The publication of my first two collections and my dissertation

Subtitle: I self-published – have I wasted my work and destroyed my career? The answer is no and I still stand by the decision which was made for very valid and pressing health reasons. First because I self-published these as a creative writing student and I still see them all very much as student projects though I hope they are re-edited and republished at some point in the future. Secondly, because it is so very early on in my writing career. I was vocal and hysterical about them on occasions, feeling desperate about it all, being absolutely devastated that the only publisher I kept sending them to (!) repeatedly rejected them. I have since learned from it, moved on and made peace with it. May people download and enjoy them freely. Amen.

Dear Memory, Dear Imagination (prose for Sarah Moss’ class)

Who the fuck knows. Who the fuck cares. Why didn’t you take the eye mask. Close your eyes. Close your ears. Close your fucking mouth. Breathe in. Breathe out. You’re not in some shitty medical tube waiting for your fate to be determined. No. No that’s not it. They’ll tell you you have lung cancer and then you will decide what happens. Jesus. You just wanted to outlive your mother. Breathe out slowly. Don’t cry. There is a landscape in your mind. Jesus. You’re not a fucking philosopher who thinks about fucking landscapes. Blow your savings and live it out on some island. Give everything away. None of it matters anymore. You don’t even like looking at photos. It just makes you so fucking sad. Fuckety fuck fuck. All the cigarettes. Your first one at thirteen. Cow shed. It’s so disgusting but you play it cool. You want to like it. You want to be like Claire. Cool as fuck. Have a fag and a Smirnoff Ice. A Bacardi Breezer. Get drunk and snog a guy. A first kiss with cigarette breath. He grimaces and lights up and then kisses you again. That’s better now. Christ, they’re going to bury you beside her in a bloody Catholic graveyard. Even if you told Maisie you just wanted to be scattered in the ocean, she would never listen. You’ll haunt them forever if they do that. Your poor bones trapped beside her forever. Trapped in life. Trapped in death. No, no. None of it matters now. Your spirit will be free. Jesus, do you even believe in spirits? Don’t scream. Clap for me. What a performance. Daughter of the year. Friend of the year. Employee of the year. Clap. Clap. Clap. How long now? Count. 1 2 3 4. Tickety bomb bomb boo boo. Just think - you’re in a bath now. You’re not trapped. They’re not counting the tumours in your body. You’ve never wanted to dance more. How you love the tango. Watching insta videos of sexy tango dancers in the dentist’s waiting room. You always fancied yourself as a sexy tango dancer. If you weren’t so fucking fat. Smokers are all skinny. Another lie. Lie. Lie. LIES. L-I-E-S. Try saying a prayer. Listen, you thought you were Bridget Jones at eighteen. Everybody smoked. Your first boyfriend at uni thinks he’s so fucking mature and says loudly, after fucking you quite mechanically as if you were a sex doll, that he’ll have a ‘postcoital fag’ because they taste the best. Feeling so fucking proud of himself. Smug bastard orgasm fag shitshow. Don’t open your eyes. Breath in. Sigh out. Was it the menthols? Grandad smoked like a chimney and never got a cold. Aunt Liz was pickled with booze. Live long and prosper with vodka in hand. You knew it was the menthols. The odd cigarillo. A pipe. Pot. Fuck, it was the pot. Isn’t that supposed to heal you or some shit? This is it. This is what you have always wanted. Start smoking again. Go out in a drug-fuelled blaze. Be less polite. Tell the truth. Have as much sex as you want. You have the upper hand. You can’t be hurt. Have meaningless sex. Why is your throat so tight. It’s that thing again. Oh,that thing. Love. You’ve never been loved by a guy. You’re thirty-five and you know that no guy has ever loved you. Jas cared for you but he didn’t love you. You both knew that.  You’ve been infatuated…. Infatuated maybe four times. A dozen crushes. You have never been in love. Fuck. What’s wrong with you. Google sociopaths. Why haven’t you ever been in love. You’ve always been open with the wrong people. Always too fucking trusting with the wrong guy and your heart couldn’t take it. Your legs are going numb. You’re going soft. It’s happening already. You’re going to end up on a fucking American talk show and they’re going to lap it up. The terminally ill woman who has never known real love. Find her a knight in shining armour. Shit. Stay still please. Clap some more. Take a bow. This is my final performance. Is it over now? Is it really over? See Venice. Swim in a lagoon. Breathe. Your body is on fire. They did this. Fuck that cute doctor. Fuck the nurse too. Try orgies. A sex club in Berlin. Get an STD. Die of syphilis. Shit. Don’t laugh. Stay perfectly still. Embark on a life of crime. Raid a bank. Live life large. Give money to David for his mum. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Write a novel. Everybody writes memoirs now. Why does every Tom, Dick and Harry think we want to read about their sad fucking lives? Guess what guys. We don’t give a shit. Somebody tell them they’re not that special. They’re still going to die. Christ, this is like that movie with Cher…Moonthing. Moonstruck. I just want you to know that whatever you do you are sill going to die. Craving immortality? A memoir ain’t going to fix it, mate. Vampire Lestrad. Don’t you look delicious? BITE ME. Christ, any guy who looks like Brad Pitt is free to suck you dry. You should have spoken to Will. Turn back time. Speak to a friend. Tell them the truth. Don’t be frightened now. Open that mouth of yours. Tongue moves. Vocal cords. Sound. Hello. Hello. Hi Will. I want to be your friend. I want to be more than your friend. Don’t listen to that dickhead voice. Speak. Will they see? Could they have known? He would have just felt sorry for you like the rest of them. You would take a pity-fuck right now. FUCK, WOMAN - HAVE SOME SELF-RESPECT. Who dies at this age without having known love? Fuck the patriarchy. Fuck romcoms. This is what got you into this mess. Don’t chase fantasies. Eat, shit, puke. No, that’s not it. You wanted to love them. Dear memory. Dear imagination.

The Orphic Review

I have thought a long time about writing this, what to say, where to post this. I don’t think I owe anybody an explanation but I am writing this for myself really. I started “The Orphic Review” in 2018/2019 under the name “Crow of Minerva” as an art blog for emerging women and minority artists. I kept thinking of other artists out there like me, how much I was struggling to have a voice and a space in the art world and how all the art blogs and Instagram accounts kept showing the same artists. Later I opened it up to literary submissions, mainly poetry but we also published some short stories. I feel very privileged to have published the work of many great writers and artists including Ciarán O’Rourke and Adam Ouston. I am proud of all that I achieved with The Orphic Review. However well-intentioned I was, I feel that, at least on the management front, it was a complete personal failure. Struggling with ongoing health difficulties, I struggled single-handedly to publish every single item on the journal. It was a constant and very difficult battle and I often admitted as much on Twitter. My honest admission impacted the reception of the journal. Hence, I only ever imagined it as a small personal project and this was a serious mistake. I was not ambitious for it though I occasionally compared it to other literary magazines which started around the same time and had gained huge popularity and support and felt nothing but crushing disappointment with myself.

From day one, I should have kept separate social media accounts for the journal and each post should have been professionally polished. I was not the right person for this. I made editing mistakes in the journal which I was always quick to correct but nevertheless I found hugely embarrassing. There were formatting errors and technical issues too and I was always so upset that the writers might be disappointed in me and the journal. I had no experience with any of it and it quite obviously showed.

In a desperate attempt to save it and reboot it, I asked three excellent writers I was acquainted with to become co-editors. Weeks later, I was disparaged on Twitter by a vindictive writer whose work I had rejected and a minor Twitter storm ensued. This had a serious impact on my mental health and I closed down the journal with my deepest apologies to my co-editors who were far too kind to me about it all. It was nearly a year later before I was well enough to open it again, this time with only one co-editor, the brilliant Anne Daly, and I am proud of the ensuing issues we published together.

It was my plan to publish two chapbooks a year but perhaps unsurprisingly I failed to secure funding and my plans were never realised. I also had serious doubts about it in terms of what I would be able to manage with my health. I had legal concerns about getting into publishing with zero experience of contracts, for example. I knew nothing of book distribution. I then won the Publishing Ireland Award in 2024 which I believed would be the answer to all my concerns and help me, finally, get Orphic Press off the ground.

All I have been able to think about is the writers. What I owe them, what I could do for them, what they deserved of me as a potential publisher. Every day online, I saw poets devastated at their publishers closing down, failing them in other ways. This has been weighing so heavily on me. I have thought about my health, my own work, my studies and family and how to balance it all.

And so I have come, regrettably, to the conclusion that the dream of the Orphic Press, of my starting a small poetry press, will not come to pass. I cannot do it. I am not able to do it and it feels like a monumental failure. I hope I can make peace with it one day.

When things look up, I will reopen the website so that that people can still enjoy the marvellous work on it. I am deeply grateful to all who have helped me and supported the journal. To all who have trusted me with their work.

I have learned so much not just from running the journal (six years editing experience is not nothing!!!) but from the writers and artists I have worked with.

Failed prose

So four books completed, more projects started. Working on my first romcom script also and thought I would post these two pieces of short fiction I wrote for class and which I decided not to use for it. Enjoy - if you like black comedy, parody, satire, self-satire etc… These are my first attempts at the fun, light stuff (commercial fiction) and are also very much NOT MY GENRE.

THE THERAPIST

In her therapist’s office again, Emily Robinson was lying back on a brown suede lounge chair that was the wrong texture. She was frantically rubbing her hands up and down the sides as she rattled on in distress and thought she could well end up with blisters. Dr Donnelly had hired a decorator and everything was wrong. She could barely see the doctor’s face in the new dim lighting and it was beginning to give her a migraine.

“It’s like something I carry around with me all the time. A sort of label. I imagine it as a large Las Vegas sign floating above my head. A thousand lights around it screaming ‘LOOK! LOOK! THIS WOMAN IS A WIDOW. LET’S ALL STOP AND PITY HER’ and they do you know. They do. They all know somehow. I see it in slow motion – their faces contorting into a sympathetic grimace, that ghastly soothing sound mewling out of their mouths and then THE LIE: ‘Don’t worry, love, you’ll find someone else.’ They all tell the same lie. They all have some anecdote about a friend of a friend who met their soul mate after being sent on a golden age cruise – one man was sent on a cruise as a consolation prize, he’d just had his leg amputated from diabetic damage, married on the cruise ship by the captain to a woman thirty years younger!!! And he wasn’t even rich!!” Emily paused mid-rant and stared at her therapist expectantly.

“Well I mean,” Dr Donnelly said slowly “you are in fact only forty. I don’t think anybody is going to send you on a golden age cruise. Many people of your age meet new partners and start families even. It’s always difficult to navigate grief, you’re doing well.”

“But you don’t get it Doctor, I’m not. It’s just not going to happen. I will always have that Las Vegas Widow sign blazing above me. It’s not just a weight in my chest. And I am FED UP. I’ve considered moving you know? To Iceland. And making up an entirely new persona. A new name even. I could be Daisy Collins, a children’s illustrator who is a lesbian and in a long-distance relationship,” she said. “And then I would just show them pictures of my cousin in LA. Hot babes dig me. Everybody would leave me alone and nobody would be trying to set me up with the fifty-year-old primary school teacher from the local village who still lives with his mum and secretly watches too much porn. Like I don’t know dude, maybe join a gym and read something other than Harry Potter and Playboy.”

In his mind, Dr Donnelly was in hysterics at Emily’s latest rant while imagining himself very far away in a slightly exotic holiday destination, completely secluded – a place where nobody could talk at him for hours, a place, in fact, where there was nobody at all apart from a mute cook who prepared five course meals. But here in this small room lined with plastic plants, infused with the soft scents of aromatherapy oils, Dr Donnelly sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, removed his slightly dirty glasses and simply said “Hmmmmm, do you think perhaps a change of scenery would be a good thing at this juncture? Do you think a break, a sabbatical even, would be beneficial?

Emily stared at the elderly man in disbelief. “A break?” she almost screamed. “A break?” she repeated in a quieter tone. “I have three children’s books coming out in the next two years!!! I have to have nearly one hundred illustrations – ONE HUNDRED – illustrations finished in the next eight months. I can’t take a BREAK. I can’t even take the time out to come here and unload.”

“Yes, but Emily, do you have to do illustrations from here, from your home? Did you not yourself tell me that the great benefit of being self-employed and your type of work is that you could work anywhere? Did you not also spend the last five sessions telling me about how much you wanted to travel and how now that David was gone you regretted all these travel plans that you thought would never come to pass?”

“I am going to suffocate in here Dr Donnelly, can you please for God’s sake, turn of the fecking tinkling bells and, and WHAT IS THAT SMELL? It’s like a sort of putrid jasmine. Fields of them are decaying inside my nose right now.”

Dr Donnelly was no longer laughing. He had invested in Soothing Sound Machine 1078XJL which he had especially imported from Beijing. S.S. & M. 1078XJL was used by all the top private Swiss psychiatric clinics. It was used in Hollywood. A friend of his had mentioned to him privately that he had it on good authority that even Julia Roberts had one in her home. He was outraged. It was a designer product scientifically proven to reduce stress and anxiety and possibly elevate levels of serotonin. He had been contemplating buying shares in the company. As for the oils, the woman in the health shop had assured him that if he bought a hundred of the multi-pack scents wholesale, he could do no better and the manufacturer supplied the scents to all the important perfume factories in Grasse. Dr Donnelly was not ready to admit that this could have been a lie.

“Emily, I think it’s time to look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself ‘what the hell am I doing now, ten years after David’s death?’” the doctor said in a biting tone.

Emily stared at the doctor, reeling in shock. She looked down to the cheap mock-oriental carpet and felt her face burning and her eyes stinging. In one swift movement, Emily grabbed her bag and coat and ran out of the room. By the time she reached her car, she noticed five missed calls from the doctor’s. She was not going to phone him back or listen to his messages. She was seething and embarrassed. She had never liked him. She only went because David’s mother knew him from the golf club and said he was a “a dear man.” Well, it was quite clear to her that he was not a “dear man.” What the hell had she been paying him for? All her friends – and there were less and less of them – were sick of listening to her talk about David. Everybody thought she should have moved on by now. But Dr Donnelly always listened and always understood. She had needed that safe space and a person to nod at her in acquiescence and sympathy.

As Emily drove to her house crying, she became more and more angry. This was never a good thing. She was in a blood-boiling rage and the last time she had felt this way, she had got a tattoo covering half her back which she then spent a small fortune getting removed. She didn’t notice the red traffic lights or hear the cars blaring their horns at her. She did not see the An Post van speeding towards the side of her small blue Fonda. And when she woke up in hospital, with a concussion, three fractured ribs and broken leg with pins in it, all she could still think of was that obnoxious psychologist who, for once in his long practice, had told a patient a truth they had not been ready to hear.

THE PINK BIRD

It was the second time Eliza had found herself at a gallery opening and she had decided that the art was shit. The art was shit and the exhibition blurb was an intellectual fabrication that only sounded good to people whose brains were shit too. She was staring at the sort of inoffensive paintings that sold well and would hang well on that feature wall of the right sort of house. The Right Sort of House would have a four-page spread in Posh Home Interiors and everybody would have a copy on their coffee table. At the local hairdressers, the ladies in beige would coo and chortle over The Right Sort of Art in The Right Sort of House in Posh Home Interiors. They would send their husbands out to seek a similar painting with just those colours to match the new silk curtains and carpet (imported specially. Hand-woven, of course. By children).

The people in beige had appeared en force tonight and Eliza wanted to shriek at the women here with their glossy, saccharine lips and caramel highlights which probably cost more than her rent. Eliza Brownston was busy making voodoo dolls of them in her head but hadn’t quite decided whether she wanted to stick pins into them or throw them on her fire. Give me a ruby pout and the honest venom of a kick from a large black boot. Waterproof. A good grip on the soles.  Eliza only wore large black boots and had a wide selection of matte red lipsticks that weathered spaghetti and making out with the only slightly-beiged eel that was Zack.

In creating her voodoo figurines, Eliza would pluck eyelashes from the beige people. This was a difficult decision to make as she was uncertain which part of them was real. Was it a wig, were those extensions? Which parts were added? Indeed, was any of it real and how much of it was permanent? However, the plucking of the long lashes would give her far more satisfaction and she really would quite like to see them bald-eyed and unable to flutter. She had been imagining herself in two scenarios. In the first one, she became a stealth-like agent of Matte Red Lips and Waterproof Black Boots and broke into their beige houses to tweeze out the beige lashes as they lay sleeping in their beige beds. They would wake up the next morning and scream as they faced themselves in the mirror. Here, she imagines them distorted, Munch-like – “Beige Scream” (painted in 2023, Dublin 4, artist unknown).  In the second scenario, Eliza Brownston would simply march up to them confidently and pluck the lashes from their faces. A surprise attack. Here, she imagines only Frances Bacon. Pure horror. Their little worlds instantly disintegrating with the disappearance of their lashes. Perhaps the voodoo dolls weren’t needed after all.

A few steps away from her stood the gallery director and the chief art critic from the Irish Times. Eliza stepped towards them to listen to their conversation.

And to the left you see, we have one of the artist’s first works: Canary on a Bin Bag. And you can really feel the artist conveying the urgency of the climate crisis here.

It’s quite something. Raw. It reminds me a little of a painting I picked up in Paris last season by a student artist – Whore on a Laundry Line. You must swing by and have a quick look.

Eliza turned to look at the canvas in question – a small yellow square painted over a black latex squiggle in the centre of a canvas which was at least six feet wide and high. She laughed. Eliza’s laughter reverberated around the large concrete gallery space. The People in Beige turned and stared and then ignored the offensive sound in the - quite sacred - large concrete gallery space. She delicately removed a pink felt-tip pen from her bag and moved closer to the canvas. In the centre of the yellow square, she quickly drew a bird. The bird was a strange sight with a large beak and feathers which fanned out to fuchsia flames. The bone legs fused into its misshapen body. The bare skin of its neck was ruched and crumpled. The long-ovalled eyes seemed somehow watery and empty. Eliza Brownston had vandalised the great modern masterpiece with a similarly unconscious creation and was feeling very satisfied.

When Eliza’s pink bird was discovered, the gallery director decided not to mention it to the artist. The pink bird was, after all, the reason the American buyer had fallen in love with the piece. The employees were made to sign an NDA and it was never talked of again. It was being shipped off to a private collection in Texas and what was the likelihood of the artist ever seeing the piece again in person? The odd pink bird resting wistfully in the yellow square was hardly visible in photographs.