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‘Senior Side Of The Street’. In this programme will are going back to the 2024 Connemara Sea Week with a recording of the author Donal Ryan. Broadcast Sunday the 1st Of December 2024 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
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‘Senior Side Of The Street’. In this programme will are going back to the 2024 Connemara Sea Week with a recording of the author Donal Ryan. Broadcast Sunday the 1st Of December 2024 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
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‘Senior Side Of The Street’. In this programme will are going back to the 2024 Connemara Sea Week with a recording of the author Donal Ryan. Broadcast Sunday the 1st Of December 2024 https://www.connemarafm.com/audio-page/
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Brodericks Electrical is offering Black Friday deals and cash back offers on AEG and Electrolux appliances. Galway Simon Community is seeking donations to help homeless families this Christmas. Clifton Supply Centre provides building supplies and hardware. Wildlands Winter Wonderland offers a festive experience with Santa and treats. Kylemore Abbey is promoting its Connemara estate for Christmas shopping and dining. Donal Ryan, an award-winning author, gave a reading at Connemara Sea Week. He shared a story about an Irish pirate and read from his story "The Outlaw." It's a double whammy at Brodericks Electrical for the month of November. Not alone can you get Black Friday deals every day for the whole month, but you can also get cash back offers on two of our biggest brands AEG and Electrolux. You can claim back up to 125 euro per appliance across the AEG and Electrolux range of appliances for the month of November at Brodericks Electrical, Castlebar and Westport or at BrodericksElectrical.ie. No child should be without a home, yet this Christmas more than 110 families and 230 children will be homeless across Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. It doesn't have to be this way. Last year, Galway Simon Community supported 201 families with 415 children to prevent them from becoming homeless. If you believe every family should have a place to call home this Christmas, donate now at GalwaySimon.ie or phone 091-381828. Thank you. Clifton Supply Centre, Galway Road, Clifton provide building supplies, plumbing and heating supplies, fuel merchants, DIY and general hardware. Contact the Clifton Supply Centre on 095-214-76. Ho Ho Ho, Wildlands Winter Wonderland is back and it's bigger than ever. Take the drama out of Christmas with one hour play, sustainable gifts, printed family photos, hot drinks and treats all included. Meet Santa, Mrs Claus and his merry team of elves. Tickets now on sale at Wildlands.ie. This Christmas, give the gift of Kyle Morabbi. Visit our beautiful Connemara estate and experience the festive atmosphere of Ireland's best loved historic treasures. Take Christmas shopping and dining and experience to remember with our wholesome winter menu and delightful handcrafted gifts. Fill your larder with homemade Kylemore Christmas fare and choose from a beautiful range of giftware and award winning chocolates handmade in Sister Grenadine's chocolate kitchen. Gift joy this Christmas when you shop in store or online at KyleMorabbi.com. Kyle Morabbi, a story so timeless it's still being written. This program is sponsored by Forum Connemara 0954416. Hello, good evening and you're very welcome to our Sunday evening programs here on Connemara Community Radio. You're tuned in on 87.8 and 106.1 FM and I do hope you can stay with us for the rest of the evening. What we have for you this evening is a lovely reading by the author Donal Ryan and it was recorded as part of Connemara Sea Week in October 2024. Now we were delighted to hear that Donal Ryan's book Heart Be At Peace won the Eason's Novel of the Year prize at the Unpussed Awards last Thursday night. So huge congratulations to him and he's won numerous awards for his writing over the years. Donal Ryan is a writer and lecturer from County Tipperary. Heart Be At Peace is his most recent novel and a follow up to his debut 2012 novel which was called The Spinning Heart which was set in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger Crash. Donal lectures in creative writing at the University of Limerick and his work has been published in over 20 languages to major critical acclaim. For the Connemara Sea Week book reading Donal gave a wonderful reading at Books at One in Setafrac. It was a reading full of energy. It was amusing, interesting and at points heartfelt. There were some questions at the end from the audience which you will hear as part of the recording. So here is Donal Ryan the author reading at Connemara Sea Week in October 2024. Hello everybody. My name is Dermot O'Donovan and I am the chairperson of Connemara Sea Week and we're delighted to have Donal here with us today as part of Connemara Sea Week. So we're really delighted to partner again with Mary and Vince in the Books at One for Connemara Sea Week this year. They've been fantastic supporters of the events over the years and we're also delighted Eileen and Sally Manley are with us today as well because Galway County Council have also supported Connemara Sea Week over the years very generously. So thank you very much hope you enjoy it. Thank you. Thanks Dermot. Thanks Dermot and again we're delighted to be associated with the Sea Week on its 40th anniversary. So it's quite an achievement to keep going for 40 years and to start to have the first event and to have Donal here. It's a real privilege I have to say. I was preparing some notes and I was printing off and I thought I simply can't. There are so many. If I was only just going the awards alone we'd be here for the next half an hour. You have won like all of the, not the Nobel Prize one yet but apart from that that's the next one clearly. Shortlisted on the Booker Prize and I think that's just in recognition of the quality of the writing and you're also prolific. I think maybe 20 titles or? Yeah it was nine at the moment but it's a good 20 yeah. Yeah and there's 20's in my head for 20 translations. There's 20 languages which is quite something. And anyway Donal thank you very much for being here. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks very much Mary. It's an awesome dorm. It's a beautiful place. I've forgotten how gorgeous it is up here and driving up today with my daughter Lucy it's just so beautiful. Coming up by Lough Einat. Do you know I can't believe I didn't think to bring something sea themed for today because I wrote a novella actually about a pirate from Tipperary which no one liked except me but parts of it were very good I thought and exciting and it based actually on the guy we met on honeymoon in Crete. He was from Northern Ireland and he was very hunched and hoary looking really like a pirate in all fairness. He was very piratical in aspect and he told us he was a pirate and he said he came over to Crete in the 60's and he became a pirate. He and his friends shipped in and bought a blockade runner with a reinforced prow and he said he used to run straight through luxury yachts split them in half and then they'd rescue other people out at sea and they'd take all the valuables. But he said he always warned them in advance we're going to do it. He said to them all jump off the yacht we're going to go straight through you. So they all got off the yacht and they got straight through, bust up the yacht. So they boarded the yacht first sorry, take everything, then they'd break it up and anyone who looked innocent they'd rescue from the sea and anyone who looked guilty they'd leave to their own devices. But he always gave them a little you know whatever it's called a skip or a scoop or a small boat to row to shore you know. So he was telling us this story and I was thinking this is absolutely all lies obviously you know. But it was so detailed and such a great story since I'm stealing this. I'm stealing the whole thing. Someday I'll write a story about an Irish pirate who goes to steal from pleasure crafts in the 60s in the Mediterranean and maybe he wasn't lying you know. Because it sounds kind of plausible too you know. Anyway, I brought a story with me called The Outlaw that I wrote for the Sunday Express magazine about six months ago and they asked for a story now and I never ever would send a story anywhere and ask anyone to publish it for me because I had enough of that for years and years and years. I wouldn't be inviting rejection like that into my life anymore. Because you know a writing life is toxed with rejection. It's unavoidable. Even when you're published and up and running you still get rejected multiply every day for much of your life. So I don't send things out unless it's asked for. So the Sunday Express magazine asked me for a story. Offer me money. I said sure bean it'd be childish to say no like I mean they're giving me money for it. So I wrote a story called The Outlaw and they didn't like it because it was a bit profane and then I read the specs. He sent me a spec that I didn't read and the spec said we want something light hearted and that didn't say facile enough. It was light hearted and optimistic and hopeful and I thought the story was very optimistic and very hopeful but it ended with a funeral. So I said sure look I'm an Irish writer. Everything ends with a funeral. There's no avoiding that. And then they said well maybe you could take out your profanities on it. I said of course I'll take it out. No problem at all. And then they put them back in because it lost something you know. So just to warn you in advance there's bad language in the story. Three F words. I used to actually often edit my readings before as I read because I could hear my grandmother going don't be using bad language. And I could hear her ghostly voice. I could almost feel her breath on my face. I said don't make a show of it now. It's got 130 words. And so I used to do that. So this is called The Outlaw. None of us liked Errol when we saw him first. My sister dragged him through the door by the arm on Sunday evening as we were just starting dinner. She told ma'am she wasn't coming. That she was seeing this new fella. And that they were going out somewhere to eat. Everyone was kind of glad. Then they arrived on all titsy and red faced. Ursa talking in that shrieky voice she uses when she's nervous. The narrator is very mean about his sister for much of the story. And Errol grinning and doing that American thing with his hands. Holding them up palms out as if to say sorry I didn't want this either but here I am anyway. Dad spoke first. You're welcome Errol. Then he looked at me and said Benjamin. Get two chairs from the kitchen and set places for Ursa and Errol. I was raging. I just started eating. Ma'am had served me first because she reckoned I looked the hungriest. She was always petting me in those days because I'd just started a job in the city. And she didn't believe I actually ate food Monday to Friday in my flat. But I didn't want to start agro. So I told his friends if they touched my plate they were dead men. They were dead men. And I grudgingly complied. Errol had a tattoo of a gun on the back of his left hand. Dad couldn't help himself. Why would someone go and do that to themselves? Errol grinned a twisty half-faced grin. I was younger he said. And stupider. Ursa said something about tattoos forming an emotional and psychic typography or something lame-brained like that. The twins were looking at Errol wide-eyed now and starstruck. They suddenly thought he was cool. He was stubbly and gaunt and had a bit of a look of Kurt Cobain about him. Kurt was alive that time and at his height. At thirteen boys are just coming into their maximum levels of impressionableness. I knew I'd been there not too long before. Errol was rolling up the sleeve of his loose white cotton shirt to show us a vividly inked snake wound around the dagger in his forearm and above that, on his bicep, which was overworked and bulging, a bound and blindfolded woman in a long robe with Circe written across the top of her like a halo. That's Irish for freedom, Errol said. Yes, we know, Mam said. I didn't, the twins said in awed concomitance. Mam was looking from Errol's bicep to Ursa's face to Dad's face with a quiet panic in her eyes that she could see when things were starting to go wrong but she was trying to keep herself level. Ursa came home screaming and crying a few weekends later, hegging and snotting all over the dining table. He's a scumbag, he's a, he's a. And Mam just shushed her and patted her arm and said, yes love, come on now and eat your lamb, forget about him, there's plenty more where he came from. But Ursa was having none of it. No Mam, you don't understand, he's unique, isn't he that's unique? Dad said, throw a stone in the air down that town and it'll land on a scraggly looking waster. They're ten a penny girls, that's Brenda of Yahoo. The twins asked, what did he do? And Ursa blew her nose in a napkin and wiped her swollen eyes and said, he didn't do anything. What he did, he, oh Jesus, it's terrible but you won't understand if I tell you. Dad started looking a bit tasty then. His bald spot reddened and he puffed air into his cheeks and his eyes got all narrow and flashy the way they always did when a problem had arisen that he was about to try to solve with his fists. Tell me, he said in a low rumble, what he did. Oh calm down Dad, Ursa said and Dad slammed his massive paw down on the table so hard that all our plates hopped and Mam's wine glass toppled over. Dad always went apeshit when you told him to calm down. Tell me what he did before I kill someone, Dad roared and he looked straight at me like I was the one he was going to randomly murder over the as yet unspecified crime that Errol had committed. Ursa started giggling cockatishly then, her usual reaction when Dad was erupting over something to do with her. Mam just shook her head wearily and said, shut up Dickie, just shut up. Look at my wine where it is and I only had a quarter bottle left from yesterday. Dad was at the highest part of high door by now, tell me what he did, tell me, tell me. Ursa didn't even look at him, she just shook her head and switched back to crying a little bit and then said in a low voice, he stood me up. We were meant to go into Limerick for the pictures and I spent half the day getting ready and he never arrived and I rang his mother's house and she was all snippy with me and she asked me, which one was I? Which one? Dad's shade lightened to a shallower magenta, he stroked his hand along his frisky jowls, he righted Mam's wine glass. I will know, he said, that's not the worst thing a man has ever done. And Ursa spat, oh ye men, all in it together, the boys club. Dad winked across at me and at the twins and then he elbowed my ribs conspiratorially and said, or I say, he's heading for the ferry and the bus, God love him. A munt of that one roaring at you would drive anyone into the arms of John Bull. The phone rang and Mam got up to answer it. We heard her say, hold please, Errol, in her best posh voice, rolling Errol's Rs idly. Ursa pursed her lips and took the portable receiver from Mam, nearly enucleating Dad with the aerial. We could all hear Errol's soft, crawling voice on the other end. He was sorry he'd let her down. He'd rung the payphone in her lobby but no one had answered. Oh yeah, his ringer is broken, Ursa said, and sniffed. He'd been held back at work because a machine had gone down on the biggest line and he was the only one able to fix it. He said sorry again. And Ursa sniffed again and said it was okay. She was sorry too, about what she said to his mother. Oh God, Errol said, and he laughed, and Ursa laughed too, and Mam rolled her eyes, and Dad smiled around the table at the other three quarters of his progeny, and less than a year later he stood resplendent at the wedding table and toasted his daughter and his new son. And when we carried him to his rest at the start of last winter, Errol's arm was tight around my shoulder and his hand was strong on Ursa's back and his faithful heart was broken. Now, of course, I brought the wrong book. I keep forgetting that I wrote a new book since this one. The Queen of Dirt Island. But this actually, I'm glad, because it's my lucky copy of The Queen of Dirt Island. It's the Kenny's Bookshop special edition. Kenny's do their own limited editions of certain books. I was in there actually a few years ago. I was in all happy. I met Desi inside, and all the lads were there. And Desi goes, oh darling, great news! We're going to do a special Kenny's edition of, and I was waiting for him to say, obviously my next book. And he went, Deryn, do you agree with his new book? Go open it and show it. Oh, yes, it's beautiful. Oh, wait till you read it. Oh, it's brilliant. Oh, we're going to do a fabulous job on it. And I went, oh, great, Desi, I'm delighted for you. And all again, and Deryn, and I hope you're very happy together. Thanks very much. And I kind of flounced off, you know. And the next day they came round me. Do you know what I was thinking, actually? Next book you have out now will do a Kenny's special edition of. And then they did this lovely edition of this book and my last book. And when they gave me my presentation copy, my copy was upside down. And no one knows what this could be. And they asked the printer, how could this have happened? And the printer didn't know. He said, there's no possible way this could have happened. Because we printed them all off together. We bound them all at the same time. Everything was turned the right way. So somehow the machine flipped itself just for one copy. And that was the copy they gave me. Isn't that amazing? So it just feels really lucky to me. I loved the Kenny's so dearly, all of them. And this just meant such a lot to me, actually, to have this book. People actually often send me e-mails with photos attached in. There's a photo you can hear online that you're reading. You're reading an upside down book. And I say, yeah, so what? That's the way I read, OK? Like Jimi Hendrix playing guitar. That's how geniuses do it. So I wrote a foreword for Kenny's about the time I was down in the dumps one Christmas because my first book had been published, The Spinning Heart. And no one knew about it. No one bought it. No one seemed to like it very much. It wasn't really reviewed anywhere. Nothing really happened for the first few months. And I thought, sure, what can I expect? This is what happens, you know? I was in the car, and my phone rang. And it was my editor and publisher, Brian Langan from Doubleday. It's time over for Doubleday. And he said, Donald, we've got the numbers in. Actually, it was early January. He goes, we've got the numbers in for Christmas week, the biggest book-selling week of the year. And we've got the figures for The Spinning Heart. And then he said seven-something. And then my phone got cut out. I had a very old Bluetooth set on my old Saab, and I was going through a car park the wrong way. So I couldn't hear Brian talking. And I said seven. Sure, he was probably 7,000, I suppose. And I was thinking, gee, maybe it was 17,000. Or 70,000. Or 7 million, maybe. It turned out it was 70, was the number I found on there. About a week after that, I got a phone call from somebody saying, well, young fella. And I thought I was going to start this conversation. And I said hello. And he goes, this is Desi Kenny from Kenny's Bookshop in Galway. I love this book, The Spinning Heart. Is there any chance you could call onto us here and sign some copies for us? I said I will, Desi. So I went down to Galway. And Desi said, I walked in kind of a bit, and down in the mouth. And he went, what's wrong with you? And I said, ah, sure. It just seems like an awful lot of work, all this book stuff. Writing it and promoting it and going around the country. And, you know, it's not selling at all. Like, no one's buying it. And I'd been in a bookshop earlier that day where my book was down at foot level. Like it always is. R is always down at the bottom. R is always at foot level. Ankle level. No one's ever seen the R's. And there was a display of all the books that had been nominated for the Irish Book Awards that year. And mine included, was actually nominated too, but it wasn't in the display. I said to the girl, would you not put some of my books up there with all the Irish Book Award nominees? And she said, now, I know she didn't mean it the way she found it. But she said, oh no, we only put books at eye level that people might actually want to buy. So after that I drove to Galway. Getting more and more pissed off on the way. And Desi knew I was pissed off. And he goes, I can guarantee you that by this time next year, that book will have been number one. And also you'll be nominated for the Booker Prize. And I said, go away out of that. It's not a hope. He said those words to me. And it sure came true. How did he know? So I called the four words to the book, The Seer. And the four words is mostly about Desi. God bless him. Anyway, this is my last book. And I based the main character on my mother, Anne Ryan. She passed away since, but she got to read the book. Thank God. And she read the book with a pile of pages. And when she finished, she said, very good though. That's great. That's pretty much as far as she'd go praise-wise ever. But you always knew what she didn't say, you know, how she felt about things. So I knew from the kind of interstitial space between her words that she loved the book. But she did say, where on earth did you get that one Eileen Elbert from? And I said, well, sure, she's you, ma'am. She is not me. How dare you? And don't you go around telling people that's me now. I'm warning you. And actually, I did go around telling people that. At the launch even, actually. She was at the launch in the bookshop. And I said, so here's the excellent queen of Rhode Island here. And she went, shut up saying that. I told you already. But I did. I imagined, I kind of half imagined how my family might have looked if my father had been killed on the day my sister came home from the hospital. Because it was kind of this alternative family lore we always had. Mam always said, God, Daddy was so tired the day Mary came home. Because Mam had been very sick during his birth. And she had stayed for a good while. And Dad hadn't slept for days. But he had to go to work that day. He had no choice. He had to go back to work. And she said, he went off. And he was walled, falling with tiredness. He could have been killed so easily. What would we have done? And I often thought, what would have happened? I wouldn't have been born. My brother wouldn't have been born. And how might it have looked? So I imagined that if my paternal grandmother had lived, and if my father had died, how my family might have looked. But I mean, it's nearly all made up. It's all conjecture. But Eileen and my mother are spiritually and psychologically very close, character-wise. So I'll just read one short chapter. All the chapters are very short. All exactly 500 words. I shouldn't have told anyone that, of course. But I did. I should have kept it as a kind of little delicious secret to myself, you know. But when I said it caused consternation among critics. They were wondering, why on earth would you write a book exactly equal chapters? So why do it, you know? And John Sellis, a great critic for the Irish Times, said, it's an odd Olympian constraint. And I didn't know what that was. I had to go look it up. The Olympians apparently were a school of French novel writers from the 1560s who applied arbitrary constraints to their work. They might write a whole short story with no letter S, you know, or a whole novel with no Y's or something. I don't know. That kind of thing. I wouldn't approve that myself now. But I wrote this book in a terrible hurry because I spent the previous year and a half, two years, writing a big, long novel that contains that novella, actually, about the pirate. It was during COVID. I was kind of half mad, to be honest. I think I had some kind of breed of COVID that just affected your brain, but didn't have any other psychological manifestations. And it seems to, whatever plant emits hubris in your brain, seems to have been overstimulated by this virus that I had because I was writing the novel thinking to myself, geez, this is unbelievable stuff. This is the best novel I'd say ever written. I'd say I'll win the Booker for this, for sure. And then I was thinking, actually, the Booker Prize would demean this novel, actually. I'll accept the Nobel, grudgingly, but that would be the very least, you know. And I wrote the whole thing. And Marie was ill at the time, and she wasn't in the form for listening to me ranting on about my book. Normally, when I write, Marie reads everything I write day by day. So I normally write a novel, a first draft, over about 16 weeks. And every day, I've got 16 weeks, and Marie will read what I've read to make sure I'm not going off on any mad tangents, as I often do. She keeps me in line. So I didn't have that luxury. But she said, this is your seventh book. I mean, how far along can you go? It turns out very far along now. But I thought, she's right. I don't need that kind of a trembling that she was giving me. You know what? It was just a thing. I told myself I needed it. I did need it, badly. Because about a month after I sent the manuscript to my editor and publisher, I received a very long, carefully worded, very politic email. And they were kind of saying, the upshot was, they were saying, what in the name of God is this? This is terrible stuff. I couldn't see it until that moment. And then my eyes, the scales fell away, and I saw it. And so I was way over my due date for a novel. I'd spent the advance years previously. I had no novel, except that one. It seemed irreparable, to be honest. You know, it was so bad. And so long, as well. And so dark. I said, I can't. I can't fix it. I don't know what to do. And then I heard a female voice. Like, I know it was my grandmother. It was kind of familiar. It wasn't quite her voice. I think it was kind of some kind of mix of all of my female ancestors who had passed away into eternity. And they had gotten together to bail me out. We better sort them out, then. And so through the skylight of my attic, I could hear someone saying, Write a novel about a house full of women. It would be great. And they started giving me ideas about the novel and what might happen. And so I wrote it very quickly. And in order for me to be very modular and schematic about it and not go off on a tangent, I said, I'm going to make all the chapters very short. They'll all be self-contained vignettes. And then they started to all come out at around 500 words. So just kind of as a look thing, I said, I'll make them all the same length, exactly. And then I got obsessed with them all being the exact same length. Having one word for a title and then 499 words in the body. But I should have just shut up about it, you know. It should have just been for me and for nobody else. This is one of the vignettes, anyway. It's called Proposal. And at this point in the novel, Eileen Elbert is a widow. And she is being proposed to by the brother of her late husband. And all of the book is lensed through the eyes of Saoirse, who at this point is 11. Proposal. Chris proposed to Mother on an evening in early summer with his working clothes on him, as though he'd been seized suddenly by some amorous impulse, some wild desire that had been lying dormant. He came rushing down from the fields to the village, half cocked, as Nanna said later, though she didn't wholly disapprove of his hastily conceived and poorly executed plan. He stood a long while at the side door, mumbling. Saoirse had never seen a redder face. Mother had stepped back to let him in. She had a cigarette just lit, and she was pulling on it deeply. Come in, Chris, she said, through a cloud of blue smoke. Or I won't, Eileen. My boots are covered in muck. I won't drag it in along your clean floor. Clean my arse, said Mother. And Chris laughed, a high chuckle, the way he always did. Chris enjoyed Mother, and she liked him right back. From somewhere, from the ether or the blue heavens, or the fumes of new growth, or agricultural diesel. He drew courage, and he made his proposal. Eileen, I was wondering, Saoirse heard him say. Wondering what, Chris? I was wondering if it wouldn't be the best thing for all concerned. If you and me, if I and you, if you and I, if me and you. And then he said it straight, nearly in a shout. Will you marry me? Saoirse saw Mother bend forward as though someone had struck her in the stomach, and she grabbed in her two fists the lapels of Chris's overalls and pulled him into the kitchen, slamming the door closed in the same movement. Chris's eyes were opened wide in shock. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't to be manhandled off his feet. He straightened himself and put a hand over his face and drew it downwards as if to reset himself, to regain something of his passive confidence. What kind of rubbish are you talking, Chris? But Chris didn't know, it seemed, what kind of rubbish he'd been talking. Anyway, and he plowed. We wouldn't have to, you know yourselves, be married in the fullness of the word. We'd just, you know yourselves, take the bad look off of things. You'd have, you know, a bit of company, yourself and the baby. Baby? Saoirse was eleven years old, and she opened her mouth to protest this slice, but some vague wisdom rose from within her and silenced her. Poddy and Chris, her uncles, called her the baby, and maybe they always would. I love you dearly, Chris, said Mother, and I'd be a lucky, lucky woman if I were free to marry you. But I'm still in my heart and soul, married to your brother, and I will be, I'd say, for all of eternity. Chris said she was okay. He was sorry. And Mother said she was sorry too, and she kissed his cheek. And Chris dragged himself back up the hillside and didn't come down again for a long, long time. We're all Chris. That's great, that's great to hear sympathy like that. Thanks very much. I love to hear sympathy for Chris, actually, when I read that, because Chris doesn't get much sympathy, actually, from anybody. People always go, yeah, the uncles, Poddy and Chris, are too right. They're great fellas. So, yeah, so Heart Be A Peace is, I'm not supposed to say sequel, actually. I was warned not to ever call it a sequel in public. But it's a follow up standalone novel that draws its energies directly from my first novel, Spinning Heart. So it's all the same characters in the same sequence, saying pretty much nearly all the same things. No, it's not. It's very different. Ten years have passed in the village where Spinning Heart was set, between Spinning Heart and Heart Be A Peace. It's the first book of mine that my mother didn't get to read. But I think she liked it, because she worked in Tesco's in Neenah, almost until she died, in fairness, now. And they retired her till, actually, in Tesco, Neenah. It's not going to be ever used again, because she was so loved. And the end till was only ever used by her anyway. And people would queue at her till for ages. The queue was like a banana behind a huge trolley full of food. And it wouldn't go ahead. You know, it did wait going on. I have to stop the end. And when it got to her turn, they'd say something like, And how's Bobby Mann? Where is Bobby now? And then they'd go, What are you talking about? Bobby Mann's been doing his book. Is he alright? And then they'd go, No, no, he's only made up. Like, he's not really, you know that? Which generally should be sympathetic. You know, I should say, I know, Bobby's fine. Because I didn't make it clear at the end of Spinning Heart that Bobby is fine. I thought I did. And my first publishers, the Lilliput Press, they were very intense on allowing my literary ambiguity to remain. You know, they didn't want to change too much about the novel. Which was great. But I think it did lead to people thinking that Bobby was in big trouble at the end of the novel. And he's not. He's actually fine. So it's better to make sure people know. So I actually gave Bobby walking parts in a few short stories. But no one knew the short stories. So still no one knew that Bobby was alright. And there was still an annoying ma'am in Tesco asking her about him. And she kept saying, Wouldn't the easiest thing be just to write a sequel? And then everyone would know it's a story, you know? I said, actually ma'am, you know what? In the end, that was the right idea. So this book is Heart Be a Piece. And it is dedicated to Lucy Ryan. With love, Infinite. So I'm going to read this from two characters. Rory and Brian. Who are the characters I based most closely on myself when I wrote Spinning Heart. We're about the same age. Brian a bit younger maybe. And Rory about the same age. And we were very similar character wise. So Penguin asked my wife Anne-Marie to do the voice of Trina. Who is Bobby Mann's wife. So she's the wife of the main character, Bobby. In both books. And she did. And then I presume, sure, obviously they'll ask me now to do Bobby. Because Bobby is Trina's husband, you know? But they thought I was more of a Rory than a Bobby. It sort of looked like. I mean, I couldn't argue with that. Because I did base Rory on myself. But I was still kind of pissed off over it. But look, I'm over it now, it's gone. And then they got a fine big handsome fella to do Bobby. With a lovely deep voice. I'll just read a bit of Brian. Because this part of Brian's monologue always reminds me of my mother. And it's based on a childhood experience. Brian. By the time of this book now. Brian and I have diverged philosophically and legally in every way possible. Every time I went anywhere in my whole life. The mother used to be boo-hooing. And making a show of me. And tormenting the old fella with her carry on. She'd be saying novenas by the new time. And drowning me in holy water. Filling my pockets up and my wallet up with bits of relics. And things that were touched off of relics. And slips of paper with little one-liner prayers on them. I found a whole prayer inside my passport. The last time I was in Shannon Airport. Cut out from a Sacred Heart Messenger. Or one of those magazines that give the mother and father such peace. They give me peace too, if I'm honest. Just the sight of them. On an armchair. With my father's reading glasses closed on top of them. The absolute sameness of them after all these years. The resoluteness of them. The same things being said over and over again in slightly different ways. The prayer was a plea for intercession to Saint Jude. Whom I presumed at the time to be the patron saint of travellers and adventurers. Folded up. And with my mother's handwriting on top of it in blue biro. Dear Brian. Please, just say this once in morning, once at night. Love, Ma'am. X. And I was only going to Amsterdam that time. For Colm Senehan's Flag Weekend. I found out since that Jude is a patron saint of hopeless cases and desperate situations. No one knows you like your mother. No matter how you try to hide the truth of yourself. Ma'am was always convinced for some reason I was going to be killed out for him. I think maybe it's partly because the world to her was such a mystery. I don't think she ever went further than Galway. I used to think Galway was another world all of its own. The year we rented a house near Spittle for a fortnight. When I was maybe ten. It felt like we were driving for a week to get there. But maybe that was because I was a bit car sick. From sitting on the green couch in the back of a van the owl had borrowed. With Granny and my sister with our backs to the engine. Even though it was brilliant. Sitting on the couch from our sitting room in a van. With Granny farting out of pure nerves. It's true now. Every time the owl fell I hit a bump. And tried to blame Marion. And Marion and me nearly whacked ourselves laughing. When we got there it was like we'd landed on the moon. That flat, rocky, treeless place with the mountains blue and purple in the distance. And down the road from the rented cottage there was a little beach. That was nearly all ours the whole time we were there. Granny and me and my sister and the parents swam there every single day. Even in the rain. The rain feels warm on your body when you're in the ocean. I remember Granny laughing louder than I'd ever heard her laugh. She was like a child. And she was well able to swim. Mam and Dad brought us to a little pub in the village every night. And all the people there spoke Irish. Myself and a sister had one fight the whole week. I remember we were all nearly crying as we left to go home. I've checked Google Maps. And it's only 127 kilometres from our house to the house we rented that year. That'll show you how thick I was as a child. How I wasn't able even to measure time or the space around me. I could never judge things the way other people can. I always work off impressions. And my impressions, it turns out, are mostly shite. So he's very self-deprecating, critical there, Brian. As I am myself, like. And, actually, it's very true of me as a child. I was an awful idiot. I didn't have a clue. I was so cosseted and blind to the world, really. And I started to find out that the world was actually a much darker place than I'd been led to believe around my mid-teens. And I was so shocked. I was kind of... I felt I had to investigate these things. I had to look very closely at people and at life and at events. And it started leading me to kind of exist in this state of almost constant wonder about how people acted and why they acted in certain ways and why the world was the way it was. And I suppose that led me to be a writer eventually, even though before that I always kind of had it in my head that the only thing I'd ever be was a writer. And then I spent years working in meat factories and in building sites and in the civil service and went to college three times for a graduate degree and did everything in my power not to write. I actually lived for years in a haunted apartment. I had a broken heart. I had a ghost for a friend. I had an unchallenging clerical job in the civil service. I had nothing but time and opportunity and space and materials to write story after story, novel after novel. I couldn't write a word because every single time I started to write, I was writing in a weird, slightly middle-class, inflected English voice. Because I thought to myself, I thought a writer is a posh English fella. That's what a writer is. Which made no sense because I was very well read and I read very widely across nationalities and cultures. Our house was always full of books. My parents had no money when we were growing up because nobody had. It was the 80s. Dad drove a van and Mam worked in a book he's known again. And so every penny they had, they needed. But they had a talent for finding job lots of books very cheaply and it fills the house with books. So I read like mid-century Americans and all the Irish novelists and I read like Ulysses who impressed my English teacher who I had a mad crush on. So there was no need for me to ever think that this was the way you had to be. But I just thought I better be posh. I better make sure to rarify my language in order to be taken seriously as a writer. And of course I couldn't even take myself seriously for more than a paragraph. For everything I wrote, I'd burn. I'd finish stories in this voice and I'd burn them so they wouldn't exist. And some things wouldn't get burnt because I wouldn't have time to burn them because I'd be late for work. And my dad realised this was happening. So he'd make these little raids. He'd come up from Neemeth to Limerick and he'd ask my landlord for the key and he'd go up and he'd find anything I'd written, poetry or bits of novels or chapters of, you know, paragraphs of stories. And he started to keep this big box that built up and built up over the years of shite, basically. But I was offered loads of money from an American university, called the Juvenalia, apparently, your development as a writer. And Dad had kept it all. Dad, that box kept in secret all these years. We're in the money now. You won't believe it. The Americans were going to buy it and he went, oh no. There'd been a bit of mix-up a few years previously and that box had been trimmed to a skip by mistake. You know, I'm actually glad in a way because you never know what'll turn up. I remember one time my mother-in-law rang and she goes, Anne-Marie, I'd given her loads of hard drive for computer rights, but there's a thing here. Now wait till you hear this. She started to read a novel I'd been writing. It's terrible. And Betty thought it was great. She's reading it out on the phone to me. Betty, just leave it. Just leave the whole thing. Please. I don't know what she did, actually. So I'll read it to Rory now. Rory is very much me. Rory, sadly, in The Spinning Heart, is miserable. Rory, the two of us, actually, have been just an add-on all the time because Rory doesn't do much for the narrative at all. But he's a great character, I think. And he's very typical. So in The Spinning Heart, Rory is suffering from a lack of confidence. He doesn't feel quite as though he fits in with his buddies on the building site. He doesn't quite fit in anywhere else either. You know, he's a bit alternative. He likes the Pixies and kind of, you know, the indie bands. He meets a girl inside in Neenah when he's signing on the dole and she's gorgeous and she's wearing a Pixies T-shirt and they have a lot in common and they both went to the Pixies in Phoenix Park and, oh, it's great. And Rory is delighted with himself. He's going, this is brilliant. I can't believe it. And they arrange to go to see a band play in Dodon's Warehouse in Limerick. And then Rory backs out of the date because he just knows it'll be a disaster. Or he thinks. It wouldn't have been a disaster. It would have been great. And the last scene of Rory's soliloquy, he's on a bus. And I do this awful metaphor between the rain and the windows of the bus and Rory's internal conflict and his sadness. It's very clunky and badly done, to be honest. But The Spinning Heart is a novel replete with things that are wrong, to be honest. Like all works of art, it's very flawed, you know. Anyway, I tried to right that wrong a little bit but the heart be at peace. Rory now is in great form. It's all going great. He's met a woman. She's very beautiful. He has impregnated that woman, successfully. She's thrilled with this. He's thrilled. They're all delighted. It's all going brilliantly for Rory. But he can't be going around acting too happy. And also, the darkness, no matter what, always starts creeping back in and he has to shove it away again. So after his full chapter of happiness and girls and kissing and pregnant girlfriends and everything, it's great. This is the end of it. I do my best to keep it to myself. You can't be going around acting too happy. When lads start moaning about shite, giving out about wives and children and wages and tax and cars breaking down and horses not coming in and the weather and the price of everything, I nod and agree away and sometimes I pretend to be just as pissed off over things as they are. But inside myself, I have this secret cargo of happiness. When Bobby comes round the site with that heady silence all around him and that dangerous look in his eyes like he's about to kick off, I feel like saying to Bobby, will you just take life easy? Enjoy it while you have it. It's only the very odd day now that the cold wind blows around me. When I feel myself getting too smug, when I start counting all my blessings, I start to think about all the things that could go wrong. I remember that I have to die someday, that Eugenia will die someday, that the child inside her that I love already more than life itself has only one sure destiny. Everything falls apart. All things tend towards chaos. I close my eyes against the mad torrent of panic. This is okay, I think. This is life. This is life. This is how it's meant to be. I'm going to read a poem that I wrote called Carnival Week, 1986 in memory of my mother. And because I'm Irish, it's a very oblique look at grief. I don't really face it head on. Carnival Week, 1986. That Carnival Week, we went all five nights, fervently and devotedly, as though it were a novena, like the one that we had in Nina with the African priests, when everyone went the first night just to get a look at him, and then went all week, caught in an epidemic of love. He met his end in a crash shortly after he left us, somewhere upcountry, hardening our hearts against our fellow Midlanders with their dark, crooked roads, their godforsaken bogholes of parishes. Why had he to be sacrificed on a mission to nourish their miserable souls? But that week, that Carnival Week, oh, the fun of it, the ball pool and the bumpers and the rifles that smelt oily and real, their cold weight in my hands. I learned that week that I was a good shot, that my sister was a demon for the waltzers, and that our mother would spend her whole month's children's allowance on five blazing, frantic hours of neon joy, and end this week of tenpence coins of love. Thanks very much. So, anybody got a question? Oh, it doesn't deserve applause, seriously. Actually, you deserve the applause for being a captive audience for my poetry. It's terrible. It's very indulgent of me to do that. I'm not a poet at all. Anybody have a question for me about anything? I just finished reading Marcia's piece and I loved it. What does the title mean to you? Where did you get your title? It was called originally The Deep Heart's Core. The Deep Heart's Core from The Lake Isle of Nishfree. And I was so happy with this. I thought, this is amazing. And then I was thinking, God, I'm so clever when it comes to titles. Brilliant. This is the best title. It was worth ten hubris I had writing that big, long novel. Unlike me, you know, I'm usually very self-critical and lacking in confidence. I was going, that's the best title ever. Jesus, I'm going to be delighted. And I told my publisher, the next novel is called The Deep Heart's Core. And I was going, there's about 40 novels already called The Deep Heart's Core. Every American that ever wrote a novel with an Irish character calls the novel The Deep Heart's Core. I was raging. So I opened my Collected Jades and I said, the first time I see the word heart in these poems, that could be the title. And I saw a poem called O Heart Be at Peace almost immediately. So I called the novel O Heart Be at Peace. And then my English publisher said, you can't have an O. The O's, no, we don't like the O's. But this is a Yates. I'm calling Yates here. You're going to take away Yates' O. Really? Yeah? Because they pay the money, you know, and they're great. I love them. So I said, O Heart Be at Peace. And you know, it made such sense, too. It's like a gift because The Spinning Heart is the first book and then the sequel is The Heart Be at Peace. And then we shoehorned in a very direct reference to a heart being at peace in Frank's soliloquy. Frank is dead in The Spinning Heart. He's still dead in The Heart Be at Peace but he's still talking. You can't shut Frank up. And at the very end, he kind of alludes to the spinning heart on the gate of his house being at rest for the first time and him feeling as though he can now merge with the universe because things are all right. I love Frank. Actually, Frank caused me awful trouble. When I was getting my first book deal with Lilliput, there was a bit of a row among the members of their committee, their board of directors. Somebody said, we can't publish a hyper real novel with a character who's dead because ghosts don't exist. And I said, of course ghosts exist. I know a ghost personally. I'm on first name terms with a ghost actually. This is true. They still wouldn't believe me. And I said, I mean, it's kind of an explication of consciousness, of people's inner monologues. It doesn't need to be completely factual and be authentic all the time. So I had to fight for it. And I was proud of myself because I said, we're going to probably have to cancel the whole thing if we don't agree to take away the ghost. And I stood on the ground and they capitulated. So it's Frank. It's the gate. It's the heart on the gate of Frank's house. It's a spinning heart. It's a piece, a heartbeat piece. It's fairly basic really. But it did feel again like a gift from Yeats. I opened the book and there it was, a heartbeat piece. Perfect text. Do you base your characters on who you know? I do, yeah. How do your neighbours see you? Oh, they go mad. I was in, anyone know a place called Drumcollarhurk or Limerick? Drumcollarhurk, West Limerick. I was in Drumcollarhurk a year ago at a funeral and I was going down along the line of murders and I see people turned like this to avoid shaking my hand because they are convinced, completely convinced they are three characters in the spinning heart because they have the same name. And the characters are wildly different. Wildly different in every respect to these people. And I didn't even know these people when I wrote Spinning Heart. There's no way they happen to have the same name. And they've also put it about West Limerick that I don't like those books at all. I really like all the books. My wife. I put my name on them because she's stealing all their lives and she's stealing all their stories for these books but she's getting away with it because she's saying it's me. And it's starting to get traction, you know. Here and there. It's great. You've had books adapted for plays and one for an Irish movie. Has anyone approached you to do anything else for your TV or for movies? Would you? I would, you know. I'm trying to avoid that kind of thing now because I always get my hopes up. I think I'm going to be rich. Mortgage paid off so I'm going to buy a second house near Llanddart. But actually, yeah. The first guy was adapted from Cymbal Thumbers. It's been run generously. Donal O'Haley played many characters. It's amazing. I just love that film. Sean Burnock made it. It was amazing. The film made it out of a short story called The Passion. We sold the option for my novel Strange Flowers. Element Pictures took on the project who made Normal People and made loads of stuff. Win Oscars, you know, Elements, they're great. Should I talk? This is it now. This is the big time. Hollywood, millions, fame, fortune. I don't like fame but fortune, it was amazing. I remember when I was getting ready to do a screenplay, Kit and her brother Dean did a screenplay. It was beautiful. Kit's life story was very similar to some of the events in the book. It was amazing. It was all coming together so beautifully. And then Sonny Rooney came along and I was dead. Normal People. And I thought, sure, maybe they do Miles Afton in Normal People. It'd be great. It happened in off the last. The book was a surprise hit. It didn't celebrate but it got a Booker nomination so it was great. It got a bit of traction. They said they'd make a film out of it. We had meetings and we were doing Zoom calls and phone calls and everything. Emails have been on again. And then they got a load of money from the Irish Film Board and we never called them again. Yeah, it's very frustrating. It's heartbreaking. But eventually, maybe. When I die, it'll happen a bit. Could I ask a question as well? Yes. Recently at the Clifton Art Festival we had Paul Lynch pop up pop down and it was a terrific interview. Well, something that has been going round and round in my head that he said in answer to what's your advice in terms of reading material to help you write your own novel? And Paul Lynch was his grandfather. Go back to the Masters. Go back to Eliot. Don't feel like father right now. No. Go back to the Broncos and I'm kind of thinking to myself well, you know, I want to get this poem finished or I want to get this book chapter of a so-called novel finished. But where am I going to get time? That's a great point. Exactly. You don't have time. Life is short. So, if you start to read a book and you don't like it, it does nothing for you, quit it. Move on. Just read what you like. It's a very simple thing. You probably would have formed an opinion now of what your kind of book is and go for that. This thing of people saying read and why and it's fair enough but I see people who know the time because they live off the food you get at book launches and they're reading four or five books a month and they're like it's great, it's fair to bet you but they generally have no muscle mass in their bodies. They're really pale and tasty faced, brittle bones and a lot of them are actually very young and they have rickets. Rickets are coming back. So, it's funny for them to read Cinnabon's Wake and all these things but I think they are great because if you read a few of them you get a sense of what a book is like and you'll see things in reviews that you know will grate on you as well. So, it's good to indulge yourself in the wisdom of crowds when it comes to choosing books because it's so hard to choose. There's so many. So, just read short, happy books but I recommend, I mean, if I was to recommend a book to you right now I'd say go and buy a book called The Cold Eye of Heaven by Christine Dwerdicke. Christine is a really underrated novelist. She's amazing. Or, Billie Keane, the great Billie Keane wrote a book a few years ago called The Ballad of Moe and Gee. She's bloody amazing. Like, it's absolutely brilliant. It went totally under the radar. So, if you're interested in reading short stories, go and buy a book called The Cold Eye of Heaven by Christine Dwerdicke. It's absolutely brilliant. 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