Session number 8, 31/05/2023

Posted on: 6 June 2023 by Saul Leslie in Creative Writing group

Pens raised in triumph. Sheets of paper glinting in evening sunlight. The thunderous beat of palms against the table. This was our return to The Belvedere...

David Tierney began with “Hay”, a story in its early stages. Fresh from the field. The narrator recalls his memories of the labours and emotions which go into farming, specifically the cultivation of haybales. That these are recollections, framed in the past-tense, gives the story part of its tension: there is throughout a suggestion that the narrator is part of a generation which has turned away from traditional labours of agriculture, moved on from the farming of west Ireland, and turned towards white collar work in a metropolis. The story, then, is about being on the edge of expertise, aware of the details and tricks of the trade, but also removed from the aches and pains that come with such physical work. During the feedback, it was suggested that this story was in the ‘Georgic’ style of Virgil’s poetry. And like Virgil, “Hay” is far from simply a celebration of the rural. It contains a lament for lost expertise as younger generations move away from traditional kinds of work, the wasted or squandered knowledge as new and more technologically advanced work emerges. In Virgil’s good company, John McGahern’s ‘Amongst Women’ was also mentioned, as an example of a text in which great violence is done against the land in the process of cultivating it. In McGahern’s novel, published in 1990, the protagonist returns from the fields in high spirits, somewhat ironically exulting in his triumph over nature, having spent the day ‘slaughtering a few trees out there’. “Hay” is still in a stage of germination, and we look forward to its flowering and bearing fruit in future sessions.

Next up was Ellen Hutchinson, a second-year undergraduate whose contributions in previous sessions have been a welcome indicator that the group is appealing to more and more non-PGR writers. Hutchinson recited an untitled poem, the opening line of which catches the eye and the ear: “I woke up to a starfish stuck to the side of my face…”. The story, rendered in lively and funny internal rhymes and staccato phrases, recalls not only the nonsense poems of Edward Leah – where the internal logic of the poem makes sense as soon as you arrive within the linguistically exotic world presented – but also the imminent poet of humour, Frank O’Hara. But there was also an appeal to the actual, to the real, as the poet notes that ‘the plugs don’t work’ in the hostel in which the action takes place. Like O’Hara, Hutchinson’s reading possessed that frenetic, jazz-like quality of live performance, and bodes well for any open mic nights in the city looking for a new voice.

Staying with poetry, Tom Kaye gave the assembled crowd “Please” and “Catharsis”, a pair of pieces which could potentially bookend a pamphlet-length collection. Kaye read both of these aloud, but it was how “Please” was presented on the page which garnered initial praise. The words ricochet off the page’s edges, like sounds bouncing off the walls of an echo chamber. As a poem which could commence a collection, it set out its stall with a polite, modest throat clearing, welcoming the reader, allowing us to keep up with the abstract concepts (what could once have been called ‘existential’), whilst also acknowledging the centrality of the body: ‘touching like an eye’ a phrase which illustrates the presence of the haptic while also containing the play on words of the first person pronoun as visual organ. “Catharsis”, in its handful of lines, and in each lines’ palmful of words, recalled William Carlos William’s brief and sparse but full and expansive poem “The Red Wheelbarrow”. In Kaye’s poem we are privy to an expression of repressed emotion which tries to solve its own repression by drawing attention to it. A hard thing to pull off, but Kaye succeeds in both cases, exhibiting a self-conscious vulnerability in the casual, shrugging, companionable voice of “a guy like me”.

Lewis Johnson laid out on the writerly slab the fourth chapter of his novel “Abattoir”. Told from the perspective of a worker newly taken on at a factory specialising in the slaughter of pigs, Johnson has previously presented the group with passages in which the odd bureaucracies, petty workplace politics, and clock-watching, is as present and banal in this extraordinary industry as in any other. Chapter four began with the visceral shrieks and squeals of the mechanised dispatch of porcine, with no gory details spared. This is carefully balanced against a scene in which the worker from the abattoir takes his young son out to a bowling alley. Notionally this provides the reader with a bit of tender familial respite, but as the sinews of the scene are pulled further apart we learn that even away from the abattoir, the sounds, smells and bubbling memories of secretions continue to loom. Johnson renders well the child-like flitting of the son’s voice in reported speech, while keeping the reader’s attention fixed on objects such as a cheap hotdog which recalls us to the workplace. The presence of italics throughout the chapter also signals how the expert language – the heteroglossia of the abattoir – bleeds into the lives of those who encounter it.

Patrick Brennan concluded the evening with a story whose working title could be “Walking Past”. The story sees the narrator, “you”, entering the lives of a pair of students a couple of years older. “You” are around twelve years old, and experience the thrill of fraternising with people in their mid-teens. The narrator even manages to succeed in giving one of these teens a nickname (“Bwiony”), a name which not only sticks but spreads and becomes her common nomenclature. As with Brennan’s previous offerings, the language is impressively precise, the nuances of emotion subtly explored and drawn out. The “you”, the second person pronoun, not only helps to draw the reader into the narrator’s interiority, but also fits with the broader genre of stories known as Choose Your Own Adventure, in which the individual undertaking the quest is referred to as “you”. As such, “Walking Past” has an almost-fable quality, where each small battle and negotiation of early teenage angst and anxiety is magnified to Mordor proportions.

Our return to the terra firma of The Belvedere is welcome after our winter nomadism. We look ahead to the rigours and ambition in these hallowed rooms, with more BA and MA input, with PGRs at the helm, the Belvedere providing our booze, the writing our breeze.