The range of papers was impressive, spanning literature (18^th century to the present),  politics, film and television, theatre.  We’re all indebted to these scholars for their attention to the work of contemporary Irish writers, and for their refusal to be corraled into the safe, familiar shapes of  the ‘canon’.  There were papers about Teresa Deevy and Shevawn Lynam as well as Joseph O’Neill, Martin McDonagh, Emer Martin, Éilís Ni Dhuibhne, Anne Enright … and many others.

http://www.unioviedo.es/aedei11/AEDEI_2011Final_Programme_website.pdf

Someone once asked me, what’s the point of  literary criticism?  At this conference I was reminded of its unique value:  like reading itself, it reminds us to slow down, to pay attention to detail, to focus on the world we’re in.  It’s strong antidote to the tendency to scatter, profliferate and get lost in spontaneous digression that life and technology induce in us.  The conference featured readings and debates and animated late-night conversations; gorgeous food, and always a small crowd to eat it with; a fantastic lunch hosted by the Irish Embassy; there was music and dancing and guided walking tours: first around Oviedo, then Avilés.

In Avilés, across the Penas river from the wonderful old town with its rich stone, strong colours and glass balconies, the future looms in the shape of a smooth white dome, a vast open terrace, a spiral ramp leading to a circular disc of glassy space – this is the Óscar Neimeyer Centre, a perfect expression of the belief that the arts can regenerate a region, attracting visitors, opening our minds. Inside, Carlos Saura’s exhibition “Luz” held us in thrall: http://video.latam.msn.com/watch/video/carlos-saura-llena-de-luz-el-centro-niemeyer/1gjj32zzc

When the Centre closed for the evening, we were reluctant to leave, but came out  to a different kind of spectacle: the industrial chimneys of the iron and steel works behind the Centre were transformed into giant instruments.  They played visual music for us, throwing surreal steamcloud shapes into a heavy sky, adding their own drama and beauty to the scene.

The conference was a triumph for the Association and for its organiser, Luz Mar González-Arias. Next year it will be held in Rioja.

During the conference, Luz Mar asked me if there’s pressure on writers in Ireland to write fiction that reflects boom-and-bust?  I slipped off on a ‘which writers do they mean?’ tangent and forgot to answer the actual question (sorry, Luz Mar). Here’s a belated answer, of sorts:

It’s true that there are people (including writers) who complain that contemporary Irish writers aren’t writing whatever it is those people want to read.  There are always hurlers in the ditch.  But this is a little like when your mother advises you to take up with that nice whatshisname, who’s always so polite and has a decent job, with prospects of promotion and a guaranteed pension.  Never mind the body odour, or the pleasure he used take in pulling the wings off flies when you were smaller.  No matter if the advice she offers is reasonable in its own way and on its own terms, it takes more than commonsense or logic – or even market forces – to ignite a novel.   Sorry, Ma, but without a spark, what chance of fire?  What’ll keep us warm in the long, lonely nights ahead? Writing a book is an intimate adventure.  It will hold you in thrall.  It will challenge, frustrate, torment and bore you stupid before it’s over.  You’ll expose yourself in it, in ways you never intended.  You have to care enough to want to stay with it to the end, whatever that end might be; you have to let yourself fall in deep, from the beginning. If you’re lucky, the memory of earlier passions will keep you going when doubts surface, as they’re bound to do.

There’ll be times when you’ll want to run away, times when you’d rather have all your teeth extracted, one by one, by a drunk wielding a crowbar and a wrench, than go back to the work-in-progress and immerse yourself in all that rawness, yet again.  But when you’re in it, it’s all there is.  Your mother’s advice might come back to taunt you at moments of doubt when you’re doing something else – (standing in a bookshop with someone else’s shiny new bestseller in your hands, for example).  But when you’re with it, when you’re immersed in your very own emerging world, it’s all that matters.  It, and the shadowy reader you sense, waiting at the borders for the right time to enter.  No pressure.

From 10.30am to 4.30pm. Tickets €60 or €50 for members

For more info:
Irish Writers’ Centre, 19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1
t: +353 (0)1 872 1302  e: info@writerscentre.ie  w: www.writerscentre.ie

Here’s a list of who read what:

Dermot Bolger: “Neilstown Matadors” (Dermot Bolger)

Michael Cronin: “Campo di Fiori: (Czeslaw Milosz)

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill: “The Language Issue/Ceist na Teangan” (Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill)

Borbála Faragó: “The Art of Letting Things Go” (Anne Le Marquand Hartigan)

Diarmaid Ferriter: “1954” and “Canal Bank Walk” (Patrick Kavanagh)

Alice Leahy: “A Sociologist Looks Back” (Brian Power)

Jinx Lennon sang: “Nothing but a Leprechaun” (dedicated to ‘Ben, Denis and Michael’)  & “The Sumo Option” (Jinx Lennon)

Dave Lordan:  ”Song for the Minister of Education” (Dave Lordan)

Brian Lynch: “On a Distant View of the Irish Disaster” (Brian Lynch)

Sinead Morrisey: “Various Portents” (Alice Oswald)

David Norris: “Easter 1916” (WB Yeats)

Miriam O’Callaghan: “A Woman Untouched” (Frank McGuinness)

Leanne O’Sullivan: “Safe House” (Leanne O’Sullivan)

Gerry Smyth: “South of the Border” (Gerry Smyth)

Joseph Woods: “Old Country Awakening” (Joseph Woods)

Highlights for this member of the audience included:

• Leanne O’Sullivan’s marvellous poem.
• Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s “Ceist na Teangan” and its introduction. Describing the dilemma of Moses’s mother as she entrusted her infant son to the reeds and a future she couldn’t see, Ní Dhomhnaill remided us that even when things look bleak,  you never know what can happen.  Hope is what we all need (and maybe a small bit of faith, not to mention courage).
• Dave Lordan, saying that one of the things he likes about being Irish is that the question is never Can you sing? but whether you will sing. (He did.  Sort of.)
• Diarmaid Ferriter’s clever juxtaposition of “1954”, written at the end of an annus horribilis for Kavanagh, and “Canal Bank Walk”, written after things deteriorated further – and then took a sudden turn for the better.
• Jinx Lennon’s “Nothing But a Leprechaun”. It always makes me laugh a little/ cringe a little.
• Miriam O’Callaghan, reminding us that while ‘we can bore each other to death talking about the recession, the things that really matter are life, love, loss and death.’  The poem she read was written about the premature death of her sister, Anne.
• Seeing Seamus Heaney in the lobby afterwards. Heaney, who has been a staunch supporter of and familiar figure at the festival from the beginning, was awarded this year’s Irish Times Poetry Now Award for Human Chain the night before. But was he resting on his laurels? No. There he was, as always, lending his support to the proceedings.

The Poetry Now Festival attracts massive support from Irish poets.  It’s not just Heaney – scores of others turn up for the readings: established poets, emerging poets and those who are still unknown. They mix with, and talk freely to, readers,  fans, academics, punters.  It’s one of the most informal, democratic festivals around.  It’s been a bright spot on the calendar for 16 years.  For a while, there, it looked as though this might be its last year, but during the festival it was announced that, from now on, it will be amalgamated with the Mountains to Sea festival. We’re told it will retain its own identity, its own curator and so on.  We’re expected to be glad about this.

I’m not buying it, people.  Poetry Now came first, it has built an international profile and standard over the years, it attracts people to Dun Laoghaire in great numbers.  I don’t see why it has to amalgamate with anything. There was an element of sadness to standing among the throngs of people chatting in the lobby of the Pavilion and thinking, it won’t be like this again.

Introducing the reading, Conall Morrison described Where the Shoe Pinches as a poem of a play; it is a fusion of the words and ideas of John Mc Clelland and those of Miroslav Holub, the Czech poet and immunologist, who died in 1998.  It explores the tension between the individual and an oppressive totalitarian regime, through the lens of Holub’s life and experience.

After the reading, which was staged with great verve by an enthusiastic and committed cast, Conall Morrison had a conversation with John Mc Clelland which included both cast and audience. JMcC described a Miroslav Holub reading he attended in Belfast in the 1990s.  He said the poet read in both Czech and English, and answered questions freely.  He gave as generously to the 18 people who turned up to listen to him in Belfast as to the 200 (or was it 2, 000?) who’d been present at his reading in Paris the previous night, acted as if he had all the time in the world to talk to them and there was nowhere in the whole world he’d rather be.

JMcC said that his intention in writing the play was not to write a straight biopic, but to try to show the flow and shape of Holub’s life, putting his own words and ideas together with those of the poet, and hoping the join would be seamless. He used lines from Holub’s poems to inform the script, and offered a structure for those lines to flow through.  All of this was entirely successful.  The play was convincing, absorbing, engrossing – and left people like me, who knew next to nothing about this poet, wanting to know more.

Someone commented that the play reminded her of Ionesco in its circular structure and use of repetition.  Someone else compared it (favourably) to Stoppard.  A member of the cast asked if Holub had been influenced by Beckett. The answer was, probably not, because the regime under which Holub lived and worked for most of his life would have restricted possibilities for ‘inward influences’. However, JMcC  admitted, he himself is influenced by Beckett.

(As it happens, he looks quite like Beckett.)

This all led to an interesting chat about influence.  When it comes down to it, JMcC reminded us, its just you and the pen.  More generally, there’s no reason why poetry can’t have as much influence in society as anything else:  Facebook, 24-hour phones and texts, freesheets on trains, the constant cacophony of daily life.  The question is one of choice, and how to make space for what we choose.  An evening like this one, at the Pavilion, is one way of making space for the influence of poetry (and drama, and literature in general).

There’s a passage near the end of the play that refers to the Angel of Death.  JMcC told us that this was Miroslav Holub’s own idea. During his lifetime, Holub had said that he’d like to write a play. After his death, all that was found in his papers were three paragraphs of notes, including this image. JMcC decided that if that was the play Holub wanted, he’d give it to him.

All of which caused goose bumps to rise on the back of the collective neck of the audience.  We were, let’s be honest, an intimate gathering ourselves.  We seemed to echo the reading described by JMcC, where a tired but generous poet opened himself to a  small group in Belfast, not knowing that one of the listeners was a playwright who would one day recreate his life and work and help to keep it alive.  What ghosts, past or future, might lurk in the stalls amongst us while we talked?

Outside, Dun Laoghaire shimmered its way to the end of a hazy evening. The sea was at its provocative best, a dream of calm blue mist.  I admit it was hard to turn your back on it and go inside – but it was well, well worth it.  The Pavilion is offering a feast of opportunity through Conall Morrison’s residency, and it’s a pity more people didn’t turn up to support this event – weather or no weather.  But other people’s loss may well have been our gain – the atmosphere this evening was friendly, informal and inclusive.  It was a genuine privilege and a joy to be there.

First, as stated in the comments below, it’s not writers who create elites and/or a canon … it’s commentators, reviewers and academics who do that.  It’s amazing how easy it is to forget this.  So, when people complain about what Irish writers are writing or not writing, the question is: which Irish writers are they talking about?

The second point, related to the first, is that I don’t accept that no interrogative or challenging novels came out in Ireland in the last ten years.  I hate to do this, because any list immediately overlooks and excludes things that should have been included, but here is a random, top-of-the head naming of literary novelists and novels that definitely engage with aspects of Tiger Ireland but have NOT been mentioned in recent conversations on this topic (so far as I’m aware):

Dermot Healy: Sudden Times

Mia Gallagher: Hellfire

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne:  Fox Swallow Scarecrow

Kevin Power: Bad Day at Blackrock

Anne Enright: The Gathering

Molly McCloskey: Protection

Carlo Gebler: A Good Day for a Dog

William Wall: This is the Country

A lot of work is being done in areas that escape the attention of the pundits, either because they’re not interested in a particular genre or because they don’t know what’s happening there.  Here’s one illustrative example: Fiacha Fola (Blood Debts), a collection of poetry written in Irish by Celia de Fréine, about the Hepatitis C scandal.  I don’t pretend to be able to read poetry in Irish, but I’m lucky enough to have seen these poems in translation and to have heard them read in both languages. They are powerful and measured, and they address a critical, painful issue in our recent history. They’ve won awards, but not the kind of awards that people outside of Ireland pay attention to.  News of their existence may not have reached the mainstream yet, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. [A selection will be published in a forthcoming bilingual Selected Poems.]1

We have a number of promising young writers who can be found in journals (eg The Stinging Fly), and let’s not forget the return of the literary essay in the pages of, for example, The Dublin Review.  It’s worth mentioning that for strong writing to emerge and develop, outlets – and editors – of that calibre are required, and we’re not exactly bursting at the seams with either. We have Mark O’Halloran, Charlie McCarthy, Dave Coffey and Eugene O’Brien writing for television – against all the odds that writing for television in this country entails.  We have a growing oral scene epitomised by Nighthawks and the Glór sessions and the Flat Lakes Festival.  We have group blogs like the Anti-Room.  We have the kids who are writing at the Fighting Words centre – who knows what they’ll pull off when they’re older?

Well. I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but I’m going to quote from Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing.  This clever, funny, heart-breaking book was published nearly 30 years ago by the University of Texas Press.  I discovered it (and first quoted this passage) in 1990.  And look, it’s as relevant as it ever was:

“As in cells and sprouts, growth occurs only at the edges of something.  From the peripheries … But even to see the peripheries, it seems, you have to be on them, or by an act of re-vision, place yourself there. Refining and strengthening the judgements you already have will get you nowhere. You must break set.  It’s either that or remain at the centre. The dead, dead centre.”

As chairperson, poet Michael O’ Loughlin opened the discussion by quoting from Yeats’ Easter 1916:

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Yeats, he said, was uninspired by the Ireland of the time, the time within the poem. Quite the statement. We could have passed the night happily taking it apart, turning it this way and that – but the night was still young, the hecklers kept their counsel for the moment, the Introduction moved swiftly on – and so should we.

O’ Loughlin next referred to the recently emerging perception of the arts as sole standard-bearer of whatever honour remains to the country.

[It has to be said that we artsy types are a teensy bit ambivalent about this.  It’s gratifying to be told how pure we are and all that, but is it lip-service?  Is there a bandwagon under the floorboards? And, which artists will be allowed to matter? By whom?  In any case, no matter what we might think about it, the arts are being conscripted into ideas of recovery and the worrying concept of Brand Ireland faster than you can say polemic. It’s not that I’m hostile to the idea that the arts can have a positive role in our recovery – I’ve written about it before, in positive terms. But.]

Meanwhile, from the podium, we heard that contemporary Irish writers are not, or have not been, sufficiently critical of the State in their work.  Michael O’Loughlin is a bit put out about the sudden bonhomie that’s sprung up between writers and politicians. He wants to know what it means. In his opinion, Irish writers (on the whole) made little or no allusion to the many and varied troubles that simmered below the striped and glossy skin of the Celtic Tiger.  Is this a failure on their part?  Are the arts implicated in the whole sorry mess, after all?

Argument followed. Well, that’s what we were there for. Nadine O’Regan, books and arts editor of the Sunday Business Post, pointed out that art comes from within, it is not ‘for’ anything.   She brought the conversation around to problems facing literary fiction.  One interesting question is whether or not literary fiction has been diminished by the proliferation of prizes, with overtones of promotion? She said that it’s increasingly difficult for literary writers to make a living, and it’s a bit much for the writers of literary fiction to be expected, not only to live in poverty, but to take on the government at the same time.

Claire Kilroy spoke with authority and conviction when she said that she couldn’t think of a single writer who is NOT critical of the system in some way.  She mentioned Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies and Kevin Power’s Bad Day at Blackrock as examples. She talked about the length of time it takes for a work to grow, said that the novel as a form is meditative and needs time.  Her own interest, she said, is in individual, lonely people. Michael O’Loughlin bemoaned the fact that we don’t have an Irish Jonathan Frantzen, someone who’ll write panoramic, comprehensive novels of recent times, to explain us to ourselves. Claire Kilroy said, with admirable restraint, that when she writes, what happens is between her and the page; she’s not looking at what other writers are doing.

Gerry Smyth agreed that writers can’t be coralled.  He’s wary of polemic, but refuted the view that Irish writers don’t engage with public or political issues, citing Seamus Heaney’s recent “Republic of Conscience”,  Brian Friel’s “Freedom of the City” and Paula Meehan’s “Death of a Field” as examples.  Sean Love referred to Roddy Doyle’s Henry Smart trilogy – and other work – as casting considerable light on the underbelly of the State.

When Michael O’Loughlin brought out the familiar complaint that some of our best and most internationally-renowned writers direct a disproprtionate amount of their attention to the past, it was argued that writers often pick up and examine today’s currents through the prism of the past;  Gerry Smyth also pointed out that there’s a danger in immediate response to events – any writer wants to produce art, and art takes time.

Sean Love pointed to a range of exciting and diverse work that is being produced away from the mainstream (not least in his own excellent Fighting Words centre), and in new forms.  He also reminded us that many writers from a particular generation had deliberately resisted being turned into propagandists for one point of view or another.  Advisedly, I think most of us would agree.  Later, he said that he admires the independence of a mind that will resist the push to express a viewpoint that we think (now) is right – because that perspective might shift in the future.

The discussion turned to theatre then, because new trends and challenges often surface first in drama.  (Mark O’Halloran’s film and television work was also given as an example of critical creative engagement). Again, the proliferation of new forms and new practitioners was raised, disciplines we don’t even know how to recognise yet, let alone have names for. Rather than tie themselves up in efforts to control all this, writers, as much as other artists, are likely to keep working away quietly, forging their own path across this new and shifting terrain, because that’s what writers and artists do.

Then we were back to economics.  It was said that the idea of a professional writer didn’t exist in the 70s and 80s, and that literary writers might have to accept a return to the part-time job.  Most of us, it has to be said, never moved very far away from it – or not for long.  Maybe long enough to finish a draft, if that’s all right. Does that mean that most writers in the future will be, of necessity, middle class?

Novelist Mia Gallagher, who had been invited to join the panel, made the point that there are different stages in making a piece of work:  the making of it, then bringing it to the market, and finally going public – when a writer becomes public property in a way and for a time.  There can be confusion about what it means to be an artist.  Is it a career?  A vocation?  Does it have to be a social service as well as a creative one?

From here the discussion became more fragmentary.  It was late, people were getting tired. Some of us had been listening hard  and waiting for the Q & A for a long time. The room was very full, every seat was taken. At last, the discussion opened to the floor.  People argued for the merits of this book or that.  Things got a little heated, but only briefly.  Mary O’Donnell made an excellent point about what she called ‘the elephant in the room’: the fact that throughout the eighties and nineties Irish women, informed by feminist ideas and concerns with human rights, had been writing from a critical position that had gone largely unremarked in mainstream media or in academic discourse.  This was dismissed, because ‘it’s changing now’, an observation that misses the point completely, even if it’s true. If a whole swathe of literary fiction is not considered literary enough to be taken seriously in an academic sense, it quickly sinks without trace.  An attentive reader of this post will have seen by now that we weren’t exactly overwhelmed by references to women writers other than Paula Meehan, until some (Anne Enright, Emma Donoghue and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne) were referred to by impassioned speakers from the floor.

Claire Kilroy had earlier remarked that before the Big Book comes along, the ‘little’ ones get written.  Every writer knows how true this is, whether they’d admit it in public or not.  But it’s just as true of a national literature, which is an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas over time – a conversation not best served by the delivery of opinions, no matter how right-on, from hastily constructed platforms as they creak and list above the heads of a crowd who are, to a man, woman and child, preoccupied with real life worries about rent and food, about joblessness and emigration. Let’s not forget that the crowd includes writers as well as everyone else, worrying with the best of them. Citizens R Us.

The final word should probably go to Yeats, “On Being Asked for a War Poem”:

“I think it better that in times like these
A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right …”

(Mary O’Donnell also has a post on this debate.  Go to: medea999.WordPress.com)

“Flight” revisits, revises and plays with some of our best known legends, but it’s mainly based on the Tóraíocht Dhiarmuid agus Gráinne or the Pursuit of Diarmuid and Grainne.  It’s a well known and popular story, where Grainne, the daughter of Cormac Mac Art, is promised as a wife to the legendary hero, Finn Mac Cool.  At this stage of his life Finn is old and cranky, and he’s already buried a wife or two.  At the wedding, Grainne persuades Diarmuid, one of Finn’s young champions, to run away with her.  Finn’s furious pursuit and the adventures that follow are part of our mythology. The Fianna are our heroes, but they carry on a lot like gangsters; they roam the countryside committing murder and mayhem at will; they take what they want, lay waste all around them, and boast about it afterwards. It’s worth mentioning also that the ancient kings and chieftains had a practice of lending their daughters to overnight guests as a mark of their esteem. They’re a law unto themselves – and yet, the premise of the Tóraíocht (as in other stories) is that the woman is entirely to blame.  Grainne puts Diarmuid under a magical compulsion to do what she wants – in other words, he can’t help himself.

I wanted to tell this story from the young woman’s point of view, to let her choose and initiate what happens, beginning with that simple shift in the title, from ‘Pursuit’ to ‘Flight’.  I wanted her to tell her own story, to make it fresh and relevant.  As I wrote it, the story gathered momentum and veered off on its own track, as they do, to become as much about the construction of stories as it is about the young lovers. It was fun to lift a line from here and an image from there; to mix familiar elements in new combinations and quote a few iconic lines while I was at it.

When people ask about this story there seem to be two main issues.  One has to do with the problem, both technical and ethical, of taking an existing story and having your way with it.  The best I can say about this is that I’m not the first person to rewrite a myth or a fairy tale, and I won’t be the last.  At readings I can explain what I did. Other than that, I have to trust the reader’s wit to see that I’m playing, making free with the tradition.  Isn’t that what it’s for?  There are enough clues in the story to make its source obvious to anyone who’s at all familiar with the original – and yet, I think it stands on its own, as all stories must.  Knowing the original should add to the story, not detract from it.  That was the intention, anyway.

The other issue that raises the odd frown among readers (who can be very stern when it comes to the morality of the thing) is about writing and politics, or the politics of writing.  Samuel Goldwyn’s famous ‘if you have a message, send a telegram’ comes to mind.  I’ve often quoted it myself.  So, if I say that I wanted to honour the work that OneInFour does in writing this story, does that make the story political?  And if it’s political, does that make it less of a story?

The decision to give the story to the young woman and let her tell it in her own way can be seen as political and yes, it probably was.  Of course it was.  But motives are never pure and rarely simple, and it was a technical/artistic choice as well.  I’ve always wanted to play around with this story, to find a way to get under its skin and shine a light on the faultlines of the original, see what new shapes might emerge.  For me, the original has a strong undercurrent of unease with – or do I mean indignation at ? –  sexual agency in women, so it seemed perfect for the occasion.  But how to do it without being heavy-handed?

I went for a long walk to think this one out. The answer presented itself in three words, as if the character slid directly into my frontal lobe and spoke to me:  Call me Aisling**. There she was, the exact tone of her voice as familiar to me as if I’d always known her, and the story took off (sorry) under her bold direction.  And yes, I do know about Herman Melville. What writer (or reader) doesn’t?  But see above, about ‘obvious’ and ‘sources’.  “Call me Ishmael” has to be one of the most iconic opening sentences in the English language, and my hope is that, in a story that gets cheeky about icons and tradition and the nature of storytelling, the appropriation of the line is self-evident and justified.  And hey, I’ve acknowledged it here, now.

Is there anything we do that isn’t, at some level, political?  Should writers resist or engage with politics? On or off the page?

**The Aisling figure is a feature of Irish culture, with so many meanings it would take a whole other entry to explain her.  At her simplest, she is a dream-woman, a muse who inspires poets and heroes to do their thing, whatever that may be; she is often conflated with the country.  What, you didn’t know? Ireland is a woman.

Links:

www.stingingfly.org

http://www.stingingfly.org/www.oneinfour.org

Here’s the thing: remarks we might throw out without a second thought in conversation do not sit well on page or screen. They don’t know how to fade, or modulate.  They lack humour, or proportion, and worst of all, they refuse to leave. This is one of many pits that open at our feet when we enter Blogland. I wanted to cut the phrase straight away, but then decided to let it stand, as a reminder and a warning to myself.  And look, the subject of another entry.

Why the angst? Here are two reasons, to be going on with:

Ernest Hemingway: “Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.” (Paris Review Interview, 1958)

Dorothy Parker: “If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.  I want so much to write well, though I know I don’t, and that I didn’t make it.  But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.” (Paris Review Interview, 1956)

The painful honesty and truth of these two statements make me blush for the crass, offhand tone of the cosy up to the greats remark.  It’s hard to imagine many writers in this age of self-promotion (facebook, twitter and yes, dear reader, blogging) who would be willing to reveal such need, such a naked sense of failure.  Or who would reveal it with such style. But the effect on a reader – well, this reader, anyway – is one of grateful recognition.  There is forgiveness in such admissions, and more humanity than any amount of cosying-up deserves.

There are so many reasons why reading the work of the great and the good is important.  Let’s see: there is the work itself, the sheer, unadulterated pleasure of it; infinite worlds to enter and explore;  glimpses of the art of the possible; masterclasses in craft.  And that’s just for starters.

Just as important, maybe even more important, is what they give us in letters, interviews, essays on writing.  They show us what writing means to them, the challenges they face, how they tackle those challenges, their frustrations and their joys.

One of the many gifts of reading is that it gives us a pass to sit in a corner and listen to what these writers have to say, even when they’re dead. If we choose, we can have breakfast, lunch or dinner with them.  We can take a coffee break and meet them anywhere, at a time and place of our choosing.  We can take them to bed, and if we turn to them in the middle of a sleepless night, they’ll stay with us til morning and not complain, not even once.  The only price we have to pay is our attention – and look at all we stand to gain.

Every parent of teenagers knows that their most important formative influences come from their friends.  You can only take your children so far; after that, it’s all down to a combination of luck and who they hang out with.

Writing is like that.  Who and what you read matters.  The good news is that all it takes to be able to cosy up to the greats and learn from them – even if they’re dead, even if they live on the far side of the world or on another planet – is a trip to the local library or your nearest bookshop.

Sometimes we get lazy, stay close to home, comfy in our safe little rut with the people we see every day, what we already have on our shelves.  But it’s good to stretch a little, venture out to somewhere you’ve never been before, sample things you know will be good for you once you develop a taste for them.  If you find it tough at first, stick with it.  Reading something that challenges you is like taking your mind to the gym and giving it a workout – not a bad resolution for a New Year.