STORIES OF HOPE
Writer Danielle McLaughlin on Cork’s new monthly fiction event, which celebrates the city’s diverse population
One day in late 2016 my friend and fellow Cork author Madeleine D’Arcy had the idea of convening a monthly fiction event. We’d both been regulars at The Lightning Bug, run by the dynamic Norma Burke. Norma had, sadly for us, moved to Dublin. In 2018, via her alter-ego Bunty Twuntingdon-McFuff, she would seek Dublin City Council’s nomination for the Áras as a means of protesting the quality of prospective presidential candidates. In a field where the competition included Peter Casey and Gemma O’Doherty, Bunty did her best to stand out by advocating burning bodies in place of fossil fuels, turning the Áras into a hunting lodge and spa, and proposing a new reality TV show called In Your Áras.
We missed Norma and The Lightning Bug and wanted to fill the void. Ó Bhéal runs regular weekly poetry events in Cork,
hence our focus on an event for readers and writers of fiction. There was the matter of a venue. Madeleine’s brother, Mike D’Arcy, runs the atmospheric Friary Bar on the corner of North Mall and Shandon Street. The pub is situated in one of the oldest parts of Cork City, with windows looking out onto the River Lee. Since January 2017, on the last Sunday of every month, it has been home to Fiction at the Friary, a free monthly event featuring readings and interviews with invited guest authors, optional writing exercises, an open mic, and plenty of good conversation. And jelly beans. Lots of jelly beans.
The events were well attended from the outset, but we noticed that our audience didn’t reflect the multicultural city that Cork has become. We knew that there were lots of New Corkonians and that their number must include writers. This was borne out in 2018 by A Journey Called Home, an anthology edited by Paul Casey
To celebrate Cork city’s diverse population,
author DANIELLE McLAUGHLIN has launched an inspiring monthly event working with writers from all over the city,
many in Direct Provision, to focus on fiction and draw the community together.
and published by Cork City Libraries in association with Ó Bhéal, where the work of 62 writers in 20 languages was presented along with translations into English. A number of the contributing writers were living in Direct Provision in Cork.
Introduced in 1999, Direct Provision was intended as a place where people coming to Ireland seeking asylum would reside for a few months while awaiting the outcome of their application for international protection. The reality is that the majority of asylum seekers spend years living in Direct Provision. We applied for and received Arts Council funding for a collaborative project between writers living in Direct Provision in Cork, Fiction at the Friary, and the Department of English, University College Cork (UCC). The project got underway in January 2019 when Melatu Uche Okorie, who spent eight and a half years in Direct Provision, was featured guest author at Fiction at the Friary and read from her acclaimed collection of short stories, This Hostel Life (Skein Press, 2018). Melatu also visited UCC, where she spoke to students on the MA in Creative Writing programme.
The project is currently in its second phase, a series of workshops which take place twice a month at UCC. We talk, share work, and study examples of writing we admire. This month, for example, our reading includes short fiction by Kevin Barry. What a privilege to discuss his short story, “The Coast of Leitrim” – “the breeze made the cables above the bungalows whisper of the Sunday afternoon’s melancholy. The waves made polite applause when they broke on the shingle beach” – in a group that includes poets from Pakistan, a lawyer-writer from Nigeria, a novelist from Zimbabwe, among others. The close examination of language that’s part of the territory of short fiction is heightened by the multi-lingual and multi-cultural nature of the group. What, I find myself wondering, will my fellow participants make of Barry’s protagonist’s definition of “clammy”: “like a warm feeling but not in a good way.” Or the main character’s memory of being given two sausage rolls by an uncle on making his first Communion. “This is a custom?” enquires his girlfriend, a Polish woman living in Ireland. “The Coast of Leitrim” is a beautiful and funny story that explores hope and loneliness and migration, the triumph of love and need over borders and geography.
Our group is writing towards a showcase event to be held at Fiction at the Friary on June 30, where members will share their work. In advance of the showcase, we’ve arranged for Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca Theatre Development Centre to facilitate a workshop on Reading Your Work Aloud. In the car after one of our workshops, I ask a writer from Zimbabwe to teach me the clicking sounds required to pronounce her name. Her alphabet has sounds not known to mine, such as the clicks of Q, X and C. Each of these clicks sounds different to the others. Before, I might have been nervous of asking a question like this, fearing it could be interpreted as a request to perform otherness. But my new writer friend, like everyone else I have met from Direct Provision, is gracious, patient and good fun as she attempts to explain exactly how my tongue must press against my palate in order to produce the correct sound.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about who gets to speak and who doesn’t, about the quality of political discourse and who gets to participate in it. Which brings me back, in a roundabout way, to Bunty Twuntingdon-McFuff, whose satirical nomination bid got people thinking about such things. The Direct Provision system fosters isolation, and deprives people of autonomy over the most basic aspects of their own lives. It results in many asylum seekers spending years in limbo in institutions that are particularly unsuitable for children and vulnerable adults. Children comprise approximately 30 per cent of people living in Direct Provision in Ireland. The Ombudsman for Children has stated that “Direct Provision is not a suitable long-term arrangement for anyone, particularly children who are spending large proportions of their childhoods living in an institution.” But then, when it comes to residential institutions, Ireland has form. The Direct Provision Centres have been described as the Magdalene laundries of our time. This time round, don’t anyone dare say that they didn’t know.
“What a privilege to discuss Kevin Barry’s short story in a group that includes poets from Pakistan, a lawyer-writer from Nigeria, and a novelist
from Zimbabwe.”