The poet for short story

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Born in Dublin in 1970 Nuala Ní Chonchúire now lives in Galway where she works as a librarian in the university. A graduate of TCD and DCU, she has a Masters in Irish language translation. She also holds a Certificate in Women's Studies from NUI Galway. Her poetry and short stories have been published in the Cúirt Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Wildeside, Burning Bush, Books Ireland, Ropes, West 47, Markings and Westword. Her work will also be featured in the forthcoming anthology Treasures by the Poets of Ireland, as well as The Shop.

She was a founder member of Garters, a women's writing group in Galway. She has taken part in many public readings, including Poets' Platform at Cúirt; readings for World Book Day and Seachtain na Gaeilge; as well as Poetry Slam in the Galway Arts Centre, and readings in Galway City Library. She has also taken part in a Poetry Masterclass with Paul Muldoon at the 2000 Scríobh Festival. She is working on a novel, and also towards publishing first collections of poetry and short stories.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a full-time fiction writer and poet. She has published two collections of short fiction and two poetry collections - one in an anthology. Nuala holds a BA in Irish from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in Translation Studies (Irish/English) from Dublin City University. She has worked as an arts administrator in theatre and in a writers' centre; as a translator, as a bookseller and also in a university library. Nuala teaches creative writing on a part-time basis.


AWARDS

2008The Strong Award for Best First Poetry Collection - Tattoo~Tatú (Shortlisted)
Leyney Writers Award - Short Story

2007 Jonathan Swift Award - short story
Aidan Higgins Prose Competition - short story (Runner-up)
Happenstance - short story (Shortlisted)
Phillip Good Memorial Prize - short story (Shortlisted)


2006 Dromineer Literary Festival Short Story Prize - short story
Frank O’Connor Intl Short Story Prize - To The World of Men, Welcome (Longlisted)
FISH Short Histories Two - short story (Shortlisted)
Willesden Short Story Competition - short story (Shortlisted)

2005 Hennessy Award - short story (Shortlisted)
Bibliofemme Story Award - short story (Shortlisted)
Firewords Poetry Award - group of poems - (Runner-up)
Hiberno English Poetry Award - poem - (Runner-up)

2004 Cúirt New Writing Prize - short story
Arts Council Bursary – Literature

2003 Francis MacManus Award, RTÉ - short story

2001 Cathal Buí Short Story Prize - short story


Some of her poems


Straw Widow

Monday is putting in time,
Tuesday, the longest day,
Wednesday, a frisson –
a swell between my legs
while I track your journey
from industrial estate,
to train, to bigger train;
the final stretch is your walk
from the station to home,
and me:

your straw widow.

This Is No Cana

after Stanley Spencer's painting

The wedding breakfast is eaten
and our guests are idling,
there's no handy miracle man
to turn good water to better wine.
My bride is regretful about
the poverty of our feast.
'What can we do?' I say to her,
my mind on our honeymoon:
the raw velvet of her opening,
the soft suck of skin over skin.

'Let them eat cake,' she says,
and I'm glad that I've married her.

The Model

She was swallowed up
by the pea-green Seine,
its murk lapped over her,
pulling her into its belly,
a sorrow-drowned nap
underneath the Pont Neuf
ending with a watery slip
into the reeking roils.

In life she longed to pose,
to be frozen in paint,
garbed as a young boy or
maybe an unchaste Diana,
and though plain as milk,
she paced the place Pigalle
to be passed over for more
pinched or rollicking types.

Slabbed in the morgue,
she is sketched from life,
a cadaver in some canvas,
a cheap anatomy lesson,
who will rot on the pages,
like in the paupers' grave,
where she'll lie with the rest
of the forgotten of Paris.

Venus in a Bottle

Legless but harmless
stretched on the Métro platform,
bottle in her hand.


After Manet's Olympia

Fresh Olympia,
you're full-bodied and fragrant
like Burgundy wine.

Detained Imports

Banned fodder: fresh meats,
semen, embryos and hides.
Foot-and-mouth disease.

Her statement

WHY I WRITE SHORT FICTION

‘The quest for form – the search for the voice and scale necessary to what one wishes to say – is the primary effort of writing.’ Rana Dasgupta

In his (offbeat) introduction to The Best Of McSweeney's, Volume 2 – which contains many stunning stories – Dave Eggers wonders "how to get England and then Europe generally to love the short story, and thus foster many literary journals and new writers". He wonders if America should use some sort of threat or force as "this is the main idea we export here in the United States". Jokes (?) aside, I'm presuming we can include Ireland in this 'Getting People to Fall in Love with the Short Story' campaign. There are plenty of excellent short story writers in this country and there's a solid history of – and attachment to – the form, at least among lovers of literary writing. But there are very few places publishing short fiction in Ireland. The bigger, committed champions of the story are The Stinging Fly (quarterly) and The Sunday Tribune (once a month); after that it's down to the small literary magazines and presses.

Image Magazine (a women's monthly glossy with a huge circulation, by Irish standards) used to include a short story in each issue but its new editors have discontinued that practice. Many worthy short story writing competitions are held on this island each year but, unfortunately, it's hard to find a print-home for even the winning work from some of these awards. The general reader seems to resist short stories; their very shortness appears to put them off; they can’t “get into” them. And what hope is there to lure that general reader if the stories aren’t available to her in the first place? As I’ve said elsewhere, the book-buying public will only buy what they are sold. I believe that readers will read short stories if they are published and promoted. If they are not available to readers, or if they don’t know about them, they won’t read and fall in love with them.

In Ireland, we need more literary magazines, more short fiction websites, and support for innovations like single-story books (e.g. Picador’s Shots series) and for those presses who are supporting short fiction writers. Maybe what we really need is an organisation like Poetry Ireland (‘Story Ireland’?) to develop, support and promote short fiction at all levels and give it a much-needed shot in the arm. * So what is a short story? There seems to be no consensus or absolute definition. What is agreed is that the short story is a more economically detailed form than the novel, and it usually centres on a small number of characters and one incident that creates conflict. The story should have the weight to hit the reader or move her and it must satisfy and be complete in itself. Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘rules’, which seem generally to be agreed with, are that a story should be read at one sitting, and that the reader should be left with ‘a sense of the fullest satisfaction’. There is an urgency to the short story that can’t exist in the novel. People talk about the confines and the narrow scope of the short story as opposed to the novel; for me it’s not a confined form and comparing it to the novel is like comparing it to the poem. You use a different set of writing muscles in each form and I write all three, but the short story is the form that I most compelled to write. Stories are short and therefore concise and maybe it’s this concision that suits me; they excite me, I become totally immersed in them, and maybe that grows from my impatient nature. Even in my poetry I tend towards shorter forms, endlessly culling until all the flab has been snipped away. On paper I practice brevity, in life I never shut up. In writing a short story, my aim is to expose truths about how people are with each other, how they love and hate and lie, often all at the same time. I like honesty, truth, believableness in short stories. That’s not to say I don’t like magic realism or stories set in strange times/places, but I want to be convinced by what is going on and by the characters. I like to find or create a self-contained world within the story, so that there is a feeling that the characters interact in a real way, that they have a past and a future, and that I’m just stepping in to see/show an incident or the consequences of a decision or something else. A sort of peeping through the curtains. My stories are not idea driven, in the sense that I don’t get an idea and then write from there. I usually start with a tone rather than an idea. A first sentence presents itself to me – it starts to swirl in my head – and the story grows from that. I don’t plan what will happen, it’s an organic thing, the story grows from the meeting of the tone and some vague notion of a character or a situation. I may have been thinking about an issue, say the idea of an older man and a younger woman falling for each other and the problems and joys they are faced with. Those thoughts then may transform into ‘story fodder’ or they might evaporate. If I get a feeling for a story, I might think ‘I’d like this to be sensuous or nasty’ or whatever. Then a setting presents itself, say an art gallery. From those elements, and a first sentence, a story can grow.
Once I have the main characters – one or two to begin with – they’re with me for days and I start to consider them as real people. (I know this because when I talk to someone about them, I talk as if they exist. It helps to have a supportive friend or two!) I might think: ‘Jack Loveday is quite conservative because of his background.’ Then I start to argue that with myself. ‘Why should he be conservative? Wouldn’t he be more human and interesting if he looked conservative but was really a maverick?’ I love the detail of language, the challenge of finding new ways to say things; I love wordplay, articulacy. I enjoy inventing settings and using good concrete detail: interesting physical descriptions of light and food and objects. All that adds truth and texture to a piece. I like dialogue, the crazy, hurtful things people often say to each other. I like a bit of discomfort, something that leaves you squirming a little. A few nasty surprises are always good.
Love and love-gone-wrong is something I explore a lot in my fiction. It’s great to put two people together and find out what they will do and say to each other. People are so individualistic and surprising – they can be horrible for no apparent reason. Everyone has their own histories and they are working from their personal history as well as their current ideas about life.
Water and rivers turn up in a lot of my work. I spent half my childhood swimming/wading/fishing in the Liffey in Dublin where I grew up, and there were always rumours of drownings. There isn’t much in the way of convivialité in many of my stories – there is a lot of darkness and death, double-dealing and secrets. They reflect life, which is often packed with hurts and regrets and misunderstandings rather than happiness and jollity. But I do like to use humour, black though it may be.
In reading a story, I like plain language (John McGahern) and I also like ‘fanciful’ language (Annie Proulx): both have their beauties. I like all different kinds of stories: ones where lots happens to ones where very little happens. I do like to feel something for the characters, whether that’s disgust, empathy or sympathy. I love to be transported to a place I don’t know as much as to see a place I do know from another’s perspective. As a writer, I am basically nosey and interested. Writers have to be sensitive to the world around them; they notice detail: what people are wearing, doing, saying. What people really mean despite what they are saying. I love surprise and a feeling of being with the character in a way that makes you consider them a real person and that the writer is merely relating a tale about someone they know well.
I feel I discovered late (28) that writing was exactly what I wanted to do. It was so obvious! I’d been writing for years, since I was a child, though mostly poetry, and I was a hungry reader always. Our home was packed with books – my parents are booklovers. John McGahern talked about his writing being an extension of his reading; that’s true for me too. I was a constant reader as a child – my mother fed this need brilliantly – and I remain so now.

I grew up in books, not being interested in any sport bar walking, travelling, swimming, exploring, strolling – the kind of ‘sports’, maybe, that relax and feed the mind. I didn’t think you could be a writer in real life, I suppose. I am compelled to write; I only wish I’d realised earlier that this was my passion and that it could be done. But then again the years spent in unfulfilling jobs and the travel I’ve done have proved all to the good for my writing. Stephen King says that “Writing is at its best – always, always, always – when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer”. When I’m not enjoying the work – as with a novel I have been writing on and off for several years that I sometimes find brutally difficult to get on with, though I love the subject matter – I leave it to one side and start something else. I LOVE writing, I HATE torture. I don’t truly believe in this notion of writers having influences. I think you can admire another writer’s work without wanting or trying to write like them. I love reading short stories and novels, and personally I enjoy the writing of Edna O’Brien, Flannery O’Connor, Michéle Roberts, Claire Keegan, Seán O’Reilly, Mike McCormack, Órfhlaith Foyle, Richard Ford, Mary Morrissey, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, John Updike, Emma Donoghue, Manuel Munoz, Raymond Carver, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Zadie Smith, Helen Dunmore, Tim Winton, Rose Tremain. Ernest Hemingway, and, most lately, the high energy, beauty and innovation of Kiran Desai.