#29 - Year in re(ar)view

2023 reflections

I realise that this isn’t strictly a “Bookwheel” post, but that’s fine for me as long as it’s fine for you as readers.

2023 has been an enormously busy year and I am trying to gather my thoughts on it. Most years are rarely very neat and discreetly their own of course, and much of 2022 bled directly—and happily—into 2023 for me especially when it came to Pacemaker which came out in late 2022.

After the initial mad flurry of promotion of the book there was a bit of lull, and then things seemed to kick into high gear again with events in March in Dublin at the Franco-Irish Literary Festival followed by more readings in May in Berlin at the Curious Fox and finally at the West Cork Literary Festival in July in Bantry. I was so thrilled to do all of them and it has been probably the most positive experience of my writing life.

With all of that happening, and also keeping pace with a fulltime job, it is perhaps inevitable that someone with my health condition might expect to hit a bit of a wall and I most certainly did this summer. Suddenly one day, my pacemaker started doing one of its jobs and alerted me to something being wrong as it made its weird beeping tone one morning in June. I wrote it off as a glitch and tried not to panic. Listening to your own body when you have a congenital heart defect is very important. I had been feeling worse than usual but had put it down to so much going on with my writing and so on. When it made the same tone at the exact same time the next day, I knew something was off. I went to the doctor. He could find nothing obviously wrong. It went off the next day at the same time again. This time we called the hospital.

They asked me to come in immediately which we did and they realised two things: first an arrythmia had made itself known again in my heart and secondly the beeping tone of my pacemaker was because it turns out I was supposed to have a home monitor for my pacemaker which it was to report to, but having nowhere to send the information, started singing. Just as well it did. After a long day in hospital including an electro-cardioversion I got to go home. I eventually got sorted out with a home monitor too.

I bring all this up because it reminded of something important about the whole process of writing Pacemaker and seeing it come into the world and find readers: although the book itself is a bounded, fixed thing, my condition is not, and as I often made the point at events, writing about this doesn’t make it go away. What it has done for me, however, is made me treat my condition with greater respect, its permanent presence in my life. It also means I can look back with enormous pride on the last 15 months and at what writing Pacemaker has brought me in experiences.

---

I am never not writing.

I have written a lot this year, although most of it is a long way from seeing the light of day.

One thing which I wrote almost exactly a year ago, and which has finally seen the light of day is a short essay “The Shoe Care Kit” in vol. 9 of Winter Papers, the annual Irish arts anthology edited by Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith. That can be ordered here or by clicking the image below.

I’ve been really fortunate this year to be the recipient for a second time of an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary Award to start work on my next project, which is going to be a fictional account of the earliest known Waterford printer, Thomas Bourke, who was active in the 1640s that turbulent and bloody decade in European and Irish history. I have also been lucky to be awarded a Maddock Fellowship by the fantastic Marsh’s Library in Dublin where some of the work printed by Thomas Bourke can still be found. I am so excited to plan the time to spend both there and in the Benjamin Iveagh collection at Farmleigh House in 2024. I’ll be sure to keep people up to date on that! Below is a facsimile of a Bourke printing, to whet your appetites for this new project:

If that’s not enough, a piece I have written about Bourke as I prepare to write the book will be published shortly in Firmament, the journal of Seattle-based independent publishers, Sublunary Editions. You can order it here or click on the picture of the cover below.

Other places some writing has appeared this year includes Poetry Ireland Review, issue 140 which came out a few months ago and includes a review by me of three poets whose work I really admire: Ellen Dillon, Christodoulus Makris and Aodán McCardle.

On the subject of poetry, I was also very glad to be asked to provide a blurb to Trevor Joyce’s newest book Conspiracy which has just been published by Veer2, an imprint of Veer Books. You can order it here or click on the picture of the cover below. Here’s what I said:

'The thrill of Conspiracy lies not in its continuity but rather in its ability to explode emerging narratives into something strange and unknowable that remains nevertheless propulsive, compulsively readable: “scattering light / at an unaccustomed angle” this sequence - and the accompanying images - offer “ongoing and intense / fluct-uations in level” that will stay with you and draw you back in over and over.'

---

So that’s been 2023 for me, thanks to everyone who supports my writing and I hope to have plenty more to share with you in 2024 and beyond. For now, wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!