ANTHOLOGY: Lost in Transition: Stories by Fourth Year Students from Scoil ChaitríonaFighting Words 194pp. €9.99
WHATEVER NEW pressures today’s Dublin teenagers have to confront, in one respect they have a definite advantage over previous generations, because today’s teens have access to Fighting Words, the wonderful centre founded by Roddy Doyle and Seán Love, which offers creative writing workshops to everyone from tiny junior infants to strapping sixth years (and to non-school-going adults too). Inspired by Dave Eggers’s famous 826 Valencia in San Francisco, the centre has been a huge success with visiting students since it was founded in 2009.
Lost in Transitionis a collection of stories by Fighting Words participants from Scoil Chaitríona in Glasnevin. The collection begins with a wonderful introduction by Anne Enright, brilliantly capturing the irresistible compulsion to write that grips many of us during adolescence.
“There was something essential about the words I put down on paper during those years. It was at that moment when the raw need to write, to say the thing that needed to be said, was overwhelming.”
That urgency and vividness is on display in Lost in Transition. Some of the stories are firmly set in the authors' native north Dublin suburbia; others roam further afield, to the Congo, to France, to the wild west, even into the future. And several of them would be worthy inclusions in any collection of short stories, by adults or young people.
Bríd Ní Chomáin's Missing, the story of Holly, a young girl who runs away from home, is told through the voices of several people who knew her.
The voices are all distinct, a difficult trick to pull off even for an experienced writer, the pacing is perfectly controlled, the characters are convincing.
There's more skilful storytelling in Dónal Ó Rinn's Second Shadow,which uses a brilliantly unreliable narrator to great effect, and Clare Ní Mhuirí's Reel Life, in which a young widow discovers an unorthodox way of dealing with her husband's death. In fact, death is a central theme in quite a lot of the stories.
Throughout the collection, various characters face their own impending demise, while others struggle to accept the deaths of their partners or family and others become killers themselves. This may explain why, although many of the stories are moving and emotionally involving, they tend, with a few notable exceptions, to be a bit short on laughs.
But what they lack in jokes they make up for in vibrancy and creative ambition. While some of the stories focus on the lives of ordinary teenagers, many look sensitively at the lives of much older characters. And several stories take the traditional science fiction concepts – a dystopian future, a character who can turn back time – to create stories that feel fresh and new.
But what's most striking about this collection is the fact that all of the contributors show an instinctive grasp of what makes a story work. The opening lines are almost universally strong. "My name is Evie, I'm nineteen years old, and I'm going to die," begins Éadaoin Ní Fhaoláin's Pretty Damn Wonderful,immediately drawing the reader into the narrator's world.
Of course, some of the stories are better than others. Several are clunky and contrived, some are simply a bit dull. But the vast majority of literary faults on display in these pages are merely the usual faults of the inexperienced writer: unnecessarily complicated phrasing, badly paced dialogue, rushed or clumsy plotting. With practice, all of these issues could be overcome by the authors. This collection shows us a group of writers learning to find their feet, making a few mistakes as they go.
As Enright says in her introduction, “reading the work in this collection is watching something grow in front of your eyes – the push of feeling, and the creak of the writer’s mind getting bigger; it is here on every page”. And it’s a pleasure to witness.
Anna Carey is a freelance journalist. Her debut novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, was published earlier this year by the O'Brien Press
