Lisa Frank Editor of Galway Stories- Co-Director Doire Press

March 1 to April 7

Lisa Frank

Doire Press 

If you are interested in participating in ISSM3, please E-Mail me.

 Writers produce the short stories and then we read them and that is all there is to the matter?  Well maybe it is not quite so simple.  Someone has to  publish the books, decide which books might be good business prospects, someone has to oversee the printing, market the book and at the same time make a living with hopefully something left over for the writers. Publishers must deal with the needs and demands of writers, artists all, while using social media and literary events to promote their books.  Some publishers are parts of giant world class corporations, some even have people whose sole job is to give free books to book bloggers.  In some publishing houses the president may load up the books on trucks to go out to the stores before he gives an interview to the media or offers a hypersensitive author some editing suggestions.   The reading and writing public are best served when publishers love literature and Lisa Frankof Doire Press certainly falls in that category.

She is co-owner and chief operating officer of Doire Press in Galway Ireland and an author in her own right.  

Official Bio


LISA FRANK was born and raised in Los Angeles but lived in the
Pacific Northwest for several years before moving to Ireland in 2007. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University and has published fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and has published fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction and screenplays. Her very first publication, ‘The Seven Deadly Sins: From God to the Simpsons’ was reprinted in Common Culture, an American university text book on writing about popular culture (Prentice Hall). 

In 2000 she won 2nd and 3rd place in Bad Kitty Films’ International Short Screenplay Competition; more recently she was long-listed for the Bristol Short Story Prize.

She has taught creative writing in a variety of settings, inluding a high school in Los Angeles, a men's prison and a university in the state of Washington in the USA.
She also worked as an editor at
Willow Springs, a literary journal in the Pacific Northwest, and for many years as a freelance editor. She lives in Connemara with her partner and is a co-director of Doire Press.

Lisa Frank

1.Who are some of the contemporary short story writers you admire, other than Irish writers? If you had to say, who do you regard as the three best ever short story writers?

I don't think I can stop at three. Maybe five or sixer. Raymond Carver would probably be my favourite and the most influential on me. I remember reading a story of his when I was seventeen and for the first time in my life being absolutely blown away by what a writer could do in so few words (this was one of his short, short pieces). He was also the reason I chose to get my MFA in Creative Writing in the Pacific Northwest, Carver county. 

I also love the darkness of Flannery O'Connor. Her stories linger in you for days after. And I love Aimee Bender, who has the most fantastic imagination. Jon McGregor's collection is the one that has most recently had a big effect on me. And I love Haruki Murakami's 'After the Quake'. He is magical.

2. I have read lots of Indian and American short stories in addition to Irish and alcohol plays a much bigger part in the Irish stories. When you first moved or spent a lot of time in Ireland, did there seem much more drinking than in the USA?

Drinking is more part of the culture here than in the States, yes. But it seems more casual here for the most part. One thing that struck me the first time I came here was that there doesn't seem to be an age barrier separating young and old in pubs. What I mean is that here you can go into any bar here and see a guy in his twenties chatting with a man in his sixties. I think that's wonderful. In the States that rarely happens.

4. Tell us a bit about your diverse experiences as a teacher of writing, please

My first experience teaching was high school English in Los Angeles. I didn't have any training or experience and it was a sink or swim situation and I sank. The students, for the most part, hated English and writing, though they did enjoy the many creative writing exercise we did because they could think outside the box. In graduate school I also got a certificate of teaching writing and through that I did student teaching at a community college and at 3rd year university course. The university course was a lot of fun because the students had a strong enough background with literature that I could teach around it in my creative writing exercises. The best experience by far was teaching creative writing at a medium security men's prison, which I did for two years. I had a core group of about eight students and we'd usually get a handful of others that would come and go. It was wonderful because it was the first time teaching people who really wanted to be there. Their experiences in life led to extremely interesting writing and it was a good outlet for them to explore their lives and their feelings. The strange thing was that they were far more interested in writing poetry than fiction. If I could do it again, I would in a heartbeat.

7. You talk about it in your preface to Galway Stories a bit, but why has Galway produced more great writers than cities with 50 times the population?

Galway has a very strong literary community and I think that's a big part of it. The community is very supportive and encouraging and so writers can take their craft more seriously. I think also there's such a strong awareness of the background of great writers in all of Ireland that the Irish feel writing is their birthright, which may in turn give them more confidence. I'd say it would be better to ask an Irish person this.

8.    How many manuscripts a month do you have submitted to Doire Press? do you read unsolicited works? it seems all of your works are by authors from Galway-coincidence or by design? If someone mailed you a wonderful collection of short stories from say India would you try to publish it?

The amount of submissions we get seems to come in waves. While we don't accept unsolicited manuscripts, we will read query letters and if we feel it might be a good fit, we will then ask to see a manuscript. 

We're a small publisher and know our limitations, which includes publishing writers outside of Ireland. Simply stated, we don't have the resources to distribute and market books outside of Ireland, and to do so would be a disservice to the writer. Just as publishers want to find a good fit in a writer, the writer should also seek out and find a good fit in a publisher. I didn't understand this as a writer before I came to publishing. 

This year we are publishing a UK writer, but it's a unique situation. 

12. One reason as an outsider I am drawn to Irish culture is that the Irish seem to love and be more interested in their own history than Americans or Filipinos, the two cultures I have direct knowledge about-do you find this also?

I think it's different being an American because it's still such a new country and thus there's relatively little history; that said, I think the 'lack' of history does shape Americans, whether we're conscious of it or not. In contrast, the Irish are hyper aware of their history and so yes it plays a big part in them and in their psyche.

14. Does the character of the "stage Irishman" live on still in the heavy drinking, violent, on the dole characters one finds in many contemporary Irish novels?   There is a lot of drinking, violence, and such in some of the short stories published by Doire Press.

While I think that some of our books feature stories with characters who might drink heavily or have episodes of violence, I wouldn't consider any of them 'stage Irish'. We wouldn't be interested in that.

16.   As an American in Ireland, do you feel more American in Ireland than you did at home similar to how Oscar Wilde said he did not really feel Irish until he moved to London?

This is definitely true. Ever since I was a child,  I always felt a very strong disconnection with being an American. And while I still don't relate to a lot of it, I do feel more American since I moved here. That isn't good or bad. It just is.

21.   can or will you talk at all in generalities about the American versus Irish character?

I think in general Americans are more success-driven, that they (we) have learned to evaluate themselves on how much they've achieved. Most Americans seem to define themselves by their job. The Irish, on the other hand, value their own time more, which I certainly appreciate and better relate to.

I think there are certainly a lot in common between both cultures, especially how friendly both cultures are. I visited the States with John a few years after I moved here and was amazed at how friendly Americans were. I had forgotten.

  

22. Once you decide to publish a book, how long until it is in the stores?

This all depends on the book and the writer. We work with mostly new writers and so we spend a lot of time working with them on editing to get their stories or poems as strong as they can be. A writer only has one first book and we want them to be proud of it.

23. Quick Pics

a cats versus dogs? Meow! from Castor, our ginger boy.

b. Starbucks or Temple Bar? Arabica in Galway.

c. day or night? Day in winter; night in summer.

d. favorite meal to eat out-breakfast, lunch or dinner? Dinner.

25.I know you have attended creative writing workshops can you share your experiences a bit please.

The workshops I attended were in my MFA programme in the States. They were very intensive three hour workshops in which we would focus only on two stories, telling the writer what the story is about, what's working and what isn't working. Each person in the workshop would receive the stories a week beforehand and provide a one-page feedback. American workshops tend to be more aggressive than in Ireland. While I didn't enjoy that aspect of it, I did prefer the structure to how most workshops here are, which tend to be more on-the-spot feedback, meaning that people are not given the stories ahead of time. While I do see the benefits of that type of workshop, I personally need the time to process each story.

29. What professionally do you find most rewarding about being a principal in Doire Press? Besides financial what are the biggest challenges? do you print and e -set your own books or do you out source this?

The most rewarding thing for us is always presenting the writer with the book. Nothing feels as good. It makes us feel like Santa Clause.

Our biggest challenge is distribution and marketing, which is difficult for short story collections and next to impossible for poetry.

I do the layout for our print an ebooks and we have them printed at our local printers, CL Print. They are literally just down the road.

30. OK let us close out on this note-what is your reaction these lines from a famous Irish poet?

I was born to the stink of whiskey and failure

And the scattered corpse of the real.

This is my childhood and country:

The cynical knowing smile

Plastered onto ignorance

Ideals untarnished and deadly

Because never translated to action

And everywhere

The sick glorification of failure.

Our white marble statues were draped in purple

The bars of the prison were born in our eyes

And if reality ever existed

It was a rotten tooth

That couldn't be removed.

Ouch!

Michael O'Loughlin

End

I offer my great thanks to Lisa Frank for providing us with such interesting answers and sharing with us her experience and knowledge of the publishing business.

"Today" by Aileen Armstrong

"Today" by Aileen Armstong  (2013)

March 1 to March 31

Aileen Armstrong

Event Resources 

 Everyone Is Invited to Join Us for Irish Short Story Month Year III.  If you would like to participate please email me.  

I am very happy today to be able to post on a short story by Aileen Armstrong of Galway.  Armstrong's first book, a collection of short stories, will soon published by Doire Press.  "Today" can be read online at The Long Story, Short (I will provide a link at the close of the post) All of the stories in the collection are set in Galway, Ireland.  I have said it before and I am sure I will say it again, for a town of about 100,000 people the literary productivity of Galway is incredible.  

"Today" takes place two weeks before Christmas.  It is set in the Yo Yo Bean Coffee Shop located on the Canal.  It is a very cold day, so cold lots of the business are closed.  There are three main characters in this marvelous very witty and perceptive story.  One is Abbie and the other is her boyfriend Dara.  They are supposed to be partners in he coffee shop but Abbie runs he show.   As the story opens a man come in, orders a hazel nut cappuccino and tells Abbie the coffee shop is way to warm.  Abbie looks at the other customers and nobody seems  hot so he pretends to turn it down.  He is in the coffee shop with just his much younger sister, Claire.  Normally once Abbie shows up she kind of bosses everyone around.  The man complains more and more about how it is to warm.   Dara ends up putting his coffee in a paper cup and showing him out.  As soon as Abbie comes the first thing Claire does is to tell her that Dara threw a customer out.  Which Abbie of course has to explain. 

There is an interesting twist to the story.  Claire has a medical problem that causes her to have her period twice a month.  In the scene where Abbie tries to give her guidance on procedures during periods I could not help but think back to a much older short story by Maria Edgeworth, "The Purple Jar" which is said to be the first mention of menstruation in a short story.  I admit it is so veiled if I had not known what it was about in advance I might not have seen this at all.  I remember the father was disgusted by his daughter's condition.

Other customer's also come in the coffee shop.  The most important one is a swim coach, he used to coach Dara and now he coaches Claire.  Dara thinks even though he is 48 and Abbie 26 he likes her a little too much for his own comfort.  

There is more to this much more story than this and I really enjoyed reading it.  The relationships seem totally real, there are unanswered questions like where are the parents of Dara and Claire and why did Dara give up swimming but that is part of the wonder of the story.  The people seem real, we like them and it is really quite funny.  "Today" is a first rate short story.

I am looking forward to reading her collection of short stories latter in the year.

Aileen has agreed to do a Q and A Session so look for that shortly.

You can read this story online here.

Author Data

Aileen Armstrong lives in Galway. In 2009, she graduated from the M.A. in Writing programme at NUIG, and in 2010, she was awarded a literature bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Stinging Fly, Three Times Daily, Cuadrivio, Some Blind Alleys, and Galway Stories. A collection of her short fiction is forthcoming from Doire Press in 2013. 

Mel u

Fireproof and Other Stories by Celeste Auge

Fireproof and other stories by Celeste Auge (2012, 151 pages)

The Irish Quarter:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to ?

Celeste Auge

"Home is where your mother makes you live.   Language is for getting by".

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts on Emerging Irish Women Writers

Posts by Participants 

Please consider joining us for this event.     Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.     I am starting to think, for me at least, the best part of the Irish Quarter has been the great emerging writers I have read as a result of it.    If someone does an online event in 2030 celebrating the Irish short story, I think some of the writers I have featured so far will be included.   

 I have never had the pleasure of being in Ireland but I do I know Galway for sure has more than its share of great writers.   Posting on collections of short stories by the same author presents a challenge, to me at least, as when you read through the collection you tend to quickly look for commonality in the stories rather than looking at the works one at a time.    My approach on a collection is to post on a number of the stories individually  and indulge in an overview at the conclusion of my post.   I think this shows respect for the artist and if I were pondering buying or investing my time in a collection of short stories this is what I would want in a post.   

Today I will be posting on a wonderful new collection of stories Fireproof and Other Stories by Celeste Auge.  It is not easy growing up female in the world of Fireproof and Other Stories.  If you are lucky enough to know where your father lives he for sure is not there for sage advise or to praise your school work. If your mother is sober for a week, it is a record.   If you a virgin when you turn 15  you are one of very few and of course pregnant at 14 will guarantee you a life on the dole.  Families are about guilt and old pain, the church is about guilt on top of guilt, you may think you can escape its reach but you are wrong.   You learn early to pretend you do not notice anything wrong in the adult world.   Men who are nice to you just want sex.

"Fireproof"    "On the strongest days, I would fill with righteous outrage-my words, my world-and pee would stream down the cuffs of my purple bell-bottoms.  My mother was used to this kind of thing at home.  "Take after your father", she would mutter"

"Fireproof" is a great lead off story.   It is told in the first person by a now thirty something seeming woman who had some serious issues growing up.   When she was born she almost died because of lack of blood and this slowed down her learning ability, both in terms of linguistic and social skills.  The narrator can let you see what I am talking about much better than I can (the censorship of the expression is just for the sake of search engines  not finding word on my blog)

"When I got over my first word--F***, I went around naming things:  the loomering, chewper, meemies.  The living room, sports, bottle caps, nipples.  Near death before birth gives me the right to claim the world, name it".

You have to wonder starting out how a preschool child acquires such a first word, maybe we know already what part of her problem may be.  

Moving forward she is now ten and they are living in a nice trailer.   The mother has been called in for a conference with the principal.   It seems the school thinks the girl needs speech therapy until the mother begins to talk with an accent the principal cannot understand unless she slows down to a very slow pace.   We moved to 12 and she is visiting her French Canadian relatives.   Now she is thirteen and has had her first kiss, in the tool shed.   Her parents fight horribly all the time, she thinks it is her fault as children often do.  Now something big happens, her mother takes her and leaves Canada and her husband and goes back to Ireland.  She knows the other students are supposed to be speaking English but she cannot understand them hardly at all.   

Part of this story is about how the words we know and use shape us.   Now she is 16 and the people around her think she must be an American.   She begins to drink a lot.   

Oh no at 17 she is in love with a boy from Spain, or in lust.   She follows him to Spain by buying a ticket with money her mother had saved up for her college registration, only she forgot to tell the mother about it and tells herself she will pay the money back once she gets a job.   Somehow she gets a job teaching English to Spanish kids.  

We push ahead to when she is thirty six.   Auge does a great job making the years fly by and we really are told all we need know.   It is fun to fill in the missing years.  She has her own daughter who is age five and does not speak.   Things have kind of come full circle or maybe the dysfunctionality in her own life is mirroring itself in a worse way in the life of her daughter.  

The story rolls on perfectly with more and more inevitable issues and squalor.   I will leave the rest of the plot untold. 

I think this is a great story as Auge has illustrated the long term consequences of the consequences of near or over the line abusive patterns of child rearing and the inability of parents and society to really cope with those who may learn in non-standard ways.

In spite of the rather grim plot, the story was a lot of fun to read and it was wonderful to see the years run their course.   "Fireproof" is a great lead of story and you will need to read it yourself to see what the title means.

"Molly Fawn"  "you like the idea of traveling around your own country as a stranger."

Auge certainly knows how to start a story in an attention grabbing fashion:

"Things you (probably shouldn't tell your boyfriend:
that you once exchanged a backseat F*** for money.   But it was only one of the Byrne brothers, from down the road in Glasnevin.
That your mother lives in a mental institute-.."

There is real a lot packed into the four pages of "Molly Fawn".   The story continues on with the young female narrator thinking of all the things it is best not to tell your boyfriend.   She is, just like the central character in "Fireproof" from a dysfunctional family that has taken its toll on her.   She is sick of her boyfriend and his friends endless conversations about American crime shows.   She dropped out of college, must have been art school maybe, because she says she developed an intense relationship with the color red and her printmaking instructor.   Her thirty year old boy friends smokes may too much (maybe this is drugs maybe not) and calls his mother, in her mind, way too much for advise.   She takes a job at a make up counter in a store to get free samples and she is tempted by the offer of a man working in a circus to travel with him.

This is really a lot to enjoy in this very entertaining and perceptive story.

"Mammary World"

No this is not a story about a "gentleman's club" or an x-rated amusement park.   Like our first two stories it is about a young woman with problems.   A woman from the bottom half of the economic strata, people who just have jobs, if they are lucky, not careers.   She gets a job at the Supervalu grocery store in order to save up for a breast reduction operation.   The hardest part of the job is walking uphill.   Her mother is not happy and gives her the silent treatment for a while.   It is sort of like school, no Ipods or mobile phones allowed, no chewing gum.  It is her first real venture into the adult world.  She is so tired of men looking just at her F-Cups.  She freezes when it happens. She starts to become friends with one of the older women working there Nora, she is working because her two sons are in college.   One way she passes the time is to kind of size up customers based on their food purchases.  Learning a new to me word, a common occurrence for me while reading the Irish short story, she imagines how tart a sloe would be when a customer buys some.

Before she can get her operation she needs to drop her body mass index down quite a bit.  The operation costs the amount of money it will take her 923 hours working in the store to get.  It is fun to meet the other workers, including a bit slow coworker, Johnny, who is the only one who has ever lasted over a year on shelf duty.  She is jealous when flat or normal chested girls check out in her lane.   She pictures her self as like a Hindu goddess on a good day an a "lactating sow...or a pair of breasts with me attached".  One day her boss, Mike, the first adult man she has known other than teachers or family, kind of corners her in his office but she is not sure of his intentions and just leaves the office.   Her mother comes in the store one day and tells her she has bought her a "space-engineered bra with NASA techology".  I will leave the very interesting sort of partially left to your imagination close of the story untold.   This is a really fun to read story that gets us very realistically into the mind and world of the young woman whose breasts are way to big.  

"Ghost Girl"


"Ghost Girl" is a great story that takes a girl with a roaring drunken mother and an absentee father from  four and half to fourteen, told in her first person.   She learns to make her self invisible, to become a ghost girl or that is how she deals with the banality and brutality of her life.  When she is in the fourth grade other girls whisper "slut" when she walks by.   She grows up fast.   Soon she is taken away from her mother who went way too down in drinking and drugs so the social workers took the girl.  Her mom goes from one man to the next, each one ends up kicking her out.   The narrator begins to learn the foster child system.   Some foster parents just want money, some times you have to watch out for the boys or the husband of the woman and worst of all are the sincere people who want to show you the right path in life.

What is so brilliant about this story is how Auge enters into the mind of the child, we see a world of pain to come with a repeating of the cycles of her mother, she seems a wonderful way ahead of her.  I have intentionally left out important details so you can have the pleasure of discovering this story for yourself.

"Telling Stories"

"Telling Stories" is another very perceptive beautifully written story told in the first person by a troubled young woman with a problematic mother and an absent father.   This time there is an important and rather strange other person in the story, Esmay, who sits on her bed and reads her stories, kind of like fairy tales.  Only Esmay seems to be a figment of  her imagination.   When she takes tea up to her mom in bed she pretends to listen accept when her mother talks about her father, who the girl misses so much.   The mother keeps referring to her husband as "your father" as if that somehow makes him her fault.   Her and her mom were close, sometimes the roles are a bit reversed.  I learned a interesting Irish slang term in this story, "culchie girl" meaning, per the Irish Slang dictionary, a term used by people from Dublin to refer to country hicks.  "Telling Stories" is a lot of fun to read and shows more of the acute understand Auge has of the mind of teenage or a bit younger girls (having three teenage daughters I can appreciate her insight as we try to steer out daughters to a good life for themselves).

"The Good Boat"  

"The Good Boat" was a refreshing change of pace.   It is about a group of young Irish women training to crew in a river raise.   Auge lets us see just what it must feel like to be in the crew and we get to know something about each of the girls on the team.  A totally fun and exciting story that shows more of the range and talent on Auge.


"Deedee And The Sorrows"

"Deedee And The Sorrows" is a really interesting story about a woman, now thirty five and still trying to carry on her rock and roll dreams.   We travel the pub circuit with Deedee and we are inside her head as she tries to decide does she continue on playing to now near empty pubs or does she go back to her job as a data entry clerk.  A very good story, totally credible in its transition from youth to the start of middle age, dreams once begun now fading.

Fireproof and Other Stories is a great collection of short stories.   I have posted on seven of the sixteen  stories.    One of the really best stories is about two grown sisters getting together after the funeral of another sister, you can tell they were also problematic teens and now they are still both a bit of a mess, especially the one who makes a really wild act of thievery seem just the thing to do.

Official Author’s Bio

Celeste Augé is an Irish-Canadian writer who has lived in Ireland since she was twelve years old. Her fiction and poetry have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, and she has published two chapbooks of poetry, ‘Tornadoes for the Weathergirl’ and ‘Smoke & Skin’. In 2009, her poetry was short-listed for a Hennessy Literary Award and Salmon Poetry published her first full-length collection, ‘The Essential Guide to Flight’. In 2010 she received an Irish Arts Council Literature Bursary to work on her second collection of poetry. She won the 2011 Cuirt New Writing Prize for fiction. Her book ‘Fireproof & Other Stories’ is due out on the 1st of July 2012.

And Furthermore…

I spent my formative years in the backwoods of Northern Ontario, Canada. My mother is Irish and my father is French-Canadian, but English was the only language ever spoken at home when I was growing up. When I was twelve my family moved to Ireland. Not too long afterwards, I started secondary school with the Jesuits in Galway. I learnt to row and to drink.

I developed an intense relationship with poetry once I had left school (and the flat expectation that every line of a poem could be analysed ‘correctly’ for an exam). Literary journals started accepting poems of mine when I was in my twenties, which always took me by surprise. Fiction had kept me sane during my childhood, and poetry helped me make sense of my twenties. After the birth of my son, in the early crazy years, poetry was about the only thing that made sense to my sleep deprived mind. So I indulged, sank into other people’s words, and re-discovered my own. And in 2006, I published a chapbook of my poetry from my formative poetry years, called Tornadoes for the Weathergirl. Over the years I’ve worked in various jobs – babysitter, waitress, shop assistant, library assistant, girl friday, English literature tutor, community Writer-in-Residence – and now I teach creative writing to adults and university undergraduates. When I was in my twenties, I dropped out of art college; in my thirties I completed an MA in Writing.

Many of the poems drafted while on the MA in Writing ended up in my first full collection of poetry, The Essential Guide to Flight, published by Salmon Poetry in 2009. Some of these poems have been read to enthusiastic audiences at poetry readings around Ireland (including the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, various libraries, & as part of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Introductions’). Two of them even got me shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award the same year the collection was published. In 2010 I received an Arts Council Literature Bursary to complete my next collection of poetry.

I now live in Connemara (in the west of Ireland) with my husband and son, a stone’s throw from where my mother was born and reared.

end of author bio

Celeste maintains an interesting webpage that has links to two of the stories in this collection and if you act quickly you can download a kindle edition of "Deedee And The Sorrows" from Amazon.  There also is a very valuable interview with Auge.

I also highly recommend that any one interested in contemporary Irish literature stop by the webpage of the Doire Press, the publisher of Fireproof and Other Stories.

I greatly enjoyed this collection of short stories and endorse it without reservation to all who love good short stories.

Mel u

Lights in the Distance: Short Stories by Susan Millar DuMars

Lights in the Distance:  Short Stories by Susan Millar Dumars (2010, 127 pages)

The Irish Quarter:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to July 1

Susan Millar DuMars

"The sky has depth, you could drown up here.  Earth- bound people have no idea.   Nicki sings, Put on your red shoes and Dance.  Her voice is throaty and you feel anything could happen."

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts on Emerging Irish Women Writers

Posts by Participants 

Susan Millar DuMars

Please consider joining us for this event.     Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.   Emerging Irish Women is now a full term event.   I am starting to think, for me at least, the best part of the Irish Quarter has been the great emerging writers I have read as a result of it.    If someone does an online event in 2030 celebrating the Irish short story, I think some of the writers I have featured so far will be included.   



 I have never had the pleasure of being in Ireland but I do I know Galway for sure has more than its share of great writers.   Posting on collections of short stories by the same author presents a challenge, to me at least, as when you read through the collection you tend to quickly look for commonality in the stories rather than looking at the works one at a time.    My approach on a collection is to post on a number of the stories individually  and indulge in an overview at the conclusion of my post.   I think this shows respect for the artist and if I were pondering buying or investing my time in a collection of short stories this is what I would want in a post.   

"Lights in the Distance" by Susan Millar DuMars is a beautiful collection of stories.   It is about relationships, about things that almost happen, about what can happen when you are too lonely.  It is by turns hilarious (if you can read "Lennon and McCarthy" without least cracking a smile, have your pulse checked), wise and erotic.   Most of the stories are about women, often about women whose relationship with the men in their lives is not what it once was.   Some of the stories are set in Galway, there is some drinking with your mates in the pubs and their is some drinking yourself into oblivion.  It is about freedom and being trapped.   

"Belfast"  (20 pages)

"Belfast", the lead story, starts out in the kitchen with a couple talking about what they will have for Sunday lunch.    The wife is surprised to see that her husband has been up early peeling potatoes.   The wife says maybe they can just get a take out dinner but the husband wants the full works.   They are on their way out and the husband tells her he plans on inviting some of this friends for lunch.   A very normal ordinary conversation.   Underlying all this is our knowledge of the terrible troubles in Belfast.   It as if the couple are striving very hard to be normal and ordinary.   So far we do not know where they are going.   On the radio they hear the news of a terrorist bomb attack on a train in Madrid.  We now know the date is March 11, 2004.  They arrive at the club they are going to and are greeted as old customers.  DuMars does a great job with the conversations in the pub.   This story is about carrying on in the face of senseless violence, about finding a kind of salvation in the small pleasures and domestic rituals  of life.   We find out a friend's husband works offshore in Saudi Arabia.   The wife is going to join him, after all everything is air conditioned.   There is a lot of old business between the people in the pub, some tragic history is brought to mind just by being there.   They find one of the people on the trains in Madrid was from Belfast and their attention is changed to that momentarily.   Underlying the story is the steady erosion of the business of the pub which reflects the decline in Belfast.   Everybody has dreams still but they have at best a tenuous hold on them.  "Belfast" is a really well done story and it felt totally real to me.

"Potential"  (10 pages)

"The street was empty and Tom was glad.  No eyes.  He could walk to the end of the block and not wonder what he looked like doing it.  He could smile, skip, whatever he felt like.  If only he knew what he felt like".   For sure I am hooked by these great opening lines, I want to know more about Tom and what he is up to, I wonder if he is up to no good or just out for a walk.   This story is about living up to your potential.    I sure I am not the only one whose memory contains conversations with their parents and teachers about not living up to their potential.   Tom is on the way to visit the doctor.  He fell at work and hit his head and his boss, the owner of a nice restaurant where Tom has just been promoted from his waiter job, wants to make sure his is ok.    DuMars gets gets us inside Tom's head.  Other people are a lot more worried about his potential than he seems to be.   When he gets to the doctor's office he is interviewed by a woman not much older than  he is.  The man's thoughts while being interviewed show the very high intelligence behind these stories.  She asks him how he feels after the fall and if the fall brought out any emotions within himself.    Tom's mother, of course, wants him to live up to his potential.   I really thought DuMars did a very good job of letting us see what Tom's understanding of the how a void existed in the life of her mother, one created by the death many years ago of his father.   You could tell his mother was still deeply hurt by this but maybe it goes over Tom's head in part.   Tom also has a very interesting conversation with a professor at his school.   He is pretty old to be still going to school and his scholarship has been cut due to low grades.   We are subject to the avuncular lecturer the professor gives him about living up to his potential.   I thought the ending gave a ray of hope that maybe Tom knew what is real potential was and had maybe found a possibility of realizing it.   "Potential" is a very well done understated story that shows how words like "potential" can be used to manipulate even when those using them have no real idea why they are doing so or what it pulling their own strings.

"Eve"   (10 pages)  "I hate it when you get drunk before me".

There is a lot of drinking in the Irish short stories I have read.   I did a Google check and Ireland is second in the world in per capita beer consumption.   I have been listening to a number of Irish radio stations (via Tune in Radio on my Ipad) and an awful lot of the songs are a celebration not just of the congeniality of drinking with friends or in a pub but of the relieve that being drunk brings the singers.   It is not just a way to forget troubles but an almost Bacchanalian celebration.   Sometimes you celebrate with the Gods, sometimes with a stranger whose name you won't recall the next day and sometimes with the self you wish you were.  "Eve" opens in a pub or restaurant on New Years Eve, the biggest party going night of the year, you just have to at least pretend you are having a good time.  Molly is looking for a few minutes of kissing and hugging strangers.   Tom, her companion, boyfriend?, checks out the flavored condoms in the machine in the comfort room.   Molly when Tom steps away strikes up a conversation with Steven.   He asks her what her if she has any New Year's Eve resolutions.   For some reason she says yes she plans to read more classics.  (I like this woman already).   She decides that Stephen looks like a readers and they launch into a conversation about Sartre and Camus, which I greatly enjoyed listening in on.  DuMars does a great job with the bar conversations, one of the attractions of strangers in a bar is that you can recreate yourself with them, be more who you want to be than who you are the only problem is you cannot live there.  "Eve" is a first rate story that brings Molly to live for us.

"Earth-Bound People" (9 pages)  "Jack Daniels,  man of the house".

"Earth-Bound People" is a near perfect account of a teenage woman dealing with the consequences of her mother's binge drinking and pill taking.     We observe the mother in a terrible post drunken state on the couch, fat and crying, she looks "raw".   She has enough of the poet in her to utter the lines quoted above, which are also a terrible slam on whatever men might have been in her life, including her daughter's father.     Aunt Jane is on the phone, checking up on her sister.   She attributes her sister's problem to a no-good man, sounds like one in a series.  At 12:32 am,  Nicki, the daughter is out on the street, free from her worrying about her mother and trying to take care of her.  "Her face is pale and smooth like as mask".   She comes alive on the streets.   I love the last few pages of this story and I hope you will read them for your self.   We wonder how long until Nicki begins her own downward spiral and we hope it does not happen but walking the streets at midnight is not a good sign.


"Fondly"  (5 pages)

"Fondly" starts out with Kate in a day dream  of being in bed with her lover, imagining herself stroking the warm skin on his neck.   The the song that started her on this ends and she is back to the reality of working in a coffee shop.   She cannot stop thinking about the man who left her.  Kate hopes maybe he will come in the cafe today.   It seems he had moved away from her and while gone sent her a letter saying he was sitting in the Apostasy Cafe sipping a chai latte and thinking of her.   She moves to be with him and now she works in the cafe and she is gone.   She is terribly love sick, maybe she is in love with the pain of his absence as much as with him.  "Fondly" is a beautiful story about a love that does not make much sense, about a woman  used badly, maybe she knows it, maybe she does not.

"Live Nude Girls"  (4 pages)

"Live Nude Girls" is set in the adult entertainment area of the San Francisco.  Just like a sign in a business that says "Live Nude Girls" gets your attention (or either you pretend not to notice it)  so the title of this story gets your attention right away.  ( The twisted side of me wonders who would be attracted by a sign that says "Dead Nude Girls".)   This story is partially about the dubious partial pleasures to be found in topless  bars and is a study in false hopes and voyeurism.   It is like looking at the dark side of yourself as a freak.  It is about the effect of objectifying others.   It is also about a class of middle class, middle aged? women stripping on stage for the first time after completing a five week course.    Of course being San Francisco, the bizarre to most places is the common place.

"Lennon and McCartney"  (ten pages)


Safe bet, your first guess as to what this story is about will be very wrong.   This is a deeply humorous very erotic story that I really liked a lot.   I laughed aloud at parts of it.   I sort of want to tell you what the story is about but that would spoil the fun for potential readers.   If you like Eric Clapton you will either love the ending or hate it.  

There are six more stories in this wonderful collection.   All very much worth reading and quite different from each other.   I totally endorse Lights in the Distance:  Short Stories by Susan Millar DuMars.   I would for sure read more of her work.

Author Bio from publisher web page

SUSAN MILLAR DUMARS was born in Philadelphia. She has been short-listed for the Cúirt New Writing Prize and the START chapbook prize. Her fiction was awarded a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2005 and was showcased in a mini-collection, American Girls (Lapwing Publications) in 2007. Susan has also published two volumes of poems with Salmon Poetry.  

from Wikipedia

Millar DuMars was born and raised in Philadelphia to a Belfast mother. In 1997 she visited Galway during the Galway Arts Festival, and has since made the city her home. Her husband is the poet Kevin Higgins; the couple have organised the 'Over the Edge' reading series and facilitated creative writing workshops throughout Galway since 2003. She also teaches creative writing classes at the Galway Arts Centre, GTI and GMIT and for the Brothers of Charity's Away With Words project.

In 2009 DuMars and Higgins were the subject of a short documentary by Des Kilbane called 'Rhyming Couplet', which was screened at the 2009 Galway Film Fleadh.

Lights in the Distance:  Short Stories by Susan Millar Dumars is published by Doire Press.   Their very well done web page has several very interesting titles and is a good source of information about the Irish literary scene.

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