My Love, My Lake, My Forest by Éilis Ní Dhuibhne is read for Spoken Stories on RTÉ Radio 1 by Aidan Kelly - listen above.
In a brand new story by Éilis Ní Dhuibhne, a writer resident at an artist retreat in a remote part of Finland falls in love and consequently starts thinking about his life and his home country, Ireland.
For this Spoken Stories series, twelve writers were commissioned to write a new half-hour length story of their own relating in some way to Creatures of the Earth, the title of a story and a short story collection by John McGahern.
On her story and the commission, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne says "I guess I thought all the stories will be very Irishy – which hasn't in fact been the case – so I’ll go to a different part of McGahern land. All his writing is closely conscious of place, our connection with the earth, but it’s not all set in the Irish countryside.
"McGahern lived in Spain, England of course, and for a time in Finland , and he wrote about these places occasionally. I made up a story about a character who is a bit like McGahern. Since I can’t write about a place I have never been, and since the I love the details of places, I located it in the only part of Finland I have ever spent any time in, namely Joutsa, a little region in central Finland, a place full of lakes, something it has in common with Leitrim.
"A lot of McGahern’s writing focuses on love and sex – I’m thinking, say, of the great story, My Love My Umbrella, and The Leavetaking. We are animals, creatures of the earth. So, it is a love story with a bit of a bite, based on my possibly too judgmental stance on McGahern’s sometime attitude to women – he was a creature of the earth but also, like all of us, a creature of his time. '
Spoken Stories 2: Creatures of the Earth, Sundays at 7.30pm on RTÉ Radio 1 or wherever you get your podcasts - listen to more from Spoken Stories here.
