"A Genuine Woman" by Mary O'Donnell

"A Genuine Woman" by Mary O'Donnell

Irish Short Story Month Year III

March 1 to March 31

Mary O'Donell 

Dublin

"At times like that, Mike could fill my heart with disappointment, anger too. Even though he did not mean it, even though he was a good man, the best of men, something began to churn in me. I thought of the old butter churns still used in the country beyond the creamery, and even the big creamery churns, turning and turning until the liquid separated from the lumpy bits, and I saw the bits of my own life separating, some of them drifting and sticking in shapes beyond my control, while the thinner bits of me, or the bits that seemed thin and of no consequence.."

This story is set in 1939, you can tell because the married couple in the story went to see Gone with the Wind.  Finnegan's Wake was published in London that year.   Ireland declared itself neutral in the war, the prime-minister of Northern Ireland said the policy was "cowardly".  Pro-Nazi elements of the IRA steal a million rounds of ammunition from the national armory.   There is a call made for the ban on married women teachers to be lifted.   Seamus Heaney is born and William Butler Yeats dies. 

"A Genuine Woman" by Mary O'Donnell is a beautifully realized story of the relationship of a married couple, Mike and Kate and Kate's involvement with another man.   Mike is the manager of a local creamery, his wife used to be one of the women (they call themselves "girls" who worked for him).  His family never quite totally warmed up to her, always seeing her a a bit to far down the social scale for their son but they never said anything and they acted as if they fully liked her.  The story occurs in a time where emotional reticence is the rule.  Her husband is really a very decent sort of man, good provider, a sober non-violent man.  His only fault seems to be that he works a lot and does not always have much time for his wife.    I do not want to tell to much of the plot of this story as I hope my readers will one day read this story.

There is great emotional reserve in this story. I really enjoyed read it and hope to read more of the author's work one day.

I read this story in Scealta:  Stories by Irish Women edited by Rebecca O'Connor

Author Data (from her webpage)

About Me

The sentries of imagination keep the way clear, think of the message of the earth, the calligraphy of trees, such things to be read on the road ...

Mary O’Donnell is the author of eleven books, both poetry and fiction, and has also co-edited a book of translations from the Galician (See Books Published). Her titles include the best-selling literary novel “The Light-Makers”, “Virgin and the Boy”, and “The Elysium Testament”, as well as poetry such as “The Place of Miracles”, “Unlegendary Heroes”, and her most recent critically acclaimed sixth collection“The Ark Builders” (Arc Publications UK, 2009). She has been a teacher and has worked intermittently in journalism, especially theatre criticism. Her essays on contemporary literary issues are widely published. She also presented and scripted three series of poetry programmes for the national broadcaster RTE Radio, including a successful series on poetry in translation during 2005 and 2006 called 'Crossing the Lines'. Today, she teaches creative writing in a part time capacity at NUI Maynooth, and has worked on the faculty of Carlow University Pittsburgh's MFA programme in creative writing, as well as on the faculty of the University of Iowa's summer writing programme at Trinity College Dublin.

In 2011, she received the President's Alumni Award at NUI Maynooth.

In December 2001 she was elected to the membership of Aosdana, the multidisciplinary organisation of Irish artists which is administered by the Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaine). Aosdana honours artists engaged in literature, music and the visual arts who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland.

She is a member of the Irish Writers' Union and served for three years as an external representative for arts and culture on the Governing Authority of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Mary O'Donnell now lives near Straffan, County Kildare.

You can learn more about her work on her very well done webpage.

Mel u

"Dearest Everyone" by Judy Kravis

"Dearest Everyone" by Judy Kravis (2006, 12 pages)

Irish Short Story Month Year III

March 1 to March 31

Judy Kravis

County Cork

"You, Dearest Everyone, who marched against the Bomb, who drank the good burgundy, who stiffened, glazed and wanted to leave, you may not wish to collect me. That is a thought and three-quarters. As you move slowly to and fro between the mountains and the seas, as you cover the great marsh of our Europa, our bull’s back, you may know I’m here and go on past. I would be happy to die in a hotel, a room number on my key and my belongings down to a couple of bags. I would like to think your faces will be there, massing sweetly at the window one day, framed by snow, which, I suddenly notice, is now with an ‘s’."


Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story or related matter.  If you like you can post on a biography of a writer or a work of Irish history that you feel helps understand the Irish short story and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.    You are also welcome to guest post on my blog if you wish.

One of the common threads to the Irish short story is a sense of how people become isolated as they age.  In our younger days we tend to more easily form attachments than in older years.  As we age and survive the death of the people with whom we were close, we become more and more isolated and dwell more and more in the past.  I think this is amplified in many Irish short stories because of the isolation of rural communities and the reticence of what one might call the Irish character.  I have posted several times on short stories that illustrate exactly these points from James Joyce's "A Painful Case" to "A Sense of Humour" by Mary Dorcey.   This is also tied up with a viewing of Ireland as a translucent  necropolis.  You can see this in "The Dead" and in short stories by brand new MFA graduates.   

"Dearest Everyone" by Judy Kravis is told in the first person by an elderly man who lives in a hotel in Switzerland (I think this is where it is but it is in the alps for sure).  He worked there for many years as the caretaker.  Now the owners of the hotel are dead, no one stays there anymore and control of it will be tied up in the courts for a long time as heirs fight over it.   The man spends a lot of time looking back on his life.  His future is just going to be looking out the window at the snow as he waits to die.  Kravis does a magnificent job of letting us how the long lingering death of his wife pushed him into isolation and detachment and focused his world in a very deeply defined way:



"My wife took a slow and specific leave of life; she forgot food and then the outside world, time and then place. I came to enjoy looking after her, taking her pulse, reminding her to take her pills. I came into my own as she went out of hers. More than half a century it took. Something took. You can be with someone all those years and not know what’s taking. Then one day you’re putting pills on a saucer at three-hourly intervals and taking her pulse, and then you know."

Taking care of the ill in a strange way relieves us of our other issues.  If you have ever taken care for a long time of a sick loved one, you will know what I mean.If you don't then don't worry about it.  

The man is educated.  He has read the Russian and Thomas Mann.  He may, this is not real spelled out, be of Russian Jewish descent.  He was once able to keep highly refined people spell bound with his words.   That is all we know.  He is talking to himself so he does not need to spell it out for himself.  He also reflects on how stories create lives and lives stories.  

There are also very wonderful descriptions of the mountains and how living with such majestic beauty impacts people.  

The story is really a kind of letter to everyone, everyone he ever knew or that he matter to.  



There was a time, a pretty long time when I would have agreed with these lines:


"I would be happy to die in a hotel, a room number on my key and my belongings down to a couple of bags."

My life has changed since I would have agreed with that but for sure I understand it.

I read this story in Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women.

Author Data


JUDY KRAVIS has recently published stories in The Dublin Review and poetry in Metre and the Salzburg Poetry Review. She has collaborated on many works with artist Peter Morgan, including Lives Less Ordinary: Thirty-Two Irish Portraits, Tea with Marcel Proust and When the Bells Go Down: A Portrait of Cork City Fire Brigade. Their two most recent books are Revealing Angelica and The Beach Huts of Port Man’ech. Judy Kravis teaches French literature and looks after a large garden in Co. Cork.

I hope to read her book  Lives Less Ordinary: Thirty-Two Irish Portraits one day.  

I really enjoyed and was made to think  deeply by this story.  

"Fusion" by Anne Haverty

"Fusion" by Anne Haverty  (2006, 10 pages)

Irish Short Story Month

March 1 to March 31

Year Three

Anne Haverty

Dublin

Event Resources-links to lots of Irish Short Stories-from classics to brand new stories

   

"Fusion" is a very interesting story about a woman who loves staring out her window at the people who walk in front of her house.   When we first meet her she has a job working catering on the Dublin/Galway train.   She distributes snacks and sandwiches to the passengers.   She loves the job because it is always the same.  The passengers are happy to see her and once they have their snacks she is invisible to them, which is fine with her.   Then one day the change her to another train, the Dublin/Cork run and she soon is so upset and angry that she quits.   She does not like change at all.  She lives with her finance.  When he comes home from work she pretends to be doing domestic stuff until he falls asleep then she stares out the window.  She begins to fixate on a couple walking their dog.  Her boyfriend knows there is something wrong with her and he suggests jobs she might like but all she wants to do is stare out the window.   Then something big happens, the man starts walking his dog alone.  The woman tells her boyfriend about this and he tells her "he probably buried her under the floorboards".   She knows he is joking but it starts to play on her mind.   Then she makes a change to the house, she has a very large bay window out in an positions her couch there for perfect viewing.   She is losing her grip.   She begins to imagine the woman who used to walk with the man is somehow fused within him.  Then one day the dog disappears also.   

"Fusion" is a fun to read and perfectly written.   Some how the building of fantasy worlds out of viewing strangers and the slow losing of one's grip reminded me of Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill".  I hope to read more of the work of Haverty.

Anne Haverty

Born in Co. Tipperary in 1959. Her first novel, One Day as a Tiger, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1997. A collection of poetry, The Beauty of the Moon, was published by Chatto & Windus in 1999, and The Far Side of a Kiss, a novel, followed in 2000. She wrote a biography of Constance Markievicz, and Shas also worked as a journalist and scriptwriter. A novel The Free and East will be published in 2006 by Chatoo & Windus. She lives in Dublin.   She is a member of Aosdana.

Mel u

"Walkmans, Watches and Chains" by Cherry Smyth

Walkmans, Watches and Chains" by Cherry Smyth (2006, 11 pages)

Irish Short Story Month

Year III

March 1 to March 31

Cherry Smyth

County Antrim

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story, maybe on a story that means a lot to you or a writer you admire, or any related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

Last year during Irish Short Story month I posted on a very good short story by Cherry Smyth, "Near the Bone".  I am glad to be able to include another one of her short stories in this year's event.

"Walkmans, Watches and Chains" is a story that will probably take you out of your comfort zone.   It is told in the first person by a young, maybe early teens at oldest school girl.   It begins with a man, someone she knows and trusts, helping her and combing her hair and it ends with a painfully vivid account of what it felt like to the girl to be orally raped by the man.  It was painful to see how easily the man accomplished this with small gifts and tricks to gain her confidence.  We know something wrong is happening as the story begins, the girl senses things are not quite right but she likes the attention from a grown man who seems to understand her.  The ending is very shocking and terribly sad as we sense the man will get away with what he has done to the girl.

I will not say I enjoyed reading this story as I think that would be the wrong way to express my reaction.  It is a very powerful work which has the total ring of truth to it.   I hope to read more of Cherry Smyth's work.

Official Author Bio

Cherry Smyth is an Irish poet, born in Ballymoney, County Antrim and raised
in Portstewart. She has written two collections of poetry, a poetry pamphlet as
well as a book, essays and reviews on contemporary visual arts. She has also
published short fiction.  Her debut poetry collection, 'When the Lights Go Up'
was published by Lagan Press, 2001. Her anthology of women prisoners'
writing, 'A Strong Voice in a Small Space', Cherry Picking Press, 2002, won
the Raymond Williams Community Publishing Award in 2003.  A poetry
pamphlet, 'The Future of Something Delicate' was published by
Smith/Doorstop, 2005. A second collection called 'One Wanted Thing' (Lagan
Press) appeared in 2006.

Her poems have been published in 'Breaking the Skin', an anthology of Irish
poets, Black Mountain Press, 2002, the Apples and Snakes Anthology,
'Velocity', 2003, 'Magnetic North', The Verbal Arts Centre, 2006.  New poems
have been published in various magazines including 'The North', 'The Shop',
'Staple', 'Magma' and 'Poetry Ireland Review'. She was a prize­ winner in the Tonbridge Poetry Competition,
2006 and the London Writers' Competition, 2007.
Her short fiction has been published in many journals and anthologies including Blithe House Quarterly,

"Welcome to the ISSM3"-
Carmilla

Summer, 2006, Scealta, Short Stories by Irish Women, Telegram Books, 2006, Chroma, Queer Literary
Journal, 2004, 2006, Tears in the Fence, Vol. 35, 2003, The Anchor Book of New Irish Writing, 2000, and
'Hers: brilliant new fiction', Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1999.

Cherry Smyth is the poetry editor of Brand literary magazine www.brandliterarymagazine.co.uk

She has been teaching writing poetry in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Greenwich since 2004.

You can learn more about Cherry Smyth on her very well done web page.   There are also links to her poetry and short stories.   I admire writers with enough confidence and generosity to allow a sample of their work to be read for free.

Mel u

"St John of the Miraculous Lake" by Rebecca O'Connor

"St John of the Miraculous Lake" by Rebecca O'Connor

Irish Short Story Month

Year Three

March 1 to March 31

Rebecca O'Connor

Event Resources-Links to lots of short stories, from classics to brand new works.  

There is no sign up form, no Mr. Linky.   Just let me know by emailing me or leaving a comment anywhere on my blog letting me know of your participation.   Guest posts are very welcome, just contact me about your plans.

"St John of the Miraculous Lake" by Rebecca O'Connor is a story showing us how deeply the forms of the Catholic Mass can sink into the psyche and reverberate in ways never predicted.   It is a dark and mysterious story whose form perfectly mirrors its subject matter.  I hope you will have the pleasure of reading it so I will not tell much of the details of the story.  It centers on a rural family who live near a lake.  The couple had three sons, one of them is developmentally challenged.  He comes through continually listening to the stories of Catholic Saints, to see himself as in the process of becoming a saint.   He sees the waters of the lake near their house as holy water.  There is a very disturbing secret at the heart of this story.   I will quote a bit from it to allow you to develop a feel for the beautiful prose style of O'Connor.

"He never spoke after that. His mother went like a baby, like Jake used to be, with swollen eyelids and blubbery lips. Her tongue grew enormous, and her skin all blotchy. His father was jaundiced-looking. They both terrified him, as did the neighbours with their freshly laundered hankies and soapy hands, lifting him off the ground, lifting him on to their unfamiliar warm laps with tears swilling in their eyes. Ben was too old for sitting on laps. He didn’t want them touching him. He sat away from them – near their mother, always near her – and watched. It was after he had told them we only wanted to show Jake the frogs, only wanted to show him where they lived, take them grown up frogs back home. And after they’d gone to look, and then found Jake in the holy water, and sent him to the hospital, the one that’s closed now, and left him there for good."

One of the things Declan Kiberd talks about in Inventing Ireland:   The Literature of the Modern Nation is the intense relationship between Irish boys (and onto when they mature) to their mothers and this story powerfully illustrates that.

I read this story in a collection edited by O'Connor,  Scealta: Short Stories by Irish Women 

Author Data


REBECCA O’CONNOR was born in Wexford in 1975. Her poetry has been published in The Guardian, Reactions 5 and Poetry Review. She was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer prize for ‘Best new poet of 2003’, and was shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Award 2005. Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust in 2005, where she was a writer-in-residence. She currently lives in London.

All are welcome to join my event-
Carmilla

Mel u

"Men and Women" by Claire Keegan

"Men and Women" by Claire Keegan (1999, 16 pages)

March 1 to March 31
Year III

Claire Keegan

County Wicklow

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story, maybe on a story that means a lot to you or a writer you admire, or any related matter and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list. Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.  

Last year during Irish Short Story Month Year Two I posted on six short stories in Claire Keegan's highly regarded collection of stories, Antarctica.   I had hoped to post this year on her second collection, Walk Through Blue Fields but that will not happen.   I wanted to include her work in the event and I noticed one of the stories in the collection, "Men and Women" is also included in an anthology I am drawing from this year, Scealta:  Short Stories by Irish Women edited by Rebecca O'Connor.  I read the story two  times this week and really liked it.   I think it deals very well with the general themes of the emotional reticence of the Irish, the relationship between the sexes and the differences in the ways girls and boys are raised.   It shows beautifully how one family in rural Ireland works.

The story is told in the first person by a young woman, in her late teens.   She has a brother who is considered "the brains" of the family so he is exempt from farm chores so he can study, her mother, and her father.   Her father suffers from arthritis so the daughter goes with him when he goes out.   The father buys and sells things from people in the area.   In one scene I really enjoyed visualizing she tells us that when her father buys a few sheep he puts them in the back seat of the car and she has to keep them under control.  We see the girl growing up and she does resent, who would not, her brother's privileged status and she wonders how her father can manage to dance with women not his wife at parties when he cannot get out of the car to open the gate at their house.  At the local dances men twice her age ask her to dance.  People tend to marry late in Rural Ireland and we see these "old bachelors" at the dances.   

There is a great scene at the end where the wife at last  asserts herself and demands a measure of respect.   It was a very visual close and I loved it.

Author Data

Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford, 

Mel u