Author Naoise Dolan is the inaugural IPUT Writer-in-Residence at Wilton Park in Dublin, awarded on an annual basis to a published writer to enable them to live and make work in Dublin, and contribute to the life of the city. Below, she files the first in an occasional series of reports on her residency-in-progress...
I've been back in Ireland for three months now after eight whole years away. I left as soon as I’d finished my undergrad at Trinity, a lifelong Dubliner until then.
What finally brought me back was the IPUT writer’s residency. Since I am the inaugural resident, I knew nothing at the outset except that Colm Tóibín was heading the selection process. My life approach is to say yes to anything involving Colm. This policy has thus far brought me to Cork, Mexico, Tuscany, nearly New York (long story involving visa fiasco) and now a free apartment in central Dublin for the year.
My only real responsibility is to write, so that’s what I’ve been doing: columns for the Sunday Independent, book reviews for the Irish Times and the odd bit for other papers. I’ve also been going back and forth with my editor in London on drafts of my third novel, which chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt Celtic Tiger politician. It’s been wonderful being back in Dublin as I finish the final tweaks, not only for easy access to historical sources but because Irish English has always had an influence on my work. It’s enlivening to hear it all around me once more.
The grá don Ghaeilge is new but other aspects of my Dublin life remain constant: appreciation of the large intrepid seagulls, jaywalking with gusto — take that, Germans — and lurking at plays and book events.
The Irish language itself has been important in these past few months, too. Like many of us, I’ve had a complicated relationship with our national language. There’s no Irish in my family and I didn’t go the Gaeltacht or a gaelscoil, but I left school with decent Irish for the same reason I left with French and Spanish and even a bit of Japanese: I was a swot. I had no particular identity attached to any of these languages; they were just subjects, skills. Speaking them was a game of sorts.
Living in Berlin for the past two years changed my perspective on Irish. While I was there, I taught myself German and Italian. Unlike in school, nobody besides me cared if I would succeed; the world would keep turning for everyone else if I never learned these languages.
Determined to acquire them, I took every opportunity I could to make them a part of my life. Now I have friends I only speak German or Italian with, I've done book events through them and I even collaborated with my German translator Anke Bürger over aspects of her translation. When I was invited to the north of Spain, I did an event in Spanish there, too: I felt newly emboldened to take ownership of the languages I knew from school after learning two more entirely on my own.
with IPUT Real Estate CEO Niall Gaffney
My block on feeling ownership with Irish had always been that there was no direct link to it in my background. These Berlin experiences taught me that you can forge your own connections with a language, and in some ways a personal choice can be more meaningful than simple inheritance. While I was still in Berlin, I started reading Tuairisc, listening to Raidió na Gaeltachta and devouring the odd book I could get my hands on.
Now I’m back, I have set myself the goal of reading fifty books in Irish before the year is out. So far I have enjoyed An Bhlaosc sa mBois by Micheál Ó Conghaile, Mná Dána: Dornán Drámaí by Celia de Fréine and Liam Ó Muirthile’s collected columns Rogha Alt. My only criterion is that they be 'proper books’: reasonably long and capable of making me think. I want to focus on contemporary fiction, but not to the exclusion of other gems. If in the next while you see someone dressed all in black with dishevelled hair and glasses scouring hawklike through the secondhand pile at the back of An Siopa Leabhar on Camden Street, possibly it’s me. (Or not — secondhand books attract a certain type.)
The grá don Ghaeilge is new but other aspects of my Dublin life remain constant: appreciation of the large intrepid seagulls, jaywalking with gusto — take that, Germans — and lurking at plays and book events. I recently read from Oscar Wilde's De Profundis as part of the installation film at the current MOLI exhibit and took the train up to Belfast for the first time in my life for a recording of BBC Loose Ends in Lisburn; the window view along the coastline is one every Dubliner needs to see.
The new book won’t be out for long time: even after the final manuscript is ready, publishers need at least a year to print it, market it and distribute it, and work any other amount of silent wizardry. In the meantime, I’ll keep cropping up in the papers and gawking at the gulls.
Read more from Naoise Dolan here.
