CREATIVE WRITING:Fighting Words, a project set up by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love to encourage kids to write, is just about to publish its first collection of stories. TOM HUMPHRIESjoins students from Larkin Community College in Dublin as they take their work to Baldoyle to be printed
THIS ISN’T WHAT you expected. It’s perfect though. Perfect. We are sardined into a room in an industrial estate in Baldoyle. No windows. Just four walls, all lined from floor to ceiling with books. So many people in here that there should be a law against it, unless nuclear war has broken out.
The youngsters cram around a large table and gossip and giggle lightly. The elders, we stand and talk awkwardly. What do we expect? We don’t really know. “Sing us a song there,” says one of the kids, just to see what might happen.
“OK,” says musician Glen Hansard. He stretches for his guitar which looks like salvage from a shipwreck. He mutters the words “Young Hearts” and then he is away.
This isn't what you expected at all. Glen Hansard, whose genius and quiet humility are things of ageless beauty themselves, is singing Candi Staton's 1970s disco anthem Young Hearts Run Freeto a room full of kids in a printer's in Baldoyle. The kids are sitting around waiting on first sight of the book which they have written together. They are pre-occupied but they join in the chorus anyway. This is living. It's high time, just one crack at life.
They are Transition year students from Larkin Community College. Class 401. Every Tuesday since last September all 24 of them have been coming to the Fighting Words rooms at the back of Mick Wallace's building on Russell Street, fast by Croke Park. Every Tuesday they have been learning to write creatively; 23 kids transitioning into writers. Now they have put what they learned between covers and they have called the book Fighting Tuesdays. We are in Baldoyle to midwife the book's entry into the world.
Who wants to live in, in trouble and strife?
They are an interesting bunch. The cliché would tell you that this is the new Ireland, but a classroom of kids is a classroom of kids. Always was. Always will be. This classroom has faces and names which come from Bulgaria and Yorkshire and Latvia and Estonia and Cabra and Summerhill and Finglas. The lives which they express in Fighting Tuesdaysare Dublin lives though.
There were two rules when they started out. They had to write fiction. The stories they wrote had to involve a character or characters of their own age. Two rules. That was all. They sit in a room in Baldoyle slagging each other and waiting for the Oscar winner to sing them another song.
Will life ever be this good again
My mind must be free, to learn all I can about me
Dublin massages itself lovingly with all that self-congratulatory balm. A writers city! A literary city! Dear old Anna Livia. Wouldn’t ya miss poor Oscar. Ah the slaggin’ between Behan and Kavanagh. Gas!
Most writers with a scrap of sense got away from the pious drear and dust as soon as they could. We talk about writing so much and about expressing the dark angst of Irishness and Irish lives so much (never have so many miserable characters walked into cold dark lakes on moonless nights) that it is a wonder Fighting Words wasn’t invented years ago.
A creative writing centre, the place was established by Roddy Doyle and Sean Love (formerly of Amnesty International) and inspired by the Dave Eggers project, 826 Valencia, in San Francisco. The ambition is to help people of all ages to develop their writing skills and to explore their love of writing.
Nothing precious or pompous about it.
Glen Hansard finishes with Candi Staton and croons a singalong version of Blue Moon. Class 401 eagerly contributes falsetto harmonies. The adults pressed against the bookshelves lip synch along.
“The smell of them books,” says one of the young authors during a lull in her backing vocals job. “The smell of education,” says Roddy Doyle with a grin.
Doyle is more part of the class than he is teacher to them. His relationship to the kids is that of a guide who has been through these woods before. Sometimes gets deferred to by the young explorers but everybody walks the same steps and he views them all as writers rather than pupils.
“This is new to me and a thrill to me,” he says, “from watching them arrive every Tuesday afternoon till today, going with them to see their words come off the printing press and the cover of their book being printed. I’ve never done that with any of my own books and when I think about it, it must be such a thrill. I know the feeling when you get handed the first copy of a book you’ve written – it’s still all yours and you haven’t put it out there yet. It must be great to be young and to be watching your first story come off a conveyor belt and turning into a book.”
The staff at Colour Books lead the group through the printing process. If you like the smell of fresh books, this is heaven. Great sheets of paper carrying page after page of Fighting Tuesdays speed along in the presses, being printed, folded, cut and bound. Stacks of the distinctive red and black cover are coming off the press in another corner.
Everybody gets a copy. Everybody quietly checks for their name on the cover. Yes!
The stories on the pages between the covers should be read urgently now and copies of Fighting Tuesdaysshould be planted in time capsules around the city so that in 100 years' time or in 500 years' time there will be texts which record perfectly what it was like to be a teenager in Dublin early in the 21st century.
Each contribution is written using short, beautifully declarative sentences. “I kicked the stool. I was found hanged. It was frightening for my family.” Roddy Doyle’s instinct for dialogue is a lovely implement which the young writers have adapted to quickly. “Free gaff. Ya comin?” “Hold on. I’ll ask me friend.”
The voices are young and distinctive. Carina Tkachova came here from Latvia four years ago, a migration which is undetectable in her perfect English. Her story Escape Meis a beautifully written adventure in the mind. A girl. The betrayal of a friend. Visions.
As the title suggests, Carina plays with syntax and form with a rare confidence. “Black. I am walking on air. I am in the middle of nothing.”
Carina gets singled out for a little more slagging and attention than anybody else in the group, perhaps because she loves it the most. She already has her first novel limned out in her brain.
“I have the whole novel planned! The novel is a girl and boy story. They sign a contract with a devil. It’s very dark. I had some random ideas about what I want to do in the future, but after writing for this book, I really want to do my own thing. Writing is the best thing.
“When we started with the stories I had loads of different ideas about mine, but when I came to write it down it took its own shape. When I had three drafts and it was finished, I thought, that is exactly what I wanted. Brilliant.”
She is waiting impatiently for the launch of Fighting Tuesdays, the unique satisfaction of seeing piles of pristine books with her own contribution fattening the volumes.
“It’s like before you go on a holiday. Just not being able to wait. The best feeling. Anticipating it and knowing it will get better.”
For nourishment, she loves to read Paolo Coelho and “the odd bit of girlie stuff”. Writing isn’t torture. It’s fun. The hardest thing is when she gives somebody her story to read and they just don’t get it.
“They’re like, do you not mean that? No! I mean this. People can do your head in. I’ve learned how to be patient, how to turn my thoughts into shapes and get them across to people.”
Marian Ivanov brings a nice ironic tone to When Love Takes Over, a fable involving a love triangle, Britney Spears and two genies, a blue one and a pink one, who happen to be cousins.
“Ever wonder what teenagers do in school nowadays? This is the story of a boy called Jim who fell for a new girl named Sally. It begins on a sunny Monday morning when Jim was upstairs in his room listening to Spin 103.8fm and getting ready for his first day back at school.”
Marian was born in Bulgaria in 1993, he arrived here seven years later and lives in Hill Street these days. He is a big fan of Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kidbooks.
“This was the best thing we have done in school. It was an adventure thing. I did three versions of my story and I didn’t like the first two. Then when I finished the last one it all made sense, why everything happened, how it happened. This gives me the most enjoyment. I worked with Roddy Doyle. I would never have got to do that.”
What hits you about the kids is the confidence the experience has given them.
“It’s not like classroom for them,” says their teacher in Larkin College, Mairéid Byrne. “ They have to get things out of themselves rather than just sitting and listening. It was a bit nervy for them at first working together in small groups and having to express themselves, but you can see the change in them.”
“Working all together – that was important,” says Marian. “We had to realise that everyone could help each other and after a while you said to yourself ‘I can do this’. It’s a good thing to know before you have to face life.”
We are on the way home from Baldoyle. At the back of the bus, Glen Hansard is singing Wonderwall.
Corina has a career in writing planned, she hopes. Marian has a follow-up story planned with lots of celebrities in it. He enjoys writing songs and has submitted one to Britney Spears for use on her next album. He says he got a favourable response. There are 21 other nascent authors on board singing along softly.
It’s quiet and happy and more than a little inspiring. Like many of the stories in Fighting Tuesday it’s not what you expected. Perfect though.
Fighting Words provides free tutoring in creative writing for students of all ages. Everyone is welcome. If you would like to know more, or join the hundreds of Fighting Words volunteers, or contribute to its operating costs, please see www.fightingwords.ie or email info@fightingwords.ie.
Fighting Tuesdayswill be available from bookshops next week (€9.99)
