ANTHOLOGY: Commotions: New Writing from the Oscar Wilde CentreOWC Press, 188pp. €10; A Curious Impulse: New Writing from the MA in Creative Writing UCD 2009MACWPress, 146pp. €10
ONLY from the perspective of the future will we know who wins through. Great writers are made, not born, and critics have no crystal balls. So really there’s no telling, from these two anthologies of new writing from two universities, who will be the stars of the future.
None of us can predict the destiny of a writer any more than we can predict the destiny of our marriages, or the weather in Japan. We’ll all just have to wait and see, and hope for the best.
And, in the meantime, try to understand and appreciate what we have, whatever we have.
The writers in Commotionsand A Curious Impulseare all MA or MPhil students: they're beginners, apprentices. And the last thing you'd want to do with apprentices would be to thump them with a big stick or to cram their mouths with sugar lumps. That would hardly guarantee their best work in the future – all you'd get would be complacency, or rage. All that anyone can offer is an encouragement and a call to greater efforts: Arise, ye starvelings, from your slumbers! Or: Thou art not here for ease or sin, but manhood's noble crown to win. Or, fail again, fail better. Or, onwards, upwards.
Cant and bromide apart, what can we say? Well, what do we have here? Enough to be getting on with. In A Curious Impulse– finer paper, better cover – there is a marked tendency to the macabre, with stories and poems darker and chillier than the work issuing from Trinity. Why should this be so? I have no idea. Except possibly that the UCD students are younger, when it's easier being miserable. Or maybe they're older, and disillusioned. Who knows? Jamie O'Connell's Daisy has a dead narrator, Tania Tynan's The Ghost Faceis Stephen King-style macabre. Throughout the book, marriages are collapsing and lives are being ruined. Jennifer Mary Brown writes a poem "for Charles Bukowski". Mariad Whisker has the Troubles. Anne Coughlan offers a cheerier alternative in her memoir, To Hell with Poverty, Let's Kill a Chicken. And the artful Colin Barrett – recipient of the Penguin Ireland Prize – ascends to great heights in his story The Dynamiters of Quebec.
James Ryan and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne introduce A Curious Impulse.
Commotionshas Michael Longley on the blurb and Richard Ford as cheerleader. Longley writes of a "convection current" generated by his students. Ford speaks of setting "a commotion going" and "literature's privileged call". Heady stuff.
The corresponding clamour of ambition is clear in Andrew McEneff's account of self-mutilation in The Garden and the Weeds, and in Declan Gorman's skilful, tricksy A irport Roundabout.Sean Monaghan's Therapysuggests a lucrative sideline in writing erotica ("At 47 she was still able to attract gorgeous young men"). Máirín O'Grady excels in grief. Rahul D'Silva's poems delight. All of the Trinity students, one feels, are keen to impress. And why not? Dazzle us. And we will repay you. When asked why she wrote, Gertrude Stein is reported to have replied: "For praise; for praise; for praise."
In the end one suspects that the only real losers on creative-writing courses at universities are the tutors, because the ambition of young writers is always to outstrip and outdo their elders.
In bringing on the work in Commotionsand A Curious Impulsethe good people at UCD and TCD have helped plant the seeds of their own demise. That's all we can safely say of the future.
Ian Sansom teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of the Mobile Library series of novels (Harper Collins)
