Tag: Writing Life

Memoir, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 68: Phyl Herbert on “The Price of Silence” (Menma Books: Cork, 2023)

Phyl, You are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss The Price of Silence,  A Memoir published in 2023 by Memna Books, Cork and launched, in Danner Hall, Unitarian Church in Stephen’s Green, Dublin in November to a packed room. Congratulations!

SG: Let’s begin with the title which tells us something perhaps about one of the themes of this memoir, and of your life, The Price of Silence. Can you talk about how you came to decide on this title?

PH: After searching through a number of titles, I knew that the motif of Silence was embedded in the storyline ranging from the young girl losing her tongue in the beginning of the book to the fact that there was a total lack of vocabulary to talk about the  abuses she experienced.  Such experiences had no words then.  The final experience of becoming pregnant by a married man which in itself was not a topic for discussion but in l960’s Ireland to become pregnant outside of marriage was not only socially unacceptable but the pregnant woman was treated as a pariah and an outcast.  So Silence was the defence mode of existence.

Cover of The Price of Silence: A Memoir showing a close up sepia image of a young girl’s face.

SG: The Price of Silence speaks eloquently, not just of your own existence, or story, but of what it was like to be a woman in Ireland during these years – the late ‘50s. ‘60s ad beyond – and, in particular, how the body, desires, ambition were silenced and controlled, and how language was used to silence and name. Were you conscious of the power of social history when writing your own story – in other words, aren’t we all formed by place and time? 

PH:  Yes, I was conscious of the power of social history and that is more or less why I wrote the memoir.  I wanted to write myself into existence and by so doing attempt to analyse those decades that I lived through.  Men ruled the institutions, and the voices of women had not as yet emerged, but there was the beginning of movements such as The Womens’ Liberation Movement that were creating platforms where women could express their grievances.  But there was a long way to go. 

SG: The Price of Silence is divided into four sections, and the opening section “Tree Rings” brings us through your childhood by way of sharp memories, many of them sensory, that seem to relate to you as a creative person – writer, actor, teacher – and very much in touch with your surrounds. Can you talk about the importance of where you grew up – that pull between Dublin and Wexford?

PH:  The pull between Dublin and Wexford was deeply felt.  It represented also the pull between my mother and father.  My mother never liked Dublin or the house where she reared her family of eleven children.  But she never rebelled, she never expressed her desires because then a woman didn’t know how to talk about such things.  I felt her lack of expression at a deep level and I think I was always conscious of the need to develop my own language, my own identity.  I was a dreamer at that young age and sought means for escape. Drama and the imagination helped me though.  I wanted to be able to express in words what I felt.  To put a name on a feeling, on a thought.

SG: That deep need to express feeling and thought comes through very clearly in this memoir. Alongside your creative outlets, your teaching career took you around the city of Dublin in secondary education, further education, and prison education with the common thread of your approach to education as what we might call a Freirean approach (echoing Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s belief that educators need to meet people where they are at, rather than the “banking” method of education whereby teachers “feed” information to students and they regurgitate it back again). Do you think this linked in with your approaches to acting and drama and the importance of those in your own life?

PH:  Yes, I believe that our whole lives are about ‘Negotiating into Meaning’ a phrase used by Dorothy Heathcote, Newcastle Upon Tyne University where I studied for an M.Ed. In Drama in Education.  Her philosophy was to provide a mantle enabling the child to find his/her voice.  In the Stanislavski Method of acting, the truth of the character was plumbed into the depths of your own existence, your own humanity.

SG: What pulses and aches right through The Price of Silence is your experience with pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. This is your memoir – not that of the man with whom you had a daughter, and nor that of your daughter – but they are both there, with you, even in their absences. Was it a difficult process ensuring that The Price of Silence told your story only?

PH: What a great question.  Yes, it was difficult because I had to protect the identity of my daughter.  She has her own story and that is not mine to tell.  I still didn’t manage to achieve that in that there were times that her voice was necessary to present the story. The birth father is deceased but his children live on.  I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes here also but of course I didn’t reveal their identity.

SG: Lastly, Phyl, the pacing and storytelling of The Price of Silence coupled with how the memoir is structured added such an emotional push to the book that I read it in one enthralled sitting. What advice would you give to those hoping to write their own memoir?
PH:  Everybody is different.  People say to be truthful.  But there is a high-wire balance to be achieved.  It’s not good to be too truthful, there has to be a distancing perspective but at the same time I think an immediacy has to be achieved.  E.G. I wrote some of my memoir in the present tense.  Ivy Bannister says, ‘Think of your life as a train journey, what station will you get on and what is your destination.’  That sort of worked for me.

That’s a great piece of advice from Ivy and yourself. Lastly, Phyl, some short questions:

  1. Quiet or noise when you’re writing?  Quiet.  Or quiet music in background.
  2. Mountains or sea?   Both.  I spent some time in The Tyrone Guthrie Centre.  Bliss.
  3. Coffee or Tea?  Coffee. But not many cups.
  4. What’s the next three books on your reading pile?   Just finished Christine Dwyer Hickey’s ‘The Narrow Land.’  Superb.   ‘The Strange Case of the Pale Boy and other mysteries.’ by Susan Knight. ‘In the Foul Rag-And-Bone Shop’ by Jack Harte. ‘The Deep End’ A memoir. By Mary Rose Callaghan.
  5. A great reading list, thank you! What’s next for your writing?  A One woman stage show about a nun who leaves the convent before her 50th birthday and discovers Tango Dancing as a way into unlocking her repressed emotional life.

That sounds intriguing, Phyl, I very much look forward to it. Thank you for your generous engagement with my questions and I wish you every continued success with The Price of Silence.

Phyl Herbert smiling in a cafe. Photograph by Emer Sweeney used with permission.

Purchase The Price of Silence from Menma Books or from Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street and Alan Hanna’s in Rathmines,  Charlie Byrne’s in Galway.

Phyl Herbert, Mary Rose Callaghan and Liz McManus will feature in Books Upstairs in an interview about memoir writing on Sunday afternoon 28th January, 2024.

Contemplation, Writing Life

Writing Through…

Writing through grief, disturbances, and uncertainty in a time of war and collective anxiety can be difficult, if not impossible. Jeanette Winterson in the New Yorker (thanks to Jeannine Ouellette for the link on her Substack post) writes that “People are frightened of not producing in this obsessed world of continuous work.”

All this uncertainty in the world – locally and internationally – can push us to give in to this fear, to believe that we are incapable of creating because we do not feel we can produce. Winterson, in the same interview, also points out that:

If you’re doing creative work, you have to move your mind out of its habitual executive function, its administrative mode, and to allow other things to come in, to allow patterns to emerge, to connect things in ways that are simply impossible when we’re just formatting stuff…

Photograph of Lough Ree by (c) Shauna Gilligan

When we are in a state of societal and political uncertainty, how do we move our mind out of its habitual executive function when it feels as if it is in a state of high alert? When even executive function can feel strained, and difficult?

Perhaps it is a matter of pausing. Of stepping back a little. Of accepting that so many things are out of our control. Remember what it is to show kindness to ourselves and to others – and especially to strangers. George Saunders has spoken of regretting his “failures of kindness”. In his convocation speech at Syracuse University, he reminded graduates that:

That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been…Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

Maybe instead of trying to create, or worrying that we are not fulfilling one of our roles – for our “produce” to mirror society – despite being too close, or everything feeling too raw – we might just think about that invisible, “secret luminous place” from which – surely?- creativity seeps.

(That is, if we are in a privileged position to have a safe space, and time, in which to do this.) Or we might pause to remind ourselves that amid – and despite – chaos, violence, and selfishness, we do, still, witness acts of kindness and selflessness. These acts of kindness shine and remind us what it is to be human. And to be human, as we all know, is to create.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat

Writers Chat 66: Alison Wells on “Random Acts of Optimism” (wordsonthestreet: Galway, 2023)

Cover of Random Acts of Optimism showing painting of a desert landscape with a ticking clock in the foreground and a red-leaved tree with a woman’s face peering at the clock. Image by Beatrice Mecking, courtesy of wordsonthestreet.

Alison, You are very welcome to my Writers Chat series. We’re here to discuss your short story collection Random Acts of Optimism which has been described by Billy O’Callaghan as “a genuinely marvellous collection”. Published by Galway based wordsonthestreet, it was launched in dlr Lexicon on September 20th. Many congratulations.

SG: Let’s begin with the title Random Acts of Optimism, which is a theme that runs through each story – despite the diverse forms within the collection – and, in my experience, optimism is the feeling with which are left with when we’ve read each story. Can you talk about how you came to decide on this title?

AW: When I came to write the title story I recognised that for Cynthia and Tom and for many of the other characters in my stories they were often taking action in spite of or in defiance of the constraints of their circumstances. The acts of optimism we take in our lives can run from stand out courageous acts to the everyday doggedness that so many people display as they push through difficult periods of life, as losses mount up over time or as we all faced during the pandemic years. Personally, I am also fascinated by psychology and how we convince ourselves of things, we can be courageously optimistic but sometimes optimism becomes delusion and that has been the subject of several of my novels as well as the stories in the book. For me, also, Random Acts of Optimism also relates to my own long journey as a writer, and also for every writer, trying to find the right words, reach people and hopefully get published. I’ve explored these themes in my writing blog Head above Water and hope to work with people to support them to maintain optimism in their writing lives.

SG: That’s very moving – working to help people maintain optimism in their writing lives. Something so very much needed. I really loved the opening title story – the characters, the narrative but also how you used the page to communicate some of the clinical ways our society was run during the Covid-19 Pandemic. It’s a heart warming story of connection blooming in adverse conditions. In particular the use of humour to fill communication gaps:

He doesn’t know what else to say so he tells her about a woman who returned a book two years too late. The book was called Successful Time Management for Dummies.

Can you talk about the origins and writing of this story?

AW: This story was rooted in my real experiences of the surreal and poignant experience of being one of a few library staff members sending books out to ‘cocooners’ during the Covid19 pandemic from a vast empty library. (The Lexicon library, currently the largest library in Ireland). Many conversations were stark but often a joke was shared and the topic of books always engaged and entertained us.

I also wanted to explore how a male character who is bewildered by his marriage breakup and fallen prey to the anxieties of the modern world  and not really able to make sense of it might begin to find answers through his unlikely connection with an older lady through the libraries and through books themselves. I’ve written (a yet unpublished novel) about a man who loses his way in life but in that case does not find a path back.

I still feel very moved when I think about the “cocooners” at home under often very lonely and vulnerable circumstances. What happened in the pandemic underlines the importance of real human connection (which, by the way, is one of the positives of public libraries with their events, social groups and book clubs) and the power of books and writing to help us feel that connection, understand ourselves and others and just be plain entertained and carried away, even in dire circumstances.

I think writing this story, more than any, allowed me to really depict the stoicism, humour and camaraderie that so many ordinary people have while negotiating everyday challenges. I went on to write several thousand more words of the developing relationship between the characters, so we will see where that goes.

SG: Well that sounds very intriguing, Alison, I really liked those characters and would love to read more. In “There’s a Café in This Story”, you tell the tale of connections breaking down, the importance of place and how necessary it is to keep hope in relationships. I loved the entwining of the inner character with the exterior of the cafe:

There are details that build up over time, the first, shyly uncertain pleasantries, umbrellas under the table, ankles knocking against the metal legs and then against each other. He wonders…. Will the cafes all merge, with all their combined sensations of exhilaration and regret?

Tell me about the structure of this story and how it came about? 

AW: We can use signs around us as scaffolding to reinforce the stories we are telling ourselves. This man, captivated by the idea of this illicit romance, sees the scene and objects around him as part of a rarefied and lovely story. Meanwhile, for his wife, sitting under the infant at home, the discarded coffee cup, her own tea out of reach, the immutable reality of domesticity, objects give a different flavour. Working in Dun Laoghaire, I often walked out on the pier. The sound and scent of the sea, the clanging of the anchors, the gulls were all very vivid, sensation laden images which I used to set the scene and evoke that sense uplift and freedom that the man feels his rendezvous give him.

I liked juxtaposing the man’s reality, his illusion of freedom, movement and magic with the more solid reality of the woman’s life in the alongside their joint memories/experiences of the past. These conflicting juxtapositions are reflected in the images of the servers’ arms criss-crossing,  the struts of the bridge, reaching up to put the star on the Christmas tree.  I think the to-ing and fro-ing between the man and wife’s realities allow us to see two sides to the story.

SG: I liked how seeing the two sides worked. I’m curious as to the order of the collection. I liked how “Sad about the Plumber’s Uncle” worked next to “All that Thinking”, in that the light relief and humour in the first story sets the reader up for the deep thinking in the second. How did you settle on the order?
AW: As you say, the stories in the collection are quite diverse in tone and mood and also what you might call genre, running from realistic to more speculative and fantastical. And as you say, occasionally there was a pretty stark reversal of tone. In other cases, one humorous story follows another but then a reflective element to that story might be echoed in the next. There are some stories about writing or having written (told from the point of view of a letter) and they are close together. To me, the process was similar to the rightness of feeling I felt listening to my favourite albums in the 80s, an instinctive feeling towards tone, poignancy, energy and pause. Sometimes evenness of tone is preserved and at other times the symbols or drums break the preceding silence. I like how the first story throws you right in and how the last story refers to a moment of coming home.

SG: I loved your use of sensory detail and pause in “The Spaceman Has His Tea”. The story has a straight-forward premise yet you created a narrative that is, in its underbelly, a philosophical consideration of the nature of our existence.

Unleashed from the world is not to be free of it, it is to be put in charge of the last egg in the basket, it is to be six years old have your mother put the egg into your hand and say ‘Don’t break that.’ And the earth is as blue as a bird’s egg, as precious as Fabergé, as fragile as Arctic ice. It is to be six years old and afraid of forgetting.

I love that it also concerns the lovely act of drinking tea and “meringue, light, delicious; clouds dissolving on his tongue.” How important are the senses to you when you write?

AW: Like many writers, I’m always pained by the gap between the richness and impact of reality, especially that of the natural world and how well I am getting it down on the page. I can be carried away by ideas and competing narratives, but I think what short work can do best and what I would like my writing to develop into is being more spare, precise, immediate and evocative. The senses are key to that. I grew up in the countryside, was immersed in it, reeds, wind, frogspawn, moss. The natural world evokes a strong feeling and I hope I can put some of that across through different sense impression. Recently I read the writing of Darragh McKeown for the first time and loved the clarity of it. The key to writing is specificity, we know the world through everyday things, what they evoke through senses and memory, what they mean to us. 

We will end this chat, Alison, with some short questions:

  1. Beach or mountains? Beach by a small margin but I grew up in Kerry near the sea with a mountain at my back and now live in Wicklow which also has both!
  2. Dart, train or bus? Definitely DART these days though I spent my college years on the train between Dublin and Kerry leading to many fascinating glimpses of characters.
  3. Do you usually have one book or numerous books on the go? Both writing and reading wise, the answer to this is always many, no matter how much I fight against it. I am endlessly, pathologically curious. I read for my own pleasure, for research for both writing projects and, currently for my dissertation for an MSc in Library and Information Science, I am also fascinated by neuropsychology and creative resilience.
  4. I love the idea of being pathologically curious! Quiet or noise when you’re writing? Quiet. Not easy to find. I used to get up at 5am when the children were young and we built a writing cabin in the garden but once the world gets going, quiet is never easy to find and the noise in my head hard to dodge.
  5. What’s the next three books on your reading pile? I just went to check and counted 50 books stacked up beside the bed! One of the perils of being a public librarian is constant temptations. I am about to read Books on Fire – The Tumultuous Story of the World’s Great Libraries by Lucien x. Polastron, The Creativity Code – how AI is learning to write, paint and think. These will inform future writing projects. I also have Poetry Unbound – 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig ó Tuama put by – his selection of poems and what they mean to him. Just now, with work, study, family life and book launches, this selection is something to steady me, give me pause and interest and settle me down in the moment.  

Thank you, Alison, for such a generous and open attitude to and answering of my questions. I wish you every success with Random Acts of Optimism.

Order Random Acts of Optimism here and follow Alison here.

Photograph of Alison Wells, blonde hair and blue eyes, smiling directly at the camera, wearing a denim-blue cardigan. Photo courtesy of Alison Wells.

Thank you to wordsonthestreet for the Advance Copy of Random Acts of Optimism.