Essays & stuff I don't want to forget

I was saddened to hear that the writer and pathologist David Wheldon passed away on January 7th this year. He had lived in Bedford for many years.

A note on his life and work is in The Bookseller.

I read David Wheldon’s novels The Viaduct and The Course of Instruction in a different era, when I was working on the building sites in London. They made a deep impression on me, and a few years ago I wrote an essay for The Stinging Fly about these early novels.

I exchanged emails with David over the course of a few years and am proud to be able to call him a friend. In our emails we chatted about his medical work, about my small son, and about his wife’s artistic work – his wife is the artist Sarah Longlands. And occasionally about our own work.

He kept writing and working right up to his sudden death at the age of seventy. Some recent stories of his have appeared in Confingo, Nightjar Press, and Woven Tale Press.

He had a website with samples of his poetry and short stories, and several essays, including some on his medical work. The link to that website doesn’t work now – I hope it goes back online soon.

I will have more to write about Wheldon’s work soon.

I have edited fiction and non-fiction for Mira Publishing UK for some years. I have taught courses in creative writing and been involved in many writing groups. I also proofread commercially in my day job.

I am on the Irish Writers Centre list of professional mentors.

This article first appeared on the Writing.ie website in September 2015.
The Backstory of a Book.

It’s been a year since my debut collection of short stories Greetings, Hero was launched to the world. My tales of drifters and deviants incapable of accepting any “central source of validation” were a long time in the making. The oldest was written in the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden in Berlin, during a bitterly cold winter. Some were written in Poznan, one in Prague, and several in Dublin. They were written slowly, left to mature, inspected, pruned with a buzzsaw to meet submission wordcounts, rejected, reconstructed, lost in virtual space, found again, re-edited. Subjected to the above cycle a few times, and perhaps somewhere along the line accepted by a magazine in Ireland, the USA or the UK.

Colm Keegan & myself are teaming up to give a 6-week course in creative writing. Enhance your creative/critiquing skillset and knock your writing into shape.
writersworkbenchdublin@gmail.com

Six-week course, Wednesday 7pm-9pm. Starting Feb 6th. This course takes a hands-on approach covering:
Creativity,
Finding your voice,
Style,
Structure/plot,
Pace,
Dialogue,
Punctuation,
Editing

Schematically Keegan will cover the ‘Creative’ aspects and O’Reilly the ‘Critiquing’ – but the main reason for two instructors is for variety. Held at Block T creative hub, just a minute walk from Fatima Luas stop. Or 5 minutes up from James Hospital / 10 mins from Heuston station.
Contact: writersworkbenchdublin@gmail.com
It starts Wednesday Feb 6th at:
Block T artistic social enterprise
8 Basin View
Dublin 8
Limited places €130

I’ve had no less than four stories in The Stinging Fly over the years. Big thanks to Declan Meade for being a thoughtful editor and for bringing readers so many interesting new stories over the years.
So now I’m delighted to have a story in this anthology to celebrate 20 years of The Stinging Fly.

The ‘stinging fly’ of the title is an allusion to a passage in Socrates’ defence speech in court where he was charged with impiety.

” I was attached to this city by the god — though it seems a ridiculous thing to say — as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly. It is to fulfill some such function that I believe the god has placed me in the city. I never cease to rouse each and every one of you, to persuade and reproach you all day long and everywhere I find myself in your company.”