; even his own mother kept scraps for shopping lists. His pen already in his hand, twisting like a divining rod tuned to blank paper.

How important to you were these parallel stories which reflect and talk to each other to what you wanted to say through the novel about the acts of perceiving, recording, and writing?

ES:  The parallel stories confront the reader with a messy, erotic, unashamed version of Ireland. In the extract you choose, Julian is writing his fictional Summer of Unrequited Love, while also participating in the real-life events of Dolly Considine’s Hotel.

Julian is a young idealist, and a “real” artist, ready to “suffer” for his art. But equally there is the serious work of how a writer portrays their characters. Which aspects of their behaviour will best represent them? Julian wants only meaningful characteristics, the ones (perhaps just one) that will resonate instantly with his readers; he wants to ignore those that merely pad out the portrait.

But Josie’s story, Sylvia’s story, Dolly’s father’s story, Brendan’s story all explore, and as you say, talk to the main and ostensibly more reliable/truthful narrative, and hopefully in their own way, produce a more meaningful truth and deeper feelings in the mind of the reader.

Eamon reads two short extracts featuring Dolly and Julian

(total time: 4 mins, 10 seconds)

Eamon Somers reading two short extracts which focus on Dolly and Julian

SG: Thank you for such a wonderful reading, Eamon. So, following on from that reading, we can say that much of Dolly Considine’s Hotel examines bodies and terminations – ideological, political, literary – through acting and enacting, writing and reading, interpreting and imagining. It’s a slow build – starting with Mikhail Mayakovsky/ the Mother Ireland scene and returning to it later – and continuing with the series of “Terminations” in Julian’s notebook – whilst following the adventures of Julian’s body in the hotel and beyond. I also couldn’t help feeling that the side exploration of urban/rural – for example, when Bláthín tells Julian in Cavan to “listen to the babies…you can’t come down here and trample anywhere you like. You have to respect the established order.” – also echoed this theme of bodies. I thought it was an interesting way to explore choice. Can you comment on this?

ES: Although it is not foregrounded except perhaps in Cathal’s naming, and Julian’s frustration at not understanding the history of the state’s inception, I was conscious of the civil war all the time I was writing the book. As a nationalism sceptic I don’t want to big up too much the “idealism” of 1916 and the war of independence, but for me the civil war marked the termination of those aspirations embodied in the Irish Literary Renaissance of the 19th century, and which were then fetishised and mythologised in the new state. Mother Ireland and her pregnancy reminds us of the loss of idealism and choice that the pro-life victory represents. Many of us who grew up in cities (but especially Dublin) under Eamonn De Valera and Bishop John Charles McQuaid were made to feel that the authentic Irish lived in the country. Dubliners are Jackeens, they took the king’s shilling, they were not to be trusted. Bláthín has absorbed the myths and is retelling them in her radio work, but she also recognises that Julian might have his own working class inner-city naive truth.

SG: Yes, of course, there’s the theme and voice of class running through the novel too. Now, we’ve discussed some of the themes and narratives but I can’t leave this Writers Chat without mentioning the humour and the chance encounter (or was it a chance!?) between Paddy/ Julian and the mysterious Malone in Busárus that sets Julian on the road to Dolly’s hotel. You really capture that era (1983), one in which the world outside Ireland was full of possibilities but an Ireland which was closed in on itself in every way (economically, sexually and so on). Can you talk about the genesis of this beginning?

ES: The people of Ireland’s 26 counties often get criticised for ignoring and/or completely misunderstanding what life is like for people who live in the North of Ireland. I wanted to play with the complexities and to allow Julian to have what he considered to be reasonable (but were often conspiratorial) interpretations for the things he witnessed/imagined about Malone, and about Dolly and GI – viz the safe house. But I also wanted a cross border romantic interest, even if the erotic only went as far as Julian wearing Malone’s pants and underwear.

SG: And speaking of pants and underwear, the erotic – particularly, male – is key to the novel and yet is not the only theme that defines it. How would you categorise Dolly Considine’s Hotel – if it can be categorised or boxed?

ES: I think of Dolly Considine’s Hotel as a post-gay novel, a book where the issue of sexuality is taken for granted.  This doesn’t make characters nicer or less nice or even more worked out, but their sexuality is just a fact, like their eye colour. Recent years have seen a market opening up for gay fiction across all genres, however in my writing I seem to have been regarded as either too gay for mainstream publishers or not gay enough for niche publishers.  And although it was not my intention when writing the book, I’d love to think that Dolly can bridge that divide.

SG: To finish up, Eamon, some fun questions

  • Countryside or city? Except for three months when I was eleven (on a Gael Linn scholarship in Connemara) I have always lived in cities. Like many city dwellers I secretly think I would love the countryside, but in reality, suspect I will always prefer to visit rather than live there.
  • Tea or Coffee?  I am definitely a coffee person. But have very little time for fussy machinery, or coffee shops, and except for weekends, will settle for instant. I switch to decaf at noon.
  • Bus or train?  I love trains, especially for long journeys. But in the city I like buses, so much better for linking London’s villages. And during covid, somehow safer than the underground.
  • First draft handwritten or typed? Typed, onto my old Amstrad in 1998, although I was also very fond of a notebook, but mainly for late night drunken ramblings.
  • What’s next on your reading pile? I supported my fellow Unbound author Patrick McCabe’s crowdfunding campaign for his latest book, Poguemathone and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into that.

With thanks to Eamon Somers and Unbound for the copy of Dolly Considine’s Hotel – purchase the book here

Photograph of Eamon Somers (courtesy of Justin David)
Exhibitions, Writing News

Duality in Dublin Art Book Fair!

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Artist Margo McNulty and I are delighted to have our book Duality exhibited in the Dublin Art Book Fair 2019 Art & Architecture: Learning from the Bauhaus which takes place in Temple Bar Gallery and Studios from 21 November – December 1.

All events are free and there are lots of events on – find out more: Dublin Art Book Fair.

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Images used with permission from and with thanks to Temple Bar Gallery + Studios

#DABF19

#TBGandS