Gerard Beirne
@gerardbeirne
Author of 8 books of fiction & poetry. Recent:The Thickness of Ice (novel, Baraka Books, 2024);The Death Poems (Salt, 2023).Winner of Rubery Award for Fiction. Shortlisted Danuta Gleed Award, Bord Gais Irish Book Awards, & Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
A couple of courses I will be facilitating through the Irish Writers Centre. Both are online. The short story course runs for 6 weeks and the publishing one is a one-day event. irishwriterscentre.ie/courses/the-... irishwriterscentre.ie/courses/from...
"There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges." Ernest Hemingway, born on this day in 1899
Forty-one years ago, living in London and looking for work, I took the Tube to Wembley with my dole money in my pocket and hoping I might still snag a ticket. Somehow, I did.
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” ― Barry Lopez
Delighted to be facilitating this course online at the Irish Writers Centre starting in September: "This course explores a range of short stories from leading contemporary American writers, blending close reading with creative practice." irishwriterscentre.ie/courses/the-...
Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham. The demanding Vicar, Mr. Carey, insists that his wife wear a plain black dress to church on Sundays even though Mrs. Carey would have preferred to wear some colour: "Mrs. Carey sighed as a woman but obeyed as a wife."
“Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you.” Flannery O’Connor
"I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money. I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it." Dorothy Parker
"Up to a short time ago I’d have said I was a writer who was just born in Ireland. But I know now, the way I write, the way I see things, my interest in story is very much the result of the race I come from." - Edna O'Brien (Photo - Cecil Beaton)
“The world that used to nurse us now keeps shouting inane instructions. That's why I ran to the woods.” ― Jim Harrison, Songs of Unreason
"My reputation as a ladies' man was a joke that caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone." Leonard Cohen
"Writing is trying to know beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward." Marguerite Duras
“Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.” ― Kathy Acker
Moving onto Eileen Chang (author of Lust, Caution), Love in a Fallen City.
About 8 pages left in Angel by Elizabeth Taylor. While I have enjoyed it, I won't lie to you it's been a slog at times - nothing to do with the quality of the writing, more the style.
I was eleven when I got my hands on the 40 Greatest Hits but had my innocence shattered the following year when I sent off for, and eventually received, The Sun Collection. From the opening notes of "That's All Right, Mama", I kinda knew nothing was ever going really going to be the same again.
“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.” ― Flannery O'Connor
Jim Harrison who died ten years ago, March 26, 2016. "Death steals everything except our stories."
For the day that’s in it—Pi Day #PiDay— an extract from my poem “Pi,” in my 2011 collection Games of Chance: A Gambler’s Manual (Oberon Press). “Weaving mathematical formulas and scientific lingo into beautifully written verse, Beirne creates a happy union between the arts and science.” – Open Book
It's no mere coincidence we will be discussing Tim O'Brien's masterpiece of prose The Things They Carried, at the closure to my American Short Story course tonight at the Irish Writers Centre (alongside A Manual for Cleaning Women – Lucia Berlin).