I’ve been thinking lots and lots this week about signs.
About patterns & symbols, rhythms & ritual; about the beings, places and themes— that grab us by the hands and heart and hair— and simply refuse to let us go.
A fortnight ago I had the honour of talking with the students of the Carlow MFA who were over from America studying in Trinity College Dublin.
It’s the second time I’ve joined them on this course, the first was online during lockdown.
It was an absolute joy, really beyond all words.
I was asked to talk about my craft; an open and quite frankly gorgeous invitation for any writer who is into the process of creating.
I’ve never actually been invited to focus on all my work as a whole, and I found the experience deeply humbling, and transformative in many ways.
I haven’t written or spoken about this much, but I found publicising my first book— THIN PLACES— harrowing.
It is a book of extreme excavation , as much female memoir is, and hard though the writing was; the public events were a whole other level of heartbreaking.
The book had been out for so long before the world opened back up again, and by the time that happened my whole life had changed entirely through the experience of matrescence. I found it difficult beyond words really to talk about it, that first wee book of mine, and I hate to admit this now but when Cacophony came out, I was relieved—in ways I can’t really quantify— to no longer be asked to speak about Thin Places.
I felt a form of disconnect between the work and me, and it hurt. When people would tell me they loved it, how much it meant to me, that it changed their lives— it felt like they were talking about another book—and I wished more than anything for that feeling to go away.
But I didn’t know how.
Trauma is such a hard, heavy thing, and I was thoroughly unprepared for the impacts that
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