My last missive! I’ve been doing the usual this week—writing, interviews, admin—so I thought I’d throw some thoughts down on art. (The natural recourse.) 

Fiction is vicarious, so it’s a relatively cheap and practical answer to apocalyptic thinking. If the end is nigh then novels offer new actualities, brief and disposable, like a box of free samples. We spread out the diffused essences in books until they fill us. The text needs us to do that, because written sentences can only ever allude to visions and concepts that readers complete imaginatively. Engaging with fiction isn’t living other lives, but riffing on them with our own.

Then people gather to discuss art. Are they multiplying lifetimes in sharing both themselves and the existences they have personally animated from the text? Or is community a contraction, since all those spaces are being packed into one? Maybe the final compression admits that there is no way to have more experiences than someone else who’s lived as long as you. Superficially one life might seem more vibrant than another, but no-one takes everything in at first exposure, so all those quick glimpses add up to the same total sensory input you’d get from knowing a few things very well. Fiction is a judicious edit. The difference between reading a book and staring at a wall isn’t that the book shows you more, it’s that the things the book shows you might be more worth seeing. (Not always. Books vary in quality, as do walls.)

But people value different things, and ‘value’ can here be broadly understood—I often enjoy books that illuminate things I deplore—so anxiety about the state of criticism is existential. There’s the fear of wasted time off someone else’s dreck recommendation, and the rattling awareness—when we disagree—that there is no foundational truth or rubric, perhaps not even within ourselves. We vary, both from person to person and internally. The same text will read differently depending on how we encounter it. Discussion confronts those fluctuations: we seek to shore up our perspective, and sometimes do, but we’re just as likely to compound our uncertainties.

That troubled subjectivity comes through in language. The terms ‘overrated’ and ‘underrated’ are partly about the allocation of resources, but surely they also imply the speaker is intrinsically upset that too many or too few people like something. Would anyone whine about art being ‘overrated’ or ‘underrated’ under socialism? I’m going to say not, if only because it’s an excellent argument for socialism.

These are all things I would have been considering more intensely if my time at Crossing Border had been physical, just from the immersion of it. But participating online has still kept collective readership on my mind, as has doing virtual events throughout this year. 

Anyway! To end on a less abstract note, I’m grateful to the festival for having me, to Elinor for co-ordinating this project, and to Madelon for translating me. Congratulations on making it happen in difficult circumstances and the very best of luck for next year!

What a weekend. We’ve had a year of terrible things happening to good people, so it’s nice to see the equation flipped. I don’t support Biden and there’s more to US politics than ‘Trump bad’, but all the same … I was going to say ‘may the wind be always at his back’, but a query from Madelon caused me to look it up and realise that’s not a phrase for wishing someone ill, as I’d always thought in my childhood. For some reason I pictured the wind pushing the person away from everyone, which seems a better outcome in this case. (Trump owns actual windmills in the West of Ireland. I hope they fall over and that he’s standing under them when they do.)

Festival-wise, hopefully yesterday gave people an escape from the tension leading up to the result. Last evening Crossing Border showcased the winners of the European Literature Prize for the best contemporary European novel that’s been translated into Dutch and published the previous year. To mark the award’s ten-year anniversary, 2020 had two juries, one majority-student panel who awarded Frère d’âme by David Diop and another headed by author Abdelkader Benali that chose Spring by Ali Smith. The award goes equally to the translators: Martine Woudt, Karina van Santen and Martine Vosmaer. The different results demonstrate how potently luck affects prizes. For every big win in the headlines, there was probably a close second, and others who were close seconds in their own estimations and their mother’s.

Madelon, who’s been translating these blog posts into Dutch, was curious about the different covers for my first novel in various territories, so I thought I’d explain more broadly for anyone else who’s been wondering why it differs from country to country. Publishers have printed my novel with a range of covers both in the anglosphere and in translation. They base the decision on their own identity as an imprint, and on the needs of their particular market. When one of my publishers is getting ready to print, they give a graphic designer a briefing for the jacket—nothing incredibly specific, it tends to be more a mood than a ‘Put this on it’. The designer comes back with their first mock-up, and if the publisher is happy then they send the mock-up to me and my agent for final approval. If I hate something I can say, but I’ve liked all my covers so far. That’s always a relief because having to say no is, for Irish people, the most painful situation in the human experience. It’s somewhere between getting your appendix out and open-abdominal surgery on the stressful procedure index.

Apart from veto power, I don’t give a huge amount of input on covers or any other marketing aspect, because it’s more about communicating the publisher’s vision than it is about the author’s personal leanings. In my case a few countries have gone for similar covers—in the Dutch translation they’re using a variation on my US jacket, for instance, while in Spain they’ve adapted the UK one. Each territory has a unique publishing landscape that the publisher will know best, and within that landscape each publisher will have their own ethos. This all influences the cover we end up with.

That’s it for now, really; otherwise my weekend has mostly been two flavours of screen time, catching up on work and doing whatever the opposite of doom-scrolling is. Positive endorphin scrolling? I’m glad Trump lost.

Happy weekend—I hope everyone’s been enjoying the festival. On Friday there was an event in conversation with my Italian translator, Claudia Durastanti. She did an excellent job with my novel and I’ve been really pleased with the Italian reception. My publisher Edizioni Atlantide came up with a beautiful cover and has been amazing to work with. It’s one of the first translations to be released, so I’ve seen reviews and have had a few interviews around Italian publication. Typically they email the questions in English, I reply, and they translate my answers and write it up.

I did one such interview yesterday. I always find it interesting talking to international readers about Irish writing. Non-anglophones generally have fewer preconceptions around Irishness, because Ireland’s diaspora is mostly concentrated in Britain, North America and Australia; so while those countries have inherited perceptions of ‘the old country’ from Irish immigrants, the rest of the world views us with fewer assumptions, if they view us at all. (We’re really small. I don’t think other countries appreciate how small we are. Not even five million people! Why does anyone know about Ireland? Why do the Irish even know about Ireland?)

Speaking of the diaspora, another thing I worked on yesterday was an article about a project by photographer Tami Aftab, who’s Irish, Pakistani and English. Her grandmother left Ireland as a teenager, and Tami made the journey back with the women in her family to complete a commissioned photography project. It’s a satisfying story because from what Tami told me when I interviewed her, her career as an artist is exactly what her grandmother would have wanted for her. As for many Irish people at home and further afield, creativity has run in her family for far longer than it’s ever been a feasible profession. My dad loves photography but never would have dreamed of trying to make a living from it, and my grandmother read voraciously but never had any notion of writing, so Tami’s story resonated with my own experiences. 

My current difficulty with the piece is that I’m already at twice the word count because Tami spoke so passionately about the project. Once I’ve managed to cut the verbiage and save the good stuff, I’m excited to hand it in and share it, and for everyone to see her beautiful photos. I can’t believe this is a sentence I’m typing, but she’s made Leitrim chic. (My dad’s side are all Leitrim, so I’m allowed to say that and would bludgeon any non-Leitrimer who did.)

Besides that I’ve been signing bookplates and sending them back to my publisher to be distributed. I am no good at this sort of thing, and react with surprise and a degree of suspicion when I ever manage to pull it off. When I have to post things, I am forever convinced that some logistical disaster is just around the corner and I will have accidentally couriered my every possession straight to Moscow.

I’m also getting something very special ready to send my agent, but I won’t say what. I think the dark hints I promised in my first blog post probably won’t materialise. I don’t know why I’m so secretive—it certainly doesn’t make me much of a blogger—but it makes it easier to get my work done, and that’s the main thing.

It’s been heartening to watch the Crossing Border festival unfold this week. They’ve assembled such a vibrant selection of voices. The anglophone literary world can be myopic, so I admire literary communities whose events show more awareness that the whole world doesn’t happen in English. Even within the anglophone bubble, there’s a tendency, for instance, for US critics to read Irish novels as if they were set in Brooklyn. I aim to approach novels on the assumption I won’t understand everything. It mightn’t necessarily be a problem either with me or with the text, but rather a friction that shows I’m learning. 

That same engagement is one of the pleasures of having my own work translated. The translator is showing a level of care it’s an honour to receive, and the effort a reader in translation might have to make to understand culturally specific matters is another degree of close attention again. Plus I get to make people puzzle over the vowel sandwich that is ‘Naoise’.

The last task I completed for Crossing Borders was recording myself reading from my debut novel. I must admit I do the first chapter every time, because it means I can avoid giving any context or describing the plot. A common misunderstanding is that writing books makes you good at talking about them. I’m not good at talking, which is why I write in the first place. I sometimes have to do the talking bit anyway, especially when I’m being interviewed by someone who hasn’t read my work (it’s more common than you’d think), but I don’t like to because I’m inevitably putting an interpretation on it as I do. Right now, a lot of apparatus goes into telling people how to read books. Much of it is beyond authors’ control—I don’t choose anything outside the pages, from how the book is described to which other authors I’m compared to—so I can ignore those things since they’re not of my doing. I’m disorganised and have no attention span, so disregarding things is what one might call a natural gift.

Obviously it’s been a scary week near the end of a scary year. Should you address horrors and absurdities when they’re what you’ve thought most about but you have nothing meaningful to add? My fear and panic are everyone’s. When none of us can escape a feeling, I’m not sure expressing my personal iteration would be a show of solidarity; it feels more like a needless echo. But it would make a strangely inaccurate blog not to mention it at all, so there it is: I’ve been scared.

It was fun having my last blog post go up, and seeing Madelon’s translation. I must admit I don’t speak Dutch, although it’s on the list of languages I want to learn at some point. (‘Some point’ is when I will do 99% of the things I intend to do in life.) I think it’s difficult to be interested in English and not end up interested in most other languages, because it really has absorbed a bit of everything (in part, of course, because of the charming lengths the British took in exporting it). As an Irish person, I find writing in English a charged thing. My Irish is barely functional. I could never navigate literary precision through it, and if I did I wouldn’t be read widely. There are epistemic truths about my people and our history that I will never be able to access because they’re locked into the Irish language. I’ll never know most things about most things either, though, so that’s a chipper note to end on.

Looking forward to the rest of the festival over the weekend!

I’m Naoise, I’m an Irish writer, and my first novel Exciting Times came out earlier this year. It has been a strange time, as every work email autosuggest fills in for you by now. Then again, publishing a novel is inherently a bit uncanny. I finished the first draft in 2017, so there’s a dissonance in witnessing a flurry of fresh reaction to something I made so long ago.

I recently read a Martin Amis article where he describes literary fiction in the 1970s as an ‘obscure and blameless pursuit’, with none of the ‘collateral activities’ authors now undertake—no schedule of events, no press, no profiles, perhaps a few reviews.

We forget this when we discuss how the pandemic has affected book launches. The focus has been on what’s changed, on what’s gone virtual, on what’s been dropped entirely, but from Amis’s description it seems to me that the current publishing realm is far more similar to 2019’s than to the hermetic pre-dialup days. I’d begun taking my first interviews this time last year, am still being interviewed now, and will probably still be well into next year. 2020s publication still seems to me a process where you’d do well to like the sound of your own voice.

Otherwise, I’ve been trying to get on with things. Mainly, I’m working on either my second or my third novel, depending on how you see it. Before the book I’m presently writing, I wrote one that I don’t want to publish, so let’s call my current draft the second novel that anyone else will read.

Besides that, I’ve been writing short fiction and cultural commentary for various publications, and I’ll soon be interviewing photographer Tami Aftab about a personal project documenting her Irish grandmother and her family story. I’ve done various virtual author events, and I went to the Cheltenham Literature Festival in person earlier in October. There, I spoke on one panel with Camilla Pang and Abigail Bergstrom about neurodiversity, and on another with Octavia Bright about my own novel. I’d never been to Cheltenham before, but I hear the corona-adjusted setup was far less crowded than usual. What it lacked in juicy overheard conversational snippets, it made up for in elbow-room.

Personally I’ve been stretched, as has everyone. I’m worried about my family, my friends, and how the world is going. I sometimes wish I were a more visionary writer. But I write best about people and things that shouldn’t exist but do, without necessarily showing anyone a way out of it beyond laughing at the immediate absurdity. I have to trust that there’s a role for dark humour in an ecosystem where other writers are doing other things. I certainly think this attitude is preferable to talking myself up as some kind of prophet. I write novels, and I’m glad if people enjoy them.

People are often curious about my ‘work routine’. Sometimes I make one up, because the question makes me feel like I should have one. But people who can do something are often very poor at articulating how they do it, and that’s me when it comes to writing. Teaching people how to write is entirely its own skill.

I look forward to blogging more over the next few weeks. I don’t like to give away too much on works-in-progress, but I might drop the odd dark hint.