Tag: Process

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.

Past Writers Interviews, Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 45: Linda Lappin on “The Soul of Place” (Travelers’ Tales: Palo Alto, 2015)

Following on from our recent Writers Chat, much of which focused on place, Linda and I decided that we’d like to revisit our 2015 Writers Chat about The Soul of Place A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Conjuring the Genius Loci.

Cover image of The Soul of Place

Linda, I was delighted to hear of a writing workbook dedicated to place. I feel it is something that the writing world needs – and place, which is so central to narrative, is often omitted from generic writing books. The ‘blurb’ describes the book as an “engaging creative writing workbook” in which you present “a series of insightful exercises to help writers of all genres—literary travel writing, memoir, poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction—discover imagery and inspiration in the places they love.”

Having had the pleasure to read your latest publication I found it a fascinating and easy read – before I even tried out some of the exercises with my writing groups. It left me with a number of wonderful ideas of how I might update writing prompts and exercises I regularly use with groups as well as introducing me to new techniques, and, more than anything, new perspectives on writing about place. This is what stays with me, now that I have put into practice some of your suggestions – how The Soul of Place sets out intriguing and original perspectives on writing into place, about place and from place. (I’ll be writing about this again, later!)  

SG: So, a few thoughts, questions, and considerations for you, Linda. Firstly, am I correct in my understanding that your premise for this book stems from your own journey in writing and in place and the knowledge gained that to go deep into our creative selves we must reach into the soul – the soul of place?

LL: Yes, this book retraces various itineraries I have explored through many places as a writer, a reader, and teacher.  It grew from two seeds, so to speak, the first is my own strong response to archetypal places which stir my imagination – islands, gardens, old houses, ruins, all of which appear in my fiction, essays, and in my life. The second was  a travel writing course I designed on “place-based writing” for students visiting Italy, where I live,  for the first time. My idea was to send them to interesting places, a medieval village, an Etruscan site, a baroque sculpture garden, ancient houses and churches, street markets, cafes, neighborhood festivals, train stations, a pilgrim’s road in the woods, to discover their own reaction to these environments while developing greater physical and intellectual awareness of the places themselves and engaging with the stories happening around them. I think creativity begins with awareness – taking time to notice who we are and where we are and with finding a new relationship to the space we live in and its contents.

SG: I agree with you about awareness, Linda. This is something that Julia Cameron and other artists talk about. Now you define the genius loci as “a form of intelligence operating within the environment in synergy with human beings.” Can you tell us a little more about how it affects our creativity, our writing, especially in relation to where we are writing (the physical place – e.g. an office, a school, a prison, a writers’ retreat etc)

LL: Architects and city planners, and before them geomancers and shamans have always known that architectural space and landscapes can be manipulated to produce certain feelings or induce certain behavior in human beings—to diverse ends.  Places, like people or planets, have emanations which may be the combined product of various forces –cosmic, terrestrial, conscious, unconscious, individual, collective, natural, artificial, historical, cultural. For me your question touches on two related but different issues.  The first and most obvious is, how can we obtain beneficial influence from our environment. I think it is possible to create  – or find — environments where our creativity and general well-being are enhanced, and discovering where those places are  can be a passionate, lifelong adventure for anyone, not just a writer or artist.   That doesn’t mean that your writing place has to be one with a stupendous view, but rather one where you are able to commune with yourself and summon your memory and imagination – and this can be anywhere, from an office to a prison cell to a picnic table at the park. It is a subjective thing, however. You have to find a place that feels right for you.  Very often we don’t really know how the places WHERE  we live affect us. Another issue this question raises concerns the type of influence which might come from the Soul of Place.  In some cases, it might not be a happy, or beneficial one, but a withering and painful one.  Some places may transmit to us violence and fear. Still in such places writers may find stories they feel compelled to tell, and an incredible energy may be available to help them at their task. Lastly, to reply to your mention of writing retreats: whenever we have the opportunity to write in a different setting and place, it helps refresh our senses, find new perspectives. I think that’s very useful.

SG: Sorry for such a loaded question, Linda, but I’m glad you mentioned perspectives – as your book is full of interesting insights about this. I was particularly taken with the section on Deep Maps – and blown away by the story you tell of Heat-Moon literally walking on the US Geographical Survey Maps covering Chase County, and then walking across the County section by section, and the fact that it took 8 years of research and 6 years of writing to complete PrairyEarth. It really epitomises what you are proposing in your book – that we pay (literal) attention to the ground we walk on, and with all our senses. Could you comment on that?

LL: What Least Heat-Moon discovered about his environment – its multilayered structure with deep roots resonating within  his own psyche, is something we can all find in the places where we are living now and where we have lived or only transited in the past if we take the time to investigate them with our senses, feelings, and curiosity.

SG: Curiosity is something that I sometimes think we are letting slip away – with so much information at our (literal) fingertips. Where is the meaning? And the discovery?

LL: I think you are right, we  are so bombarded by information, images, news, ideas, it is impossible to take it all in. That’s one reason, I think, that being centered in a physical place, even if only for a brief time, is so important.

SG: I like the way the workbook is structured – you discuss concepts, invite the reader to a selection of further reading, and illustrate the practice of these concepts or ideas using examples from literature and your own novels, and then present us with some exercises. Are there any readings or exercises you wish you could have included in the book?

LL: At one point this book was a third longer than it is now, with specific poetry exercises, journaling, fiction exercises that made it unwieldy, and so in my final version I scrapped some of them. I did have a section on recreating environments in historical fiction, something which really interests me, in fact all my novels are set in the 1920s and one, Katherine’s Wish, focuses on the historical character of Katherine Mansfield.  I decided not to include this material in the book, but to leave it for a later time. Another thing I didn’t include was a special exercise on masks, related to Carnival time, in Italy, and I hope to do something with that, too sooner or later!

SG: Oh that would be interesting – please keep me posted on new ventures; you might even have a second book on place and objects?

Well, I suppose it depends on the response to this book, but my own research has continued since I completed The Soul of Place. I’d like to something more with writing rooms and writers’s rooms for example, and my publisher had a great idea for a short video or two based on the ideas in the book.

SG: I am interested in arrivals and departures and how these movements connect to and disconnect from place and, because of this, form our emotional attachments (or detachments) to places and landscapes. You bring this notion a step further when you invite the reader to study every day places such as parks, gardens, markets but also to deeply explore sacred places and spaces, and labyrinths.

LL: Living in a place like Italy, you are literally immersed in layers of history – also religious history,  in places where Christian churches incorporated pagan sites where Neolithic people worshiped in even earlier times or in places where Renaissance artists rediscovering the humanism of the antique world  fused pagan and Christian symbols – The secret languages of myth, symbol, and the sacred are stamped on so many places here – gardens, towers, palaces, churches, grottoes, roads, you are constantly transiting from the bustle of contemporary life to these other zones which appeal to another part of our nature which is less concerned with the quotidian and hungry for feelings and sensations that make us feel part of a greater world. Most cultures do have special places, religious or natural sanctuaries, “set aside” to restore us from the frazzle of daily activities.  It can be very rewarding for writers to explore these different settings and their effect on our creativity.  

SG: It is clear that place – and placing cities, landscapes, exterior and interior to the forefront of your writing – is important to you. I know you discuss talismans in the book so can you tell us if there are any mementos that you carry with you? I, for example, have some Mexican milagros that go everywhere with me when I’m writing. I feel they connect me to place, and now that I have a name for it, thanks to your book, they connect me to the genius loci.

LL: Nowadays I tend to travel lighter than I once did.  As far as talismans go, I keep a ticket from the Paris metro in my wallet –hoping it will somehow anticipate my next visit to a place I love. The old house where my husband and I go on week ends sometimes is a talisman in itself. Full of curious objects accumulated in various ways, it definitely has a personality of its own.  Rather than taking things with me when I travel, there are certain things I love to bring back, like dried herbs, honey, or seeds. I  always bring back sea salt from Greece, Sardinia or France. People think I am crazy to bring back a kilo of salt from a Greek or French supermarket –but I just love the idea of adding a little touch of the Aegean or the Atlantic when I cook.

SG: Oh goodness, this has put a smile on my face – when I go to the west coast of France (which is pretty much every year), I always bring back large bags of sea salt. There’s nothing like it! The other day I made a wonderful salty caramel using it. Moving on from this, can you describe the place where you wrote this workbook?

LL: Different places: A sunny room in Rome with a balcony over a very noisy street, with jasmine and plumbago vines and a nest built by a pair of blackbirds that then never occupied it.  A darker room in an old house in a village outside Rome, with  a red brick floor and thick chestnut beams, with a view of the canyon, and a woodstove with a glass door through which I can watch the flames.  A courtyard in that same village, with lush Virginia creeper clinging to old stone walls and flowering hydrangeas concealing a fountain.

SG: I can just picture them – all so inspirational, magical and, of course, so full of vibrant colour. Tell me, where will you spend the summer months – and what will you be working on?

LL: I will be visiting relatives in the US and then hopefully,  will return for a short visit to Greece, where I am hoping to organize a five day Soul of Place Writing Workshop with a writing center on the island Andros next summer. I am trying to finish a memoir about a house sit in Tuscany, called Postcards from a Tuscan Interior, and also have a couple of novels on the fire, as well. Thanks so much for your interest in my book. Your questions have been quite challenging.

SG: Thank you for engaging so fully with the questions, Linda, and I wish you every success with your book which I will continue to use as part of my teaching and which I recommend – highly!

Photograph of Linda Lappin (Courtesy of the author)

Connect with Linda and Purchase The Soul of Place–A Creative Writing Workbook: Ideas and Exercises for Counjuring the Genius Loci (Travelers’ Tales: Palo Alto, 2015)

Film, Writers Read

Fighting your way through the process…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the hard work of creativity, of life. How the best always seems the most simple and the clearest. How behind this clarity is years and years of graft and inspiration and struggle.

Ira Glass says “You just have to fight your way through that….”
This short video encapsulates all of this – take 2 minutes, 18 seconds out of your day and enjoy!

THE GAP by Ira Glass from Daniel Sax on Vimeo.