Okay so I’m in it. Okay so I love flash fiction but this, this is just terrific. 65 authors of top quality calibre, fresh, exhilarating, sparkling, unique and marvelously entertaining tiny tales.
It’s coming out in paperback in time for National Flash Fiction Day on the 22nd June but you don’t even want to wait that long. Buy it now, you will not regret it!
(And leave a review if you do. Extraordinary!)
Niamh Boyce is from Athy, Co Kildare. She won Hennessy XO Writer of the Year 2012 for her poem Kitty. She’s currently editing her short story collection Wild Cat’s Buffet and writing her next novel. I met Niamh first at the Hennessy Awards 2009, where we were both finalists and again at a book launch where I was thrilled to hear about her forthcoming release. A talented and versatile writer and a lovely person, I couldn’t be more pleased to have her here on the blog to talk to us about her debut novel The Herbalist which has just been published by Penguin and launched in Athy just yesterday. First my thoughts on the book…
The Herbalist is a vivid and compelling tale told about a town in 1930s Ireland which witnesses the arrival of an exotic stranger – the Herbalist who sets up his stall and begins to enthral, influence and unsettle the women of the town, beginning with teenage Emily. Mindful of the social constraints of the times and the real difficulties that women found themselves in, this novel conjures up a cast of strong female characters (a great strength of the book) with various desires and hopes which they bring to the Herbalist’s door. Without giving the plot away, the Herbalist’s activities become more sinister and the final outcome depends upon the action of the women in the story, particularly Emily. This is a finely told tale, with lovely details of the times that will keep you turning the pages until the satisfying conclusion.
I asked Niamh three questions to delve more into the novel and its characters.
Alison: I found I had great sympathy for the female characters, Carmel,Aggie, Sarah, Emily, Mai etc who all displayed various character flaws but who were strong and vivid women. What did you hope to achieve with your female characters and by including such a range of these.
Niamh: I initially planned for just two main characters but the book had different ideas! I think the strong female characters that eventually emerged reflect the very nature of story itself; that of a man who was known by many women, but who was essentially a different man to each of them.
I began the first draft writing from the point of view of both Emily and Sarah, but very quickly other voices began to clamour to be heard, and as they became more distinct, they became more recognisable as Carmel and Aggie. Rose’s voice was very faint, but I knew instinctively that she was important. So in the end I threw out any ideas I had about who should tell the tale. Actually I stopped trying to tell the tale at all; and just let them tell it to me.
Alison: I also admired how you weaved detail of the times including the fashion, music, film etc into the book to make it a rich tapestry. Did do your research up front or alongside as the story developed?
Niamh: I left most of the research till the final draft. I used the films from the era as a touchstone as I wrote the initial draft, movies like It Happened One Night, Wuthering Heights, Flash Gordon, Tarzan and all the Betty Davis and Greta Garbo pictures. I also read the local newspapers from the late thirties on microfiche in the library. That’s as much research as I allowed myself at that stage. I trusted the story to reveal itself, and left the more serious research till the final draft stage when I used the internet, the national archives, old newspapers and of course good old fashioned history books.
Alison: How did you come up with the character of The Herbalist?
Niamh: He was inspired by a real person that I came across years ago when I was archiving local newspapers. I read an article that referred to an Indian Herbalist who had been arrested for offenses against girls and was curious as to what the truth behind the article might be. I recall thinking, even back then, who were you the scapegoat for? That was in 1990, and I didn’t start writing till 2008 but when I did begin writing I remembered that man, and became curious again about him. I decided to base my first novel around the idea of him. So though The Herbalist was inspired by a real man, the herbalist of my book is a completely fictionalised character.
Niamh blogs at niamhboyce.blogspot.com where you can find out more about the Herbalist, her blog tour and other literary matters.
I highly recommend The Hebalist as a really great read, it’s available in all good book shops and here.
Thanks once again and huge congratulations to Niamh Boyce!
(Fiction)
It’s far from holographic dogs I was reared. We had Shep, Fido and Bounder – good sheepdogs they were. We had a mongrel named Patch, apt that. He was gone in the head, didn’t know you he’d go right through you.
Thing was, there was a ‘spate’ of burglaries round our way. More used to spats than spates, I’d give them a fistful but I got married and that put manners on me. Then on account of the child’s allergy to dander there was no chance of a wee pet, a nice sharp toothed Rottweiler, a manic spaniel or any sort of homicidal Hooch. We had to go holographic.
The chap from Holographic Guard Dogs Dot Com was prompt fair play to him. The Guard Dog was up and running in a jiffy. The wife thought the dog ‘loomed large’ across the driveway. The child said he was ‘slick.’ He had a big head on him and a mouth full of teeth like knives and the sound of him was atrocious.
There’d been two chancers days before – made off with my wife’s handbag and the child’s Nintendo DS, some ructions that caused. But the word was they were desperate see so I lay in wait watchin’ what might conspire and was the holographic dog any good.
In they came again, eejits really, all innocent looking and laughing mind you. Only then they looked up and got an eyeful. I hadn’t bargained on what happened next. I’d just nodded when the lad said about the upgrade, the wife was insistent. The gadget jiggery poked them somehow and they got thinner on all sides. The screams of them as they flattened into electronic wafers. The holographic Rottweiler roared, he went right through them and ate their digital signatures for breakfast.
Flash Mob is being run in honour of National Flash Fiction Day UK on June 22nd. This is the last day for entries so hurry. You need a piece of flash of under 300 words to post on your blog and then you email your entry, with a short bio and picture to the flash mob site. Experimentation is called for and there will be prizes on the day. All the details here!
With the emotional resonance of a Maggie O’ Farrell and hints of Ishiguro’s Never let me go, Bloodmining is a vivid and believable rendering of a familiar but crucially altered near future. A compelling debut novel from Laura Wilkinson that I read in one sitting, this is well worth the read.
Over the course of the novel we develop great sympathy and affinity with the characters: Megan who must chart her past to save her child’s future, Elizabeth, whose story is both shocking and profoundly moving as well as Megan’s colleague Jack North who introduces resourcefulness and humour to a difficult quest. I enjoyed Megan’s tough exterior which is paired with a fierce love for her son Cerdic who develops a life threatening hereditary illness.
What Megan learns as she tries to find a suitable donor for her son’s treatment is central to the plot and there will be no spoilers from this quarter. We visit two eras, near future and a future right on our doorstep, although one I hope we do not witness. But that’s as far as I’m telling. I strongly urge you to find out for yourselves, Wilkinson’s prose is light, clever and accomplished, the story structure elegant and effective and her descriptions utterly evocative and riveting. She explores ethical dilemmas and decisions that are close at hand. If you want a book to grip, shock, surprise and satisfy you, with plenty of discussion for reading groups this will not disappoint. Bloodmining deserves a wide readership and recognition and I look forward to more from this author.
***** 5 stars
Bloodmining is published by independent small press Bridge House.
You can buy it here on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or for the Kindle
“I am spinning tales. I prick my finger on the spinning wheel and sleep for a million years. In this ancient universe I appear, over and over, reaching for meaning, words magnetising to my tongue so I utter all these messages of utter import. I am from the future, I am flying backwards on the day of an accident. But words are dumb things…everything cannot be said.
Perhaps there came upon the earth a contagion of stories. An unstoppable compulsion. Perhaps a solar flare carried the seeds of ideas in neutrinos onto the earth and blew them like the filamentous achenes of dandelion clocks all around the world. Perhaps then there were stories; legends and classic tales that live on or tales like the mayflies that die in a day but blaze in beauty and truth for the short time they live. There are stories at bedsides, firesides, at campfires, in courts and inquiries, tales woven behind the doors of banks and governments, tales spun, like the spinning of treacherous spinning wheels where a princess – a whole nation – can be both enchanted and undone. Analolgies and parodies, from Swift’s satire to Wilde’s wit. From the seanchaí to the performance poet. From a woman on the other side of the ether who whispers in the ears of the lost.”
Extract from The Book of Remembered Possibilities my just completed literary novel.
© Alison Wells All Rights Reserved
As I mother of four I am very familiar with having to wait, to rein in speed and impetus and to go very slowly or not at all while being present for my children in some way or another. Walking with a toddler or even my 5 year old now there is more standing than proceeding, where special things such as pebbledash walls and ‘baby leaves’ need to be examined, legs are short and cannot do distances at speed. I take a step forward but my stride is too long, I stop, I wait. These days we might be on the school ‘run’ and I can feel frustrated at my lack of progress with the 5 year old as I watch my older children stride ahead of us down the hill. I remember breastfeeding in particular (since only the mother can do it) as one of those experiences where it was a question of sitting under the infant for long swathes of time (perhaps up to an hour) at each feed and all thoughts of being elsewhere or achieving tasks of any kind needed to be put aside. Right through pregnancy and right up to the late toddler years there are physical restraints, whether it’s a cumbersome body or trying to negotiate a pushchair in the town. There are things that young mothers miss; having their arms loose as they walk, walking straight out of a house without first cajoling an army, getting into a car and just driving without negotiating with a plethora of awkward straps and resistant toddlers.
This society is geared up for achievement, for awards, for the spectacular rather than ordinary mundane heroics. As writers now we need to be everywhere, building a platform, marketing ourselves, we need to keep up a presence and be productive. But what we keep needing to be reminded is that the occasions when we need to stop, sit under our book and it’s themes for a while are absolutely necessary and valuable and part of the process.
I’ve talk around this before, about how Kirsty Gunn spent seven years on her book, about incubation, the benefits of walking for creativity and so on. I’m thinking about it now as I’m looking at how I go about writing books, how expression and structure interplay, how the first excitement of an idea needs to be followed by thought and observation.
I’ll add more specifics of my own current experiences with a new project in a further post but what I will say in general is that if you come to an impasse at any stage of a project, don’t let your lack of progress dismay you, first, just sit and wait, follow your train of thought, read more things that are tangential to your work, look out the window, spend the necessary time, as this beautiful post by Kim Triedman explores, staring at trees to live ‘on both sides of the brain’.
The children grow up in time, and your novel will too, there will be less need for stopping but the stopping has given you greater insight, added a whole new depth and dimension. Never apologise for your lack of speed.
(By the way, if any of you have joined us for the #15KinMay (which is a very reasonable/non manic wordcount target) I have now reached 10K words but many, many of these are not sections of the book per se but thoughts on what the book is. Many writers, including Irish writer Claire Kilroy who I spoke to at a writing event, say that they write many many thousands of words beyond what is required, including notes of all kinds, then they extricate the story afterwards, many of you are more methodical than that but we all need to find our own way.)
The UK National Flash Fiction Day is on June 22nd and here is your chance to get involved and submit to the anthology. The closing date is very soon – on May 17th. It’s a particularly interesting challenge this time as you are to write a 500 word flash related to another cultural object/art form that inspires you. The full details and links to the competition are here on my writing.ie post as well as news on my flash fiction piece The Wobegones Slaughtered Dreams being chosen as a winner of the May New Planet Cabaret creative writing challenge on RTE Radio’s arena.
Hope your writing is going well this week!
You’ve probably seen this already but I was so moved and touched by this video of Commander Chris Hadfield who has been tweeting from the international space station. He performed a version of Space Oddity in the zero gravity of the Space Station just before he returned to earth after his stint in orbit. In the video we can see out of the window of the space station and a guitar floats across the capsule. Such a beautiful circularity of David Bowie’s song about being alone floating in space watching the earth from a distance then being performed in space. But Chris Hadfield has been tweeting to many hundreds of thousands of followers, answering their questions, making videos of his time on the space station making space immediate to us. Still that immediacy does not take from the astounding achievement of humans to build machines and do the calculations required to get us into space. This video and the others Chris Hadfield have made bring the wonder of that achievement more vividly to us.
I’ve decided to join the #15kinMay writing folk on twitter to progress a new project based on a flash fiction I wrote last year. This is a very visceral book and to me the book has always had a May feeling. I felt a great impetus last year to just write and write further but due to circumstances ( I was releasing my self-published comedy book Housewife with a Half-Life and working on another book) I didn’t go ahead with working on it at that point.
Of course impetus can sometimes be deceptive, we love the shiny thing we made and have a vague idea of what we want to do with it but when we get down to writing we might run out of steam or ideas after a few thousand words. Next week I’ll be writing about Sitting with your book and also what I’ve learned over time as I begin another novel (having completed three so far) about the interplay between Structure and Free Expression. In other words how the plotter and pantsers tendencies can beautifully combine to help move your project forward.
I’ve successfully completed three Nanowrimo’s (50,000 words in a month challenges) so what tips am I bringing to the 15k in May?
1: Anyone can write 500 words a day which is all you need to do complete this challenge
2: If you fail to achieve your target one day, it does not mean anything about you, your writing ability or what you will produce the next day.
3: What might be stopping you. Fear, Self-Doubt, Performance Anxiety, ‘Should’ Thinking or you may just need to incubate ideas for a while, take a walk, a shower or forget about it altogether to allow your ideas to dance around each other and combine. For example on the walk home from the school run today I thought about how I might bring two previously unrelated characters together.
4: Don’t make rules for yourself to make it harder. If you are working on a brand new project like I am give yourself permission to include comments, explorations and self-talk in your first draft and let it be part of the wordcount. Who cares? For me these comments are like the pegs or cornerstones of your project, they will give you the shape of the thing, give you a place to set off from. Write freely from these points, non necessarily chronologically, although in next week’s post I’ll issue some caveats and suggestions as to how to ensure your first draft doesn’t become a whole heap of muddle.
All you have to do to participate in the #15kinmay is to use this hashtag on Twitter regarding your project and you’ll be invited by the organisers to take part in further group discussions should you wish to. The camaraderie is always wonderful for kickstarting motivation and showing you that your struggles are not unique.
May is already 10 days in but there’s plenty of time to join in. Let me know if you are intending to rise to the challenge which can be for a new project or to add volume to something you have already begun. Best wishes.
We all do it, whether we mean to or not, and social media is our worst enemy. We all compare ourselves to others, how we’re progressing in relation to them, whether as writers someone else is published, sold more books, got more shortlists, likes and comments on their posts etc.
I’m thinking about a post for next week about how we really need to think about what we want to do with our fiction because that’s central, what we want to achieve with our writing, our sentences, our ideas. Everything else is noise, so much of people’s perceived worth/talent depends on the zeitgeist, social norms, the in-thing, culture, visibility and who has the power and voice in the arenas that are seen as important. We want to find a clear path and say if we do x and y we’re going to make it. But it’s not that straightforward, the world is chaotic and while we can steer as true a path through as we can, there are a whole lot of waves and sharks that might change things one way or another.
Author and blogger Iain Broome says it best this morning and with terrific humour. How many of us sighed at the Granta best 20 under 40, especially those of us for whom 40 is a lovely landmark we’ve sailed by. Iain Broome says the green eyed monster is normal but that the main thing is to keep writing and making our work the best we can. In psychology it’s called intrinsic motivation and it works far better than the outside kinds like rewards (tho’ a nice award wouldn’t go astray!) Listen here on youtube to Iain’s uplifting and true discussion on our green eyed monsters and about staying true to the words.
