THE OSCAR Wilde Centre at Trinity College is celebrating its 10th year of nurturing and encouraging writers who embody the future of Irish writing, writes Fiona McCann.
'This is the room where Oscar Wilde was born," announces poet Gerald Dawe of his bright, high-ceilinged office, which now houses a couple of desks, piles of books and a wall of bound portfolios embossed with some of the biggest names to emerge in Irish literature over the last decade: Claire Keegan, Sean O'Reilly, Claire Kilroy - the list goes on. Each one has passed through this building as a student of Trinity College's masters degree programme in creative writing, which is currently celebrating the 10th year since its inception as the first of its kind at an Irish university.
Through this course, which Dawe directs, the Oscar Wilde Centre on Westland Row, Dublin 2, has assisted at the births of many more writers than the one after whom the 19th century house is named. The building's literary heritage makes it ideal for a creative writing course, with students workshopping their writing in the same room that Wilde's mother, Speranza, once held her renowned "salons".
"At those salons you would have had the mathematicians, the writers, the political activists, the intellectual elite of the 19th century," says Dawe. "So when we moved in, in 1998, we were conscious of the fact that there was this kind of legacy in the house." The centre's geographical location, backing on to the eastern end of Trinity's city-centre campus, carried a further significance for Dawe. "Behind us you have the heartland of the college and out there you have the thriving city life of Dublin, so the house is kind of like the link between the two," he says.
Inside its terraced walls, the 16 students who make up this year's course attend classes, discuss their work and meet daily along the dark corridors.
"The creative writers kind of live in here, they use it literally as their home," says Dawe. They share the building with students of the M. Phil. in Anglo-Irish literature, and the annually appointed writer fellow, currently novelist Mary Morrissy.
With so much activity taking place within its narrow confines, it's little wonder that this 19th-century house is in need of some minor refurbishments, and plans are already in motion to upgrade the rooms and to find a proper home for its valuable library, donated by the family of the late scholar Vivian Mercier.
Both the house and the precious books it now contains offer a connection with this country's literary past, but the students who clatter up and down the narrow staircases represent its future.
Rachelle Dolan, from Seattle, Washington, is one of this year's creative writing cohort. "To be able to transplant myself for a year and surround myself with people that make it seem normal to spend so many hours a day working on something like this, that's almost for me the most important part of what I've gotten to do this year," she says.
To those who knock the notion that creative writing can somehow be taught, she points to the fact that her own writing has improved dramatically over the six months since she began the course. Her classmate Philip St John agrees that taking the course has been immensely beneficial. "I think it speeds things up," he says. "You learn pretty quickly what's not working, what you need to go back over and what is working." Much of this is learned through the feedback of classmates as well as the input from teachers such as Dawe and his colleague, novelist Deirdre Madden.
According to Dawe, the feedback and support the students receive from each other is also integral to their creative development. "There has always been some kind of support system for writers," he says. "Look at Yeats and Lady Gregory, all those guys who used to flock to Coole Park! Writers have historically always surrounded themselves with five or six chums, people that they trust. This is what this course is doing, it's just in a university." Whatever alchemy a course that teaches creative writing - a subject some would categorise as unteachable - offers, those who have completed it are full of praise.
"For me, it had a massive effect, profound," recalls Sean O'Reilly, who has published a book of short stories and three novels since he completed the course in its first year. O'Reilly, who is currently working on what he terms "a big fat novel" says the year gave his writing career an invaluable boost. "I can't even express my gratitude to everyone concerned in there for giving me that start," he says.
Novelist Claire Kilroy is also positive about the impact of the course on her own creative process. "I would say the value of the course lies in the academic structure and time during which you can write, as opposed to there being some great secret they let you in on about how to write," she says. One of the most invaluable components it offered Kilroy was a way out of the solitude that is often concomitant to the writing process. "It really turned things around for me," she says. "I went from utter silence to having great fun, having people supporting my work, saying they liked it, which gives you enthusiasm, and now I have friends from it."
The 10 years of feedback and creative input that helped shape writers such as Kilroy and O'Reilly are being marked this month with a series of readings by graduates and writer fellows that began last Tuesday and continue during the month.
The students of this year's course have also chosen to mark the occasion with their forthcoming publication, a compilation of their creative work entitled Sixteen After Ten. "I think we have felt that because it's 10 years, putting that in the title means that we are representing the Oscar Wilde Centre as well, so we did put a lot of work into it to make it as good as possible," says Ruth Patten, one of this year's students.
For Patten, who is working on a novel, writing has already become second nature, and now that she is daily engaged in the task, she is even more certain that it's something she will be pursuing long into the future.
"Personally, I know I will be writing for the rest of my life," she says. "I can't tell you if I'll ever be published but I do know that there's a part of my day for the rest of my life that will be writing."
That may not be all she gleans from this year, if Kilroy's current project is anything to go by. "I'm working on a novel set in Trinity about a creative writing course and a great Irish writer," says Kilroy. "So I've got a lot out of it!"
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For more information on events to mark the 10th anniversary, see www.tcd.ie/OWC/