Writestuff

This episode features an interview with and reading from Gary Cunningham. In ‘Joys of Joy’ and ‘Life After Joy’ Gary wrote about his experiences as a prisoner and life after imprisonment respectively. Gary has gone through a lot and has used writing as a way of eloquently expressing his story. This should be a sad story, but Gary comes across as one of the most positive people around, infusing everything with humour and brutal honesty. This honesty comes across in this interview as Gary talks about the power of creativity, the process of getting over addiction and the rock opera that he is working on.

This is the first of a number episodes recorded at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week.  Through a writing career spanning 55 years, Margaret Drabble has written such novels as A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Red Queen, and the highly-acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.  In this interview, Margaret discusses her career, what she is reading now, her reflections on editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature, what she would have done if she hadn’t become a writer and the recent referendum on abortion in Ireland in connection with The Millstone.

Paul McNamara – Performance Poet This episode features two performances and a chat with Paul McNamara. Paul has won a range of competitions for his performances and treated audiences at many festivals and events to his comedic and sincere poems that chronicle the misfortunes of a twenty-something Irish male. He delivers his poems with a precise rhythm and a physicality that make them rise from the platitude of a page and into something to be experienced rather than observed.  Paul performs his most well known piece, ‘Quarter Life Crisis’ before discussing what performance poetry is and how it differs from ‘page poetry’. Paul talks about the process of creating a performance poem and tells us about his one-man theatre and poetry show. Listen to the end for a second performance from Paul.

In the third episode of WriteStuff, Chris Fitzgerald interviews Kerry Neville. Kerry teaches creative writing at Georgia College and State University and was in Ireland to deliver workshops at the Frank McCourt Creative Writing Festival. Kerry’s first collection of fiction, Necessary Lies, received the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Fiction and was named a ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year. Last year, Kerry published her second collection, Remember to Forget Me, to great acclaim and she is currently working on her memoirs. Kerry has published her non-fction in The Fix, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kerry talks about her Irish heritage, her role as a creative writing facilitator, writing that is ‘radically honest’, diversity of modern writing, publishing through modern media and much more.

In the second episode of WriteStuff, Chris Fitzgerald talks to Liz Nugent. Following on from the huge successes of her first two novels, Unravelling Oliver and Lying in Wait, Liz has just released Skin Deep. The novel tells the story of Cordelia and her relationships with various men as she moves from an Irish island to London and the French Riviera. As with all of Liz’s novels, it starts with a bloody scene and takes us through how this came about. Liz tells us about writing Skin Deep as well as other insights including the one book she wishes she had never read, her views on adaptations of her work and an exclusive piece of information on her fourth novel.

In this first episode of WriteStuff, we interview Donal Ryan. Donal is one of Ireland’s greatest literary talents, he has won a range of literary awards for his four novels and one collection of short stories, including The Guardian First Book Award for The Spinning Heart in 2013\. Donal has just released his fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, which is receiving widespread praise for its weaving together of three seemingly distant narratives.  We talk about his new book and how he came to write about a Syrian refugee in From a Low and Quiet Sea. We touch on many aspects of Donal’s views on writing in this interview, including his advice for building fictional characters, finding his voice, dealing with good and bad reviews, his writing process from conception to publication, discipline, editing and drafting and his obsessive compulsion towards paragraphs.  Donal reveals his period of shame for writing in an Irish demotic voice before he overcame this to feel comfortable with pursuing writing in this ve