New!

NEWS

FABER ACADEMY OF WRITING

Write a Novel

Eilis Ni Dhuibhne and James Ryan will give a series of workshops on novel writing under the auspices of the Faber Academy. The course, which will cover all aspects of novel writing, begins on 7th October in Dublin.  Further information from www.faber.uk.

Writer Fellow, UCD

Eilis Ni Dhuibhne has been appointed Writer Fellow at UCD. She will teach on the MA in Creative Writing.

EVENTS IN 2010

30 Eanair:

Leamh  i Lios na nOg, Bothar Feadh Chuilinn, Ranalach, ag 4.00pm

22 February

Reading in Boston College, Boston, MA.

19 March

Reading at Leipzig Literary Festival, Leipzig, Germany

16 April

Reading at Franco-Irish Literary Festival, Dublin

3-6 June

Short Story Workshop, Listowel Writers' Week, Listowel, Co Kerry

July-August

5 week fellowship as guest of Djerassi Artists' Program, Palo Alto, California (exchange scholarship with Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig)

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Selection from review of Eilis Ni Dhuibhne: Perspectives. Edited by Rebecca Pelan. Galway, Arlen House, 2009. Review by Rachel Sealy Lynch, in Irish Times, June 2009.

CRITICISM: RACHAEL SEALY LYNCH reviews Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, Perspectives, edited
by Rebecca Pelan

  
THIS COLLECTION of essays on the remarkable contemporary writer Éilis Ní
Dhuibhne provides what is possibly the only critical format capable of
encompassing the work of this richly diverse writer: her output takes so many
shapes that it requires a multivalent set of responses.
Some essays in this collection are weaker than the rest, succumbing, for
example, to an abundance of plot summary. Taken in its entirety, however,
Perspectives deserves real praise both for its fine editing and its individual
interlocking essays. The value of this collection is twofold. First, it offers
us the overarching “big picture”, and second, it allows us to think of the
portions of Ní Dhuibhne’s output with which we are already familiar in a new or
enhanced way.
Of the many strengths of this collection, two deserve particular mention. First,
its editor, Rebecca Pelan, and her contributors, work together to identify and
connect the many dots on the canvas of Ní Dhuibhne’s writing. The result is a
portrait of almost unimaginable diversity. The critical essays examine Ní
Dhuibhne as a novelist, short story writer, playwright for both stage and radio,
poet, children’s writer, bilingual author, folklorist, and scholar. Her
contributions to any one of these categories are formidable. The evidence laid
out in this book of the range of her work must surely enrich our reading of the
individual arms of her achievements, each one of which is significant. Her
scholarly contributions in the area of folklore alone include an array of
scholarly articles and translations and an important contribution to the
International Folktales section of the Field Day Anthology.
Secondly, the essays explore Ní Dhuibhne’s acute awareness that a single lens is
limited in its power. She is dedicated to the erasure of boundaries and
binaries, bravely crossing the dividing lines between categories and genres,
past and present, traditional and modern, orality and the written word, Irish
and English, time and space, home and exile, the universal and the particular,
fiction and scholarship. In the case of Irish and English, both language and
nationality burst out of their containers and commingle in her fiction.
Several outstanding essays attend to Ní Dhuibhne’s use of interleaving and
slippage in a particularly revealing way. Christine St Peter focuses on the
novel The Dancers Dancing , showing how the narrative layers “events in modern
Ireland with old stories of infanticide in Irish history and folklore” as a way
of (in Ní Dhuibhne’s own words) “negotiating the boundaries of different
worlds”. Anne Fogarty analyses the “shifting spaces and timeframes” in the short
stories, shifts that result in what she calls “unsettling effects”. Fogarty and
Jacqueline Fulmer both elucidate, in a most helpful manner, the oral/folkloric
resonances woven into the contemporary narratives in The Inland Ice and Other
Stories and the individual short story, Midwife to the Fairies.
Both Fogarty and Fulmer celebrate a key change in Ní Dhuibhne’s , The Search for
the Lost Husband, her updated tale of the goat husband and his bullied, demeaned
bride: here the wife walks away from her abuser, declaring that she is “tired of
all that fairy-tale stuff”. Stressing that Ní Dhuibhne makes her changes based
on her “extensive knowledge of where these stories come from”, Fulmer argues
that such cross-contamination offers a commentary upon contemporary and
continuing oppression in women’s lives and “inequitable relations between men
and women”. Fulmer further points to “the postmodern emphasis on questioning
received narratives” as evidenced in Ní Dhuibhne’s reworking of women’s
responses to physical and emotional violence. Fulmer sees the interleaving
technique as a consciousness-raising strategy. As she puts it, “In The Search
for the Lost Husband and Midwife to the Fairies, funny and appealing female
characters express themselves on tension-filled topics”. These two stories show
how adept Ní Dhuibhne is with folklore, postmodern fiction, feminist humour, and
strategies of indirection that hold the attention of readers who might otherwise
be averse to such elements in literature. Fulmer’s brilliant essay alone is
worth the price of this book.
Perspectives is both scholarly and accessible. In addition , its extensive
bibliography, including a listing by genre of all she wrote between 1974 and
2008, will be of great use to all who love her work. The incorporation of two
previously unpublished short stories is an added delight. In putting together
this collection, Pelan has honoured the spirit of her subject’s extraordinary
diversity, and reading Perspectives is a deeply satisfying and at times
genuinely exciting experience.

Rachael Sealy Lynch is associate professor of English at the University of
Connecticut. She is currently working on a book on class, gender, and identity
in Jennifer Johnston’s work
This article appears in the print edition of the Irish TimesADVERTISEMENT