An insightful evening with six writers
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| Amy Gaffney, Lissa Oliver, Hazel Gaynor, Maria McDonald, Orla McAlinden, and Jo Doyle, with Dawn Behan of Woodbine Books. |
Organised by local bookshop Woodbine Books, moderated by Jo Doyle who is herself one of the six writers, the evening provided a range of insights into the ups and downs of a writer's life.
These included Hazel Gaynor's recollection of pressing 'publish' to launch her The Girl Who Came Home on Amazon's Kindle platform. "I was sitting at the kitchen table, my boys playing on the floor and surrounded by unfinished dishes of Weetabix," she recalled. "Then, nothing. No champagne, nothing." Except that the book went on to sell 100,000 Kindle copies, and was later picked up by her current publishers HarperCollins.
Amy Gaffney told how she had wanted to write since a young child, but it wasn't until after her own last child was born that she took the time to do so. She decided to go to college, did a BA and subsequently a Masters in Literature. "It was a most wonderful thing to sit in a room with people who take you seriously, and taking that step to believe in yourself." An anthology of the work from her class is soon to be published by UCD.
Lissa Oliver said she was first published when she was seven, in The Brownie Magazine. "Myself and my family don't remember any time when I wasn't writing, and I've always taken it for granted that you send in pieces and they don't always get published." She's now writing her fourth novel based in the horse racing business — and the first book she wrote 30 years ago has finally been taken up by a publisher, after three decades of rejection slips. "It's all about patience."
Delving into her family history was the source of Maria McDonald's inspiration for Charlie Mac, a blend of fact and fiction about her great grandfather in Belfast, where he was shot by the Black and Tans in 1922. "I got the idea to put the story down in a book so the family could understand it," she told last night's gathering. "I came to writing older, and now I just can't stop."
Portadown-born Orla McAlinden, whose latest book Flight of the Wren was recently published, began writing her short stories to bring back the 'beautiful glory' of her late father's Ulster dialect. "I realised my young children would never meet my dad, or hear his great stories. So I wrote down some of the most scurrilous of them, and in his voice."
For herself, Jo Doyle told how her memoir of life in Africa, Labyrinth through the Elephant Grass, was helped by Lissa Oliver who did the publishing. "I did the distribution myself, and found that when you have finally the beginning, the middle and the end of a book, there's still a lot of work to do."
A fascinating night, with more to say about it, which I'll do in the November 'Bridge'.
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