academic
10 Hungry Ghosts: Trauma and Addiction in Irish Literature
Excerpt from Trauma and Identity in Contemporary Irish Culture edited by Melania Terrazas Gallego
The hungry ghosts, with their bulging bellies and skinny necks, are familiar figures in Buddhism. These disturbed phantoms suffer from unresolved trauma in a past life that manifests as a bottomless craving. My books are full of hungry ghosts. History is a traumatic, violent, unsettled place for most nations. However, Ireland has had a peculiarly lengthy brutal colonial story and has struggled to exist in the face of the monolithic controlling presence of its neighbouring island.
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Essays
Fiction is the mothership
Published on Kaleidoscope
In the beginning, stories leaked from us onto the walls of the caves, they were the spiral scratches on Neolithic stones; they pulsed through ancient hands that squeezed clay into the abundant Goddess shape. All our religions are fiction—holy stories and mythologies that house our spirits. We have danced them, painted them, rhymed them, sung them and worshiped them. Story is the shape of our soul. We are both elevated and controlled by our fictions. The constant playing out of these sacred stories becomes rituals that bind and root us.
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JOURNALISM
Climate change is not an equaliser
Published on The Irish Times
On August 16th, an unprecedented thunderstorm shook the walls of my Bay Area home. Our flimsy complex shuddered through 2,500 ferocious lightning strikes and 75mph wind gusts. The strikes hit the parched California forests, starting multiple fires. On Thursday, dawn never came. I was on Mars, under an eerie yellow sky punctuated by a tiny sun the colour of Kool Aid.
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JOURNALISM
America is not broken, it was built this way
Published on The Irish Times
Racism is built into the United States through the education, health, housing and justice systems. There’s no making America great again. It never was. This land was always used by white Europeans to gather wealth. While people of colour were tolerated in order to support the system, they were mostly shut out of real power. History is ugly and relentless, with black people having to rise up, again and again, to push for basic rights and justice. To ask if they could breathe.
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Literary
Border Crossings
Published on The Wild Word
Our group #shiftingborders is a diverse and fluctuating group of artists who all migrated to Silicon Valley because of the opportunities offered in the high-tech industry to our partners or ourselves. We all work in different mediums and believe different things. We are very happy this month to share our work with The Wild Word, a new magazine dedicated to excellence in art and committed to the same core beliefs as ourselves. Because if we share one core belief, it is that art is more powerful when it means something, when it addresses social injustice, and when it attempts to explore the crisis and strain our planet is under.
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journalism
Irish teacher in California: 'I never thought it would involve taking a bullet'
Published on The Irish Times
"I come armed with pragmatism. When I decided to become a high school teacher after moving almost five years ago from Ireland to California, I did so to support my writing habit. I was not young and idealistic. I was an immigrant middle-aged parent, and as an artist it was a job I could bear. I thought I could spend even more time reading, thinking about, and discussing books, stories, plays and poems while getting that magical monthly pay cheque and vital health insurance for my family. I never thought the job would involve taking a bullet for someone else’s child."
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Literary
I wear my wife's shoes
Published on Levure Literature
A poetry and painting collaboration between Emer Martin and artist Moitreyee Chowdhury that attempts to start a discussion about refugees and ever changing cultural landscapes.
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Literary
Resist
Published on The Wild Word
A poem written in response to the current political climate in the United States.
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literary
An Artist in Silicon Valley
Published on The Wild Word
"For the last three years I have lived surrounded by the people who created the technology you use every day. I live in this place with no landmarks. Everything is hidden, subdued, and understated. Despite the flocks of pelicans in the Baylands, the redwood-covered mountains, the whale-filled ocean, and the finger grip of fog grasping in from the coast, the human landscape is mundane."
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Literary
Keeping it Surreal
Published on The Wild Word
This work was of a particular time and place, that I then put away, thinking the struggle had moved on. I thought the Gorilla Girls and feminist theory would wake everyone up and the art world would naturally become more inclusive and aware. In a way it did, of course, but did the world change? Art is resistance. The surrealists struggling to work in a time of great political turmoil that scattered them across the planet during WWII and the rise of fascism are suddenly relevant again. We are once again living in a time where the forces of darkness and oppression are on the rise. The veneer papering the advances we thought feminism had made has been stripped away with the recent brand of politics and misogyny that has arisen. Do these images have a new message for us?
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Literary
I'm still writing
found on The Irish Writer's Centre
It’s after midnight, my yellow cab crawls along the magnificently ugly Pulaski skyway over the foul wreckage of New Jersey’s chemical nightmarescape. This cab is bringing me back to a city that was once, unquestionably, home. The airline has lost my luggage, which always fills me with a sense of relief and freedom. Unfettered, I’m entering a hot Manhattan Saturday night carrying nothing but a laptop.
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Literary
Tea in San Francisco on a Sunny Afternoon
Published on The Irish Writers Centre
"San Francisco is not a city that is the centre of anything in the art world but it does attract many people who care deeply about the arts. This is only one of the city’s contradictions. It is a city that not just tolerates otherness but embraces it. San Francisco is a cold foggy city perversely perched on a peninsula in Sunny California as if poised to pounce out of the Continent and do its own thing. And it does."
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Literary
#secondrising
Published on The Wild Word
"The fight was on. I was having a grand old time swinging about my rifle and play-acting. I even got a thrill at the terrified look on the face of the poor wee woman at the gift shop as she scuttled out the door. The guards were bemused and not budging until someone fired a shot over their heads and their faces blanched. The rifles weren’t fake after all."
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Literary
A TELMETALE BLOOMNIBUS: 18 TALES FROM MODERN DUBLIN
Published by The Irish Writers Centre
To celebrate Bloomsday the Irish Writers’ Centre asked 18 writers to bring Ulysses into the 21st Century. As Joyce once took inspiration from the texts of Homer, the writers have taken the 18 episodes or chapters from Ulysses and transported them into modern Dublin.
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essays
Author Emer Martin: Overnight success takes years
PUBLISHED BY RTE
Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman doesn’t quite have the same heroic ring to it, but it is a feat of endurance and bloody mindedness. Last week I was in London and I saw a random poster pasted to the wall - Overnight Success takes Years. I stopped and took a photo and posted it to Instagram and got an overwhelming response from many of my artist friends. The filmmakers, the actors, the painters, the musicians, the page fillers, the poets. Anyone in the arts knows this instinctively. We also know that sometimes success never comes and sometimes it comes and goes too quickly. Author Emer Martin: Overnight success takes years