Review of Trade

It’s a strange paradox that confessionals largely occur either with the priest or the prostitute.   Trade makes use of the confessional between an older man and a young rent boy whose services he has procured previously.   The play is stripped back to its bare essentials with a minimalist dialogue, a dingy B&B bedroom and two characters that remain nameless.  Yet despite the simplicity of the story and setting, there is nothing simple in the execution of this play.  It is honest, raw and cleverly places the audience as voyeur and witness to the complexity of both men’s lives.

A way with words - connecting the traditional with the digital

In his essay ‘Story-telling: The Gaelic tradition’ Declan Kiberd states that for “the past eighty years in Ireland, the short story has been the most popular form of all literary forms with readers,” and that it has “been the form most widely exploited by writers”.  Kiberd highlights that Patrick Pearse saw with “uncanny accuracy” that the future of Irish literature lay in the short story rather than the folk tale.  That essay, which formed part of a collection on the Irish short story, was published in 1979[i].  Over thirty years later the short story form continues to be widely exploited by Irish writers today.

Letting Go?

In the good mother’s way with her sons;
The fledged bird is thrown
From the nest – on its own
But the peasant in his little acres is tied
To a mother’s womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord
                                                        (excerpt from The Great Hunger by Patrick Kavanagh)

In the summer of 2002 I visited an unusual place in the Garden County. Just outside Roundwood is an Indian Sculpture park called Victor’s way. This oddity in rural Ireland is owned and managed by Victor, who inherited the land and developed it into a philosophy park. The sculptures are strategically located around the place to enable the visitor to reflect upon the various stages of life.

Rejection: a fact of life

There are things we have to do in life and things we have to experience in life.  In order to survive we have to breathe, drink, eat, sleep and shelter from the elements.  As we develop emotionally and psychologically we experience a wide range of emotions, navigate relationships and ourselves.  To a greater or lesser degree we can control our emotions, avoid relationships and avoid experiences.  But there is one area of experience that we cannot avoid…that ever perennial problem of life; rejection.

Success - To fear or not to fear

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you…,”
                                                                           “Return to Love” by Marianne Williamson*

Despite the plethora of advice that tells us to think positive or use affirmations to heal or visualize the perfect life, career or lover, there is one crucial aspect missing from all this advice, which is the utter fear and dread of success. As odd as this sounds, many of us are terrified of it.

The two realities of Christmas

Christmas is a magical time; a time of being with family, friends, loved ones. A time of sitting round an open fire or a gas fire or an electric fire or no fire. A time of stuffing our faces with rich laden food, drinking too much alcohol and too many fizzy drinks. A time for experiencing the delight in children’s faces when they open their presents. It is a time of getting in touch with our Christian roots and our Pagan roots. It is a time of myth making, Santa Claus and believing in things that do not exist. Father Christmas and the birth of Jesus on the 25 of December are fictitious but both are representative of gift giving and new beginnings. There is celebration of a new hope and a new beginning but in order for that to happen there has to be death of the old. At Christmas time all above the ground is dead whilst below the ground new life is emerging.

The Demise of the Letter

In The Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane, Keane opens with a preface on the humble letter, stating that it is “the simplest and most permanent form of communication”.  Furthermore, he sees the epistolary form as a vastly underused resource in the literary world. John B. Keane put together a collection of ‘novelettes’ as he terms them from a series of “stock” Irish characters that includes the farmer, the matchmaker, the parish priest and the T.D. (a government representative in the Irish parliament).  Writers such as Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe used the letter as a literary device to give the reader an insight to the character's thoughts but also as a means to further the plot through time and life-like realism.  This resulted in the emergence of the novel as we know it today.  The epistolary was the earliest genre used for the novel.