After a long absence from this venue, I managed to get to Kerry for a couple of days, where it was my privilege to join so many in the packed ballroom of the Listowel Arms to listen to Edna O’Brien in conversation with Eimear McBride. The crystal-clear enunciation and the sharpness of wit and cogency of argument made by this intelligent, elegant, reflective woman, made me wonder what keeps a person that engaged and alert in their late eighties? Is it the constant wrangling with your intellect, the battling with yourself that keeps you moving forward, still perceiving challenges to be surmounted and things to be said?

I listened to razor-sharp Edna and thought with dismay of the Elder Lemons in the nursing home.

Other Highlights:

Witty, personable Colm Tóibín shared some valuable insights into the genesis of ideas for many of his popular novels, in a format which seemed to suit him, in an event entitled ‘A Cuppa with Colm’. Participants found a question card at their place on the round tables of the dining-room and Colm used some of these questions as prompts for his discussion.

Of value to the emerging writers in the room, was his advice to ‘leave things out’ – to interrogate yourself as to what exactly it is the reader needs to know, and to allow the reader a void to imagine the action between the scenes.

Colm believes source material is everywhere. A novelist or short-story writer should learn to see the drama in ordinary incidents. How the writer chooses to advance and develop those incidents, is up to them.

Yours truly asked a thorny question about genre, and if all of his books were strictly literary fiction, to which he gave an expansive and thorough explanation of the type of conversations and characters that influenced him when growing up, some of which later appear as themes in ‘Brooklyn’ and ‘Nora Webster.’ His advice to me later, was to just ‘write what I am writing’ and let the publishers and agents attribute the genre.

This was manna from heaven, to someone weary of ticking ‘genre’ boxes on agent and publisher submissions.

The subject of genre raised its head again at the ‘Lady Killers’ session with Alex Barclay and Julie Parsons, interviewed by novelist supreme Catherine Dunne. The two interviewees were quick to assert for their writing different sub-categories within crime fiction. Julie, less drawn to blood and gore, likes to write about crimes committed behind respectable hall-doors, in what I suppose if you had to tick a box, would fall into the ‘domestic noir’ genre, whereas Alex, delves deep and dark into the depravity of human behaviour, but sets her novels in the States, distant in location and culture from her own environment.

Their interviewer, Catherine Dunne, alluded to the obsession of classifying books too strictly into genre fiction, which she found in the long term reductive.