The Ogham Stone 2021

By University of Limerick

The Ogham Stone  is an annual anthology of original writing and poetry produced by students on the MA in English and the MA in Creative Writing programmes at University of Limerick in Ireland.  Launched in 2014, it is fast emerging as a distinctive and prestigious context for new writing in Ireland, showcasing import

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Limerick
• Release date: Jun 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781911620273

Book preview

DEDICATION

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COPYRIGHT PAGE

The Ogham Stone 2021, electronic edition

Published by the University of Limerick, Ireland

©2021 | Copyright of each work rests with the artist

ISBN: 978-1-91162027-3

Illustrations designed by Freepik (with modification)

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See more at:

www.theoghamstoneul.com

www.facebook.com/oghamstoneul

Twitter: @TheOghamStone

Instagram: @theoghamstone

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2021 EDITORIAL STAFF

Brandon Collins

Conor Nix Fitzgerald

Jason Goodwin-Tully

Tony Hynes

Karunakara Karanth

William Keohane

Julia McNamara

Bláthnaid Nevin

Lorraine O’Byrne

Nathan O’Connell

Valerie O’Connor

Eileen O’Donoghue

Oluwasegun Oriowo

Danaë Petsimeris

Michael Power

Megan Ring

Pippa Slattery

Philip Spillane

Sarah Marie Staus

Daniel Whelan

Anna-Maria Zechner

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF:

Dr Carrie Griffin, Dr Niamh Hehir, Iva Yates

FOUNDING EDITOR:

Dr Patricia Moran

DESIGNERS:

Paula Dias Garcia, Helena Mulkerns, Clodagh Guerin,

PRODUCTION:

www.Cyberscribe.eu

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors of The Ogham Stone 2021 would like to express our deepest gratitude to Dr Carrie Griffin for her generous and tireless commitment to the journal.

Our thanks go too, to Dr Niamh Hehir for her support to the project during the Autumn of 2020.

Both Dr Griffin’s and Dr Hehir’s dedication to and enthusiasm for the journal has been inspiring, especially during this continuing global pandemic. Sincere thanks also go to Iva Yates for her hard work and constant support throughout the year.

We are extremely grateful to Gráinne O’Brien of Silver Apples, Cassia Gaden-Gilmartin of Channel, and Danny Denton of The Stinging Fly for their generous and informative workshops on producing a literary journal.

We would like to extend our congratulations to Alice Kinsella, whose short story, ‘Window,’ is the winner of the All-Ireland Scholarship Alumni Creative Writing Competition, sponsored by J.P. McManus. We are delighted to include it in this issue. We also gratefully acknowledge the patronage of the McManus Foundation.

We are also delighted to introduce The Ogham Stone One-Page-Play Contest in this year’s issue. A great many fantastic plays were submitted, and we extend our congratulations to Niall Carmody for his winning play, See You On The Other Side which is published here.

The two highly commended plays, The Case against Therianthropy by Jerry McAuliffe, and In Other News by Sarah Maria Wiltschek are published on our website: https://theoghamstoneul.com/one-page-plays-2021

Our thanks go to Helena Mulkerns for her expertise in design and layout and for all her advice on our publishing options.

The Glucksman Library, UL, especially Pattie Punch and Mark Gallagher, the staff in English and Creative Writing, UL, in particular Sarah Moore Fitzgerald and Joseph O’Connor, and our Writer in Residence, Kit de Waal, also have our thanks.

And finally, sincere thanks to all who have submitted this year; without whom this issue would not have been possible.

With warmth and gratitude,

The Ogham Stone Editorial Team

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The Ogham Stone is compiled by the students on the MA in Creative Writing and the MA in English, University of Limerick. All submissions to The Ogham Stone are judged blind.

RESPECT*

Kit de Waal

Was there ever any worse advice than write what you know? Who of the greats ever wrote what they knew? Did Charlotte Brontë live in a grand country house with a man called Edward Rochester who tried to commit bigamy with her before she wrote Jane Eyre? Was Gustave Flaubert a woman who committed adultery before he wrote Madame Bovary? And how many of us could write a good book if we only wrote what we know. I would have to write about a middle-aged woman who lives in a Midlands town, visits Tesco and tends her garden. No story there. No bestseller. Because it’s not interesting. As writers we have to make things up if we want to spin a good yarn. We have to have a murder or two, a broken heart, a bank robbery, a ride in a spaceship.   

But what those writers, Flaubert and Brontë, had in common is that they made you feel they did know those lives, that they did have those experiences. They made us believe the lie. So we have men writing as women as in Thomas Hardy or Henry James, we have women writing as men Donna Tartt and Iris Murdoch. We have people writing from the point of view of someone with learning difficulties, from the point of view of an alien, an animal and most common of all, people who write historical fiction from the middle ages to the second world war and beyond. 

And thank goodness for those books that tell us something about other worlds and other lives. Without authors who cross the boundary from what they know to what they imagine, we would have a poor library. No The Curious Incident Of The Dog in the Night-Time, no The Remains of the Day, no To Kill a Mockingbird, no Of Mice and Men, etc, etc, etc. 

So what is the big problem when we come to writing about different cultures? What’s the problem when it comes to race, when it’s white people writing in the voice of a black person, of a Chinese person of an Indian? Isn’t this just the same as crossing gender and ability? What is this thing called cultural appropriation and what should we do think about or do about it? If anything. 

The dictionary definition is this: ‘Cultural appropriation is the adoption of elements of a minority culture by members of the dominant culture. It is distinguished from equal cultural exchange due to the presence of a colonial element and imbalance of power.’ 

There’s a couple of words there that might give us a clue as to why it’s become a thing, a talking point not just in literature but in dance, in music, in dress, in film. Those words are minority, dominant and imbalance. So when one culture, the dominant one uses stuff that belongs to (and I’ll come on to belonging later) a minority culture, that minority culture can feel offended, feels a sense of loss or injustice. 

I’ll just talk about a few instances so we all know what we’re talking about. In an American University some white students dressed up in sombreros and ponchos and the Latino students took offence. The Washington Redskins, a football club in America, is currently locked in a court case because of their use of the tribal headdress of the First Nation people. Popstars and clothes designers have been vilified for using turbans, feathers, bindi in their designs and right now there is a very public debate about one girl who wore a Chinese dress for her prom night.     

In literature one of the most famous examples of white people crossing that line and writing as a black person is the case of Kathryn Stockett who wrote The Help in 2009.  That book spent 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, is based on the lives of black, female, maids in America’s southern states in the sixties. The book is written in the voices of two black women and is set in Jackson, Mississippi during racial segregation and Ku Klux Klan lynchings; it is also written in the idiomatic ‘black’ vernacular (‘You is smart, you is kind, you is important’). 

In the ‘Afterword’ to her novel, Stockett admitted she was scared she was ‘crossing a terrible line writing in the voice of a black person,’ fears which have proved to be well founded. Despite initially being hailed as the most important book since To Kill a Mockingbird, the book and the subsequent film have been widely condemned by critics, academics and commentators alleging that the novel ‘trivialises, misrepresents and stereotypes black women, black men and the black community’ and ‘presents black liberation and success being dependent on white intervention and goodness.’ The American Association of Black Women Historians released an open statement which concludes by saying that it finds it ‘unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.’ 

When I gave a talk to the Association of Booksellers about cultural appropriation, several agents came up to me afterwards and said that they had authors abandoning novels left right and centre because they were worried about writing in the voice of ‘the other.’ They didn’t want the Kathryn Stockett treatment. 

As writers we do not want to give offence, no-one wants to be called a racist, yet we want the freedom to write the book we choose, to inhabit other lives and to explore the full range of our imagination and ability. How can we do that? How do we walk the line between cultural appropriation and artistic licence? 

1. Beware Blackface: there are very few people today who would think that the black and white minstrels were okay. Why? Because those white entertainers were pretending in the most crass way possible to be black wearing pigment black make-up, huge white painted on smiles, tight curly wigs and white gloves reducing black people to grotesque and negative stereotypes, singing and dancing for their betters, the happy slave dancing hard after a day on the plantation. But how could we blackface as a writer?  By stereotyping the other in our writing, by taking a few well-worn and probably outdated stereotypes and adding them slapdash to whatever we are writing: the Asian corner shop, the black street hood, the sexy Latino mama, the Chinese woman in the takeaway. If we want to have black characters in our work, we need to ensure that they are fully rounded, rich, up-to-date, viable, flawed, sometimes unlikable but believable authentic people, not representative of a whole culture but representative of themselves.    

2. Look at Ourselves: we have to ask ourselves who we are and what we are trying to say in speaking as a black person or as ‘the other.’ What are we trying to accomplish in our writing that needs that perspective? Are we the best person to say it? Have we examined our privilege and our attitudes sufficiently to give us the necessary perspective to be authentic, to be sympathetic, to be true? Are we sure that we are not dabbling in exotica, in Orientalism in that fascination with the other that prevents us portraying a rounded, rich culture with all its nuances, its diversity, all its reality? By writing our story are we taking the place of someone better placed to tell it? Our aim should be not only to write well but to do no harm along the way.  

3. Research: This is not as easy as it sounds. If we are researching a particular culture or language or religion we must remember that no one person can speak for a nation. There is no one person that can speak for the whole of Ireland. Nobody can give the definitive answer to how a culture behaves or what they believe or why. There are as many diverse ways to be a Muslim, or an Indian or a Jamaican as there to be an Irish person, a Catholic or an American. So while research is important we have to make sure we listen carefully and respectfully, analysing and deconstructing what we are told or what we discover. Read widely, interrogate what we learn, talk to people, talk to elders, talk to the young