gorse no. 8 launch 2.0 (The City launch), Wednesday 19 April 2017, 7.30-9.30pm, The Liquor Rooms, Dublin, with readings from the issue by Sheila Armstrong, Sinéad Gleeson, Caitríona Ní Chléirchín, Colm O’Shea, and Dimitra Xidous . RSVP.
Danielle McLaughlin in the Irish Times, ‘The stories that writers love’:
It was Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay, I am Love, in gorse magazine, that led me to read By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. The novella, by Elizabeth Smart, is intense, unsettling and fierce; it’s not a story of a sweet and gentle love, more about love of the obsessive, all-consuming, obliterating kind. “IT is coming. The magnet of its imminent finger draws each hair of my body, the shudder of its approach disintegrates kisses, loses wishes on the disjointed air. The wet hands of the castor-tree at night brush me and I shriek, thinking that at last I am caught up with.’
As it is Valentines, and as the essay is in the now sold out gorse no. 2, we are sharing Claire-Louise Bennett’s essay online for one week only. You can read it here. Enjoy.
‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’
1.3 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges contains the doubly memorable statement, from which I copy the following words: ‘All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare […] The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous.’
1.4 ‘I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.’
There’s a line in the opening number of Merrily We Roll Along, the musical by Stephen Sondheim, that asks: ‘How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?’ I’m quite sure that I would not be where I am—which, for the record, is a flat in Clerkenwell, London, on a Sunday morning in January, before anyone else is up—if my parents had not taken me to the theatre to see Sunday in the Park With George one day in 1984. Something hit me in that play, I can trace all of my passions back to it, all of the ways I have related to the world, and understood my purpose in it. That day I fell in love with the theatre, and more specifically with musical theatre; I fell in love with art, with the nineteenth century, with Post-Impressionism, with France. I didn’t know I would go on to study theatre, or teach art history. I didn’t know I would move to France. I didn’t know you could move to France. I couldn’t foresee that one day I would live between Paris and London. I didn’t know you could live between two cities. I didn’t know I would become a writer, and understand the retreat from the outside world, hoping that the people you love understand, feeling the weight of their sadness, their disappointment. I didn’t know I couldn’t have the kind of life I wanted in New York, that the pressure would be too great to have a conventional job, to settle into a conventional life. To become a writer, I had to move to Europe. But to choose that life, I had to give up the one I was born with.
We are delighted to announce that Aifric Mac Aodha is joining gorse as Irish language editor. Her first poetry collection, Gabháil Syrinx (The Capture of Syrinx), was published by An Sagart in 2010, and she has had work in various magazines and journals, including POETRY Young Irish Poets. She has been translated to many languages, including French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Czech.
From Pádraig Ó Méalóid’s essay on Flann O’Brien, gorse no. 3:
One day, not too long ago, I spotted Micheál Ó Nualláin, the only surviving member of the twelve siblings, and eighty-six years old himself, waiting for a bus out to Monkstown. I should go and ask him, I thought. But did I want to? Did I want to actually solve this, to know for sure if it was true or untrue? I’d already done a ridiculous amount of digging, involving visits to both the National Library here in Dublin and the British Library in London, much correspondence with lots of kind and helpful people, and spent far too much money buying books that ultimately expanded, rather than diminished, the mystery here. If I asked the question, all that would be as nothing. I thought about it, and watched his bus arrive, watched him get on it, and wondered if I’d made the right decision, not approaching. And I decided that I definitely should have asked him, because I might never get another chance.
Fortunately, I got another chance. A while after that first existential encounter, I saw him again at the bus stop. This time, reader, I asked him. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Micheál, ‘but you wouldn’t know. It’s the kind of thing he’d do, though.’
RIP Micheál Ó Nualláin.