Tag: Reading

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing News

Writers Chat 79: Celia de Fréine on “Even Still” (Arlen House, 2025)

Celia, You’re very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to talk about Even Still (Arlen House, 2025) your debut short story collection in English which also includes “The Story of Elizabeth”, your short story shortlisted for Short Story of the Year Award at the An Post Irish Book Awards. The collection has been described as having “compelling” prose with “characters’ voices pitch perfect” and a “unique, characteristically stark, witty perspective on the lives of women and girls.”

SG: Even Still invites the reader into the emotional heart of each narrator – over a range of ages – and stays with some of them as they create life-paths out of places of poverty, away from damaged families and through schooling and employment that only echo where they’ve come from. Did these themed threads dictate the title and running order of the collection?

CdF: Thank you for the invitation, Shauna. I’m delighted to take part in the Writers Chat series. The word ‘debut’ seems strange applied to me at this stage of my life and so late in my literary career, but Even Still is indeed a debut collection of stories that were written on the side, over many years, while I worked in other genres. The title was chosen at the last minute, and with difficulty. I feel it suits the collection, however, as it suggests the possibility of alternatives. As for the running order, I thought it best to place the three stories that feature the character, Veronica, in chronological order. “My Sister Safija”, “Vive La Révolution” and “Irma” grouped themselves together. It seemed appropriate to place “La Cantatrice Muette” and “Félicité” between later stories, some of which have characters common to them. As you say, many of the stories explore the lives of  characters who emerge from disadvantaged backgrounds, then attend schools / are employed by institutions in which they are challenged as a result of that background; the question as to how they manage to improve their lot is one that intrigues me, not only in this book, but in general.

Cover image of Even Still showing part image of the painting ‘Fitzwilliam Square’ by Pauline Bewick – side profile of a woman on a balcony in Dublin looking down on a road on which seven cars move along.

SG: The collection is as much about place as people – starting with the cover art (‘Fitzwilliam Square’ by Pauline Bewick) – and the opening story “Pink Remembered Streets.” In these stories villages, towns, cities, and the buildings that form them rescue and trap their inhabitants. Can you comment on the importance of place in your stories?

CdF: The cover art, suggested by publisher, Alan Hayes, with its buildings, winding street and traffic, viewed by a woman from a height, is indeed appropriate. This is the first time I’ve been asked about place in my work and am happy to provide answers, insofar as they relate to this book. The buildings, in which the stories are set, are imagined, apart from the brief mention of a boarding school in “These Boots were Made for Me” and the houses described in “Pink Remembered Streets” and “The Accident”. Both of these houses were places in which I spent time; both were places of insecurity. The former is a flat in a house in Rathmines where I lived with my family during my early years, and from which we could have been evicted at a moment’s notice; the latter is my grandmother’s house in a seaside town in Northern Ireland where I spent my childhood summers, knowing the fun and happiness would end when summer drew to a close. Both houses have appeared in other work, as has security of tenure and the buying and selling of property. Another place that permeates the stories is the past, L.P. Hartley’s ‘another country’ where, in this case, there were few opportunities for girls and women.

SG: You tackle themes (such as domestic abuse, gun running, suicide, the poverty trap, cruelty) that could be weighty with, at times, a narrative voice that is wry and humorous. I’m thinking of the voices of Stella in “Panda Bears” and Eithne in “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio”. Was that a conscious, writerly decision or did those narrative voices emerge through the writing of the characters?

CdF: I tend to see the absurd in many situations and this is reflected in the stories “Panda Bears” and “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio”. In the former, Stella feels she must marry, not least on account of the urging of her friend, Eileen. The fact that both men she sleeps with wear hideous underwear and are poor lovers emerged naturally, as did the time in which the story is set: the opening occurs in late 1969, as suggested by the Mary Quant lipstick and the Beatles’ song; the fact that the timing of the gunrunning, set during the following Whit Weekend, coincides with the 1970 Arms Trial, was serendipitous. “His Ice Creamio is the Bestio” began life as a play in which I examined the lives of three generations of women from the same family, each of whom spent their formative years in different circumstances: grandmother, Eithne, from Northern Ireland, worked as a shorthand-typist during World War 11; her daughter, Francesca, an academic, grew up during the fifties in Dublin; Francesca’s daughter, Alannah, grew up in the Connemara Gaeltacht during the eighties. I found it bizarre, though credible, that three generations of one family could emerge from such different backgrounds on the same small island, and set out to explore how those differences impacted the characters.

SG: I’d love read a novel with these three generations! The stories often hold their power in the unsaid – or shown at a slant – whereby they rely on the readers’ close attention and intelligence to know or feel the real truth. Veronica’s stories, in particular, are great at this (the absence of Clara, for example). We know what happened to her – or we use what the narrative has stoked in our imagination. This makes it feel like these stories are a dialogue between writer/narrator and reader. Can you comment on this?

CdF: The subtlety probably spills over from my poetry where the number of words is more measured and the point never hammered home. I feel this approach works well in the Veronica stories, each of which focuses on the fate of a child: Clara, who falls prey to a paedophile in “Pink Remembered Streets”; the baby, Elizabeth, born of incest in “The Story of Elizabeth”; the unnamed boy, illegally adopted in “These Boots Were Made for Me”. I hadn’t planned that the common denominator in these stories would be the ‘child as victim’, as seen through the eyes of Veronica. Perhaps, because they are told at a slant, the stories demand the reader’s close attention, creating, as you say, an additional element to the usual dialogue between writer and reader; if this is the case, it was unintentional.

SG: And the unintentional is often the magic of the work! War, gender, and displacement are also explored in these stories, overtly in “Irma” and “My Sister Safija” which, as they’re bookmarked between other stories, seem to echo concepts of the outsider, whether it’s ideas of blow-ins, internal movement within the island of Ireland, or belonging through marriage. Did you set out to explore these themes or did they emerge through the stories?

CdF: War, gender, and displacement feature regularly in my poetry and it comes as no surprise that they have spilled over into Even Still. In addition, I should mention that some situations and characters in the collection are inspired by real events, though said situations and characters have been changed out of all recognition. The theme of the outsider, insofar as that person is from Northern Ireland, is one that worked its way into these stories. Having been born in the North and grown up in Dublin, I’ve always struggled to find out where I’m from, a question which drives much of my writing. I used to question whether I was entitled to explore my ‘Northerness’ as I hadn’t lived in the North during the Troubles but, more recently have come to  better understand how the fallout from the conflict reaches beyond the Border. Though I didn’t set out to write stories populated by Northerners, these characters presented themselves and exerted their influence to varying degrees on the situations in which they became involved. As for belonging through marriage, Stella in “Panda Bears” is a young woman from Dublin who ends up marrying a Kerryman and moving to Tralee. This idea was also triggered by personal circumstances: I worked for some years in the Civil Service where the vast majority of colleagues were from the country and cast me, the Dubliner, as outsider – even though when I finished work and went home in the evening I was cast, alongside my family, as outsider because we were from the North.

SG: Much of your writing has the poet’s eye for detail, the dramatist’s narrative curve, and the prose writer’s depth. Your descriptions and visual take on lives also has the film maker’s sensibility. Could you see any of these stories as short films? (I’m thinking of “The Short of It”, for example).

CdF: It has already been suggested to me that some of the stories would work on screen. As soon as someone gets back to me with a firm proposal, I shall give it my serious consideration! “The Short of It” is the only story I set out to write as part of an agenda. Some years ago I was devastated when my work was plagiarised and exploited on a very public platform. One of my sons suggested I write a revenge story in the style of Michael Crichton: Crichton finds novel way to exact revenge on critic | The Independent | The Independent. Although my son’s suggestion triggered “The Short of It”, the story changed out of all recognition once I got going and now bears no resemblance to the travesty which gave it its initial impetus. I like the juxtaposition between the narrator’s circumstances when young, cash-strapped and working in the Civil Service, she adapts sewing patterns to recreate dresses featured on the catwalk, and her response, years later, when she realises her writing has been plagiarised.

SG: You are a bilingual writer. Were any of these stories first written in Irish, and, if so, how did you find the translation process in terms of idioms, flow, and narrative voice? If not, would you consider translating any of them into Irish?

CdF: “My Sister Safija” was originally written in Irish and is published as “Mo Dheirfiúr Maja” in Bláth na dTulach (Éabhlóid, 2021) an anthology of work by Northern writers. As such, I had to transpose it to Donegal Irish and needed editorial assistance. You can listen to it, beautifully read by Áine Ní Dhíoraí, here: Mo Dheirfiúr Maja le Celia de Fréine – Bláth na dTulach (podcast) | Listen Notes. I would consider translating any of the stories in Even Still into Irish for a film script or play.

SG: We will end this Writers Chat, Celia, with some fun questions:

  • Bus or train? Tram. I love the LUAS. For longer journeys, I prefer the train but find myself travelling more by bus as bus stops are more accessible than railway stations.
  • Marmalade or jam? Marmalade. Thick cut.
  • Coffee or tea? An cupán tae, always.
  • What are you reading now? When I’m writing I read little other than newspapers (at the weekend) and research / fact-checking articles. As well as the above, at present I’m dipping into There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die (Penguin UK, 2025) the selected poems of Danish writer, Tove Ditlevsen. Recently I read The Forgotten Girls: An American Story (Allen Lane, 2023) by Monica Potts; and You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Canongate, 2023) by Maggie Smith (not the actor). All three books explore themes covered in Even Still.
  • These sound like great recommendations (I love Ditlevsen’s work!) What are you writing now? I’m about to sign off on the second edition of my poetry collection Aibítir Aoise : Alphabet of an Age (Arlen House, 2025); I’m also reworking my play Cóirín na dTonn with the team from An Taibhdhearc. Cóirín na dTonn was originally published as part of the collection Mná Dána (Arlen House, 2009 / 2019) and is recommended as an optional text on the Leaving Certificate Syllabus. I also have two projects on Louise Gavan Duffy, inspired by my biography Ceannródaí (LeabhairCOMHAR, 2018), on the back burner. As all these projects are based on, or inspired by, earlier work, I long to clear space for new poems, and get back to a YA novel in Irish which I began a couple of months ago.

Thank you, Celia, for such insight into your writing life and process. Here’s to finding clear space over the coming months and continued success with Even Still which can be purchased in Books Upstairs.

Photograph of Celia de Fréine, Princess Grace Library, by Judith Gantley used with permission.

Contemplation, On Reading, Writers Read, Writing Life

Brevity and Letting Words Sit

I was delighted to be able to attend a number of literary events recently – it’s not often that I am in a position to do so – and whilst in Strokestown for the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and in Maynooth Bookshop for Mary O’Donnell’s launch, I picked up some gems of poetry and short story collections.

Photograph showing the covers of the seven books listed below

As a predominantly long-form prose writer, I treasure the chance of brevity, beauty, and letting words sit for a while. Here’s my reading list:

  • Nuala O’Connor Menagerie (Arlen House) – poetry
  • Vona Groarke Infinity Pool (Gallery Press) – poetry
  • Mary O’Donnell Walking Ghosts (Mercier Press) – short story collection
  • Alan Hayes and Nuala O’Connor (eds) Washing Windows V (Arlen House) – poetry (by 303 poets – and I’m delighted to have a poem in here!)
  • Celia de Fréine Even Still (Arlen House) – short story
  • Noelle Lynskey Featherweight (Arlen House) – poetry
  • Eilish Martin ! All’arme/? And what…if not (Macha Press) – poetry (stunning art work and production)

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read

Writers Chat 77: Paul Perry on “Paradise House” (Somerville Press, 2025)

Paul, you’re very welcome back to my Writers Chat series. We last talked about The Garden (New Island, 2021). Today we’re delving into Paradise House (Somerville Press, 2025), named as one of The Irish Times’ most anticipated books of the year and which Dermot Bolger describes as “an intriguing feat of deft imaginative power.” I thoroughly enjoyed the gripping narrative which gave me lots of “aha!” moments.

Photograph of the book Paradise House with a black and white cover image of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle by the coast, and on the back cover, a black and white photograph of the author Paul Perry. Photograph by Paul Perry and used with permission.

SG: Let’s start with the origin story of this astounding novel, which I’m guessing stems from your love of Dublin, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald?
PP: Yes, that’s absolutely right. Paradise House began, I suppose, as an act of literary trespass. I’ve always been fascinated by Dublin as a city shaped by absences—Joyce’s being the most mythic of all. But rather than following him into exile, I wanted to imagine what might have happened had he stayed. What if Stephen Dedalus never set sail, but instead opened a cinema—one filled with ghosts, flickering dreams, and revolution in the air?

The Fitzgerald influence came later. There’s a Gatsby-like energy to Kinch—his flair for performance, his aching desire to reshape the world around him, and, of course, the parties. The novel became, in a way, a meeting place between Joyce’s lyric interiority and Fitzgerald’s doomed glitter.

SG: Like The Garden, your writing in Paradise House deftly captures place and its people. Through atmospheric writing you evoke, at times, a sense of magic realism, and, at others, Joyce’s own Dublin writings. Dublin, here is a city:

whose streets were busy, and dirty with impish, innocent and smiling children. Dublin with its trams, and their reassuring, but lonely clicks…a city of half-truth, and half-light. A city of ash-pits, old weeds, and offal

We re-discover Dublin through the eyes of narrator-hero Jacob Moonlight he, working for Kinch (Joyce) as a projectionist in his cinema Paradise, wanders, often with Greta, around the city during a hot summer. Someone saying a Latin Mass passes them by alongside a child holding a doll like a baby. Another scene involves “the last lobster in the Monto.” Another again, on a Saturday night in July, Kinch turns the upstairs bar “into a kind of tropical misted atrium with bowls of fruit, flowers, sugared water, and live butterflies.”

How much fun did you have writing scenes such as these?
PP: Far too much. There’s something liberating about slipping the leash of strict realism and leaning into the surreal textures of a city already halfway to myth. Those scenes—the lobster, the butterflies, the tropical mist—all emerged quite naturally once I gave myself permission to let Paradise House become not just a setting but a living metaphor.

I was interested in the kind of Dublin that could exist if it were dreamed rather than remembered. And Moonlight, as a newcomer, sees the city with fresh eyes—it gives everything a slightly enchanted, uncertain quality. Writing those passages often felt like walking through fog with a torch: you only see a little ahead, but it’s enough.

SG: What a great description of the writing process – one which actually echoes this reader’s experience. Kinch declares that “Dublin is a city of memory… Sometimes, I feel like I am going to bump into myself walking around the corner of Dame Street.” Paradise House is essentially an homage to a Dublin that could have been. Writing the novel, did you find yourself following ghosts and what-if trails? Did you enjoy writing the Great Gatsby-style parties where people laugh so hard, they sneeze champagne?
PP: I absolutely followed the ghosts. That’s really how the novel evolved—through a series of hauntings. The ghosts of Joyce and Nora, of lost causes and unmade films, of streets that change but never entirely forget. Dublin is wonderfully suited to that kind of spectral layering.

The Gatsby-style parties were pure joy to write. They allowed me to explore Kinch’s performative side—the grand gestures, the theatre of it all—but also the melancholy behind the music. The champagne sneezes were fun, of course, but there’s always something bruised beneath the glitter. Kinch is a man building illusions while the world burns just outside the velvet curtain.

SG: In the characters of Kinch and Stuart, you cast the cold eye of hindsight on early twentieth-century revolutionary politics and hope. Paradise House doesn’t shy away from the laughter, the wily jibe, and the seditious joke of history. How important for you was this narrative thread?
PP: Vital. I think we’re often given the binary of solemn revolution or frivolous art—as if you can’t laugh while marching, or paint while fighting. But in truth, laughter and creativity are deeply political. They’re forms of resistance.

Kinch and Stuart offer contrasting ways of navigating the shifting Ireland of the time—one through spectacle and ambiguity, the other through ideology and action. But neither escapes the mess of history. What mattered to me was honouring the spirit of the time, which was full of talk, wit, song, irreverence. These were not cardboard heroes—they were people, with all the contradictions that entails.

SG: Yes, the honouring of wit within a tumultuous time is a stand-out feature of the novel. There is also a wonderful crossover and reimagining of history, literature, fact, and fiction in Paradise House. Can you talk about your research for this novel?
PP: The research was layered—part historical, part literary, and part intuitive. I read widely around the period: Joyce’s biographies, the Rising, WWI recruitment, cinema history in Dublin. But I didn’t want to be trapped by footnotes.

The novel plays fast and loose with history—it’s speculative, playful. So, while the bones of it are grounded in fact, the spirit is more dreamlike. I also revisited Calvino, Chekhov, Gatsby, and of course Joyce. I wasn’t quoting them as much as listening to their rhythms—trying to capture their ghosts in the room without needing to say their names aloud.

SG: “Life is…for enjoying, not just surviving.” Can you discuss how this reflects what you wanted to explore in the novel?
PP: That line sits at the heart of the book, I think. It speaks to Moonlight’s slow awakening, and to Kinch’s failed promise. The novel is about joy—not as escapism, but as a defiant act. In a world full of dislocation and dread, moments of beauty, intimacy, absurdity… they matter.

Kinch dreams of miracles happening in Paradise House, but ultimately it’s the human moments—walking through the city, falling in love, sharing a drink—that offer salvation. For me, writing the novel was a way of reclaiming those small, luminous moments in a city—and a literature—so often shadowed by survival.

SG: Rather than “love,” it seems to this reader that it is art—and the expression of it—that brings people together in Paradise House. Would you care to comment on this?
PP: Yes, I think that’s beautifully put. Art in Paradise House is a kind of currency—it’s how people connect when language or politics or emotion fail. The act of creating, performing, or even just witnessing something together offers the characters a fragile sense of belonging.

For Kinch, art is both mask and mirror. For Moonlight, it becomes a way of understanding the world—and himself. And for Norah, perhaps, it’s a refuge. So yes, while love is a force in the novel, it’s often filtered through, or made possible by, the sharing of art. Maybe that’s my way of suggesting they’re the same thing in different clothes.

SG: Indeed! We’ll end this Writers Chat, Paul, with some short questions:

• Dublin or Wicklow? Dublin for ghosts, Wicklow for breath.

• Oh lovely! Cinema or theatre? Cinema. The flicker, the dark, the possibility.

• Whiskey or Champagne? Whiskey in winter. Champagne for the parties Kinch throws.

• What’s the last film you saw in a cinema (and what cinema)? The Zone of Interest at the Lighthouse — chilling, brilliant, unforgettable.

• My favourite cinema (right back to the early beginnings!). What are you writing now? A new novel, Nine Days from Heaven, about Samuel Beckett in the French Resistance. It’s about silence, betrayal, and the long pause between action and meaning.

That sounds intriguing, Paul. Thanks for being so generous with your answers and I wish you much deserved success with Paradise House which Professor Anne Fogarty will launch on Tuesday, May 13th at 6 PM in Hodges Figgis, Dublin.

Headshot of author Paul Perry, provided by Paul Perry and used with permission.

Professor Paul Perry is the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of several books of poetry and prose. A winner of the Hennessy Prize for Irish Literature, he is a poet, novelist, and screen-writer, and Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin where he directs the Creative Writing Programme.

Thank you to Somerville Press for the advance copy of Paradise House.