This week's literary round-up
O’Faolain remembered
Landscape is key to the writer Tim Robinson (above), so it's little surprise that when he visited Nuala O'Faolain, before she died in Dublin in May last year, it was her surroundings that he especially noticed. He wrote a memo to himself about it which is published in the latest issue of the Dublin Review.
“I went to see Nuala on her last day. She had bought a house in Ringsend some months previously. Gerald Street, I found, was lined with attached single-storey cottages so small they made the street seem wide. Nuala’s was number 14; the door was half open, and the tiny living room immediately inside was full of people,” he remembers. It was at the end of what he calls “Nuala’s project of going into death with a fireworks display of life,” and they were waiting for the ambulance to take her to the hospice.
They threw a ball for her young black Labrador and Robinson noticed particularly that there was no traffic. “I got the impression of a mutually caring community in this little web of streets, and I would love to have discussed it with Nuala; it seemed remarkable that it had survived and improbable that it would be tolerated much longer; the offices of Google loomed over it, a vast wave of grey steel and glass about to crash down and annihilate it in the name of development.” After O’Faolain had left by ambulance, he headed around the corner towards the city centre and noticed the dozens of Google employees standing outside their office block, smoking and chatting . “They were lively young people from every country of the world.”
He read later that O’Faolain had told him that day that she would miss him. He says that perhaps she did, although he doesn’t remember it, adding: “I think that if she had done so I would have replied, ‘No, you won’t – but I’ll miss you’.”
Tim Robinson's most recent book is Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, the second volume in his Connemara trilogy. Contributors to the summer 2009 issue of the Dublin Review(number 35) include James Pethica, David Wheatley and Vona Groarke. See thedublinreview.com
Tweets from Pluto
Pluto Press is about to release a book as a series of Twitter posts. The tweets will be from the P20 Crisis Manifesto, a call to action from analysts and activists in response to the economic crisis. Participants will include experts on economics, the environment, international relations and culture. Pluto says the Manifestoreflects the growing importance of social networking for contemporary protest movements and feel its distribution in this micro- blogging way will ensure it reaches a large, new audience. The completed document will also be available as a free downloadable electronic book, as well as in a print version. It will be launched on June 29th on the Pluto Press Twitter Feed (twitter.com/plutopress). Pluto will be releasing two points from it each day up until the launch of the full e-book on July 13th.
Calling all writers
Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Co Council arts office is calling for submissions for two opportunities for writers. DLR Arts and the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dún Laoghaire, is inviting writers of contemporary fiction to apply for a residency in IADT from October to May 2010 while DLR Arts also invites submissions from mid-career script-writers for the Hugh Leonard Award, an award in honour of the playwright who died last February.
The closing date for submissions is July 17th.
The writer-in-residence will need to live in or within commuting distance of the area; the fee is €16,000, with an extra €2,000 for other costs.
The Hugh Leonard is a bursary of €5,000, plus a budget of €5,000 for the production of a rehearsed reading of one of the winner’s scripts at the From the Mountains to the Sea DLR Literary Festival this September.
Details from Carolyn Brown, DLR senior arts administrator, at cbrown@dlrcoco.ie or 01-2719532.