SOPHIE GRENHAM talks to ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN about POETRY, prisons and the ANNAGHMAKERRIG LAKE …
Photograph by Eoin Rafferty
Annemarie Ní Churreáin is one of the most mesmerising Irish poets to emerge in the last decade. Her stunning debut collection Bloodroot is a powerful tribute to women from Ireland’s recent history, many of them very close to her heart. Annemarie’s words give voice to those who have been silenced or shut away; Ann Lovett, Joanne Hayes, her grandmother who survived a mother and baby home. Bloodroot’s arrival could not have come at a better time – when such deeply ingrained grief has finally been given air.
Thomas McCarthy, one of Annemarie’s biggest supporters said the wordsmith has – “A distinctive new voice with a mature sense of the lyric form and a rare sense of lyric completion, rooted in the bloodroot of women’s history.”
Annemarie has received literary fellowships from such institutions as Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. Her work has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The London Magazine, Agenda Poetry Journal and The Stinging Fly. In 2016, she won a Next Generation Artists Award from the Arts Council of Ireland. In 2017, Annemarie was appointed to the Women in Prisons Panel co-funded by the Arts Council and the Department of Justice, Equality and Reform.
Annemarie Ní Churreáin lives with her partner Niamh McCann and their dog Sophie in Dublin 8. Annemarie is currently the Kerry Writer in Residence, where she is working on a new collection of poetry.
Bloodroot (€12) is published by Doire Press and available from all good bookshops.
On home
I live in Ceannt Fort in Dublin 8 otherwise known as Mount Brown. It’s a small web of estates on an uphill curve of the city, probably best known for its distinct gold Portland stone houses. Many of the narrow roads up here are named after Irish rebels; the one I live on is named after Frank Burke, who was nineteen years old when he was killed in action during the 1916 Rising. Outside my front door is a carefully tended grotto and although I’m not religious, I’m quite fond of our resident Virgin Mary.
In the summertime, the gardens overflow with giant pastel roses and bright lilac. In winter snows, Mount Brown is one of the most beautiful spots in the city. My local pub is McCann’s on James’s Street and it’s one of those rare gems, a real community sitting-room. The folk there know how to hold a tune and will sing to you over a pint of Guinness if you stay long enough.
On roots
I grew up speaking Irish in rural, northwest Donegal in a place called Cnoc na Naomh (Hill of the Saints). Growing up in the bog gave me a great sensitivity not only for shadows, but also for sound. As a kid I used to stand outside and shout down over the bog to my friend Danny who lived at the bottom of the hill. I’d shout his name and wait for the sound, syllable by syllable, to arrive at his door. He’d come out shortly after and send a sound back up. There was a tremendous amount of patience involved in this process for what seems now like not an altogether clear reward. This was my first experience of landscape and words – the bog as a telephone wire on which sound traveled. What I remember most about my first homeplace is the darkness of it and what might be buried there. You can never really leave the bog. It stays with you your whole life.
I have fallen in love with Dublin but I regularly take myself on road trips back into the wild. To quote story-teller John Moriarty; “unless there’s wildness around you, something terrible happens to the wildness inside you.”
On creating
I work in an upstairs room with a view of the neighbouring Mount Brown rooftops. Overall, my writing needs are quite simple but I like to be surrounded by old things – woods, objects, anything with a sense of past. I feel more productive in a room with history, which is why writer’s cottages have worked so well for me. I’ve traveled on residencies all over the world and spent three months living in Jack Kerouac’s old home in Orlando, Florida. I’m the 2017/18 Writer in Residence for County Kerry, so I spend a lot of time on the road. I have a little cottage in Muckross where I currently spend half of my week. I tend to write new poems when I’m on residency or on research trips. But I do all my editing at home. As a writer you are never fully tuned out of your work. You’re always observing, always processing, always logging detail. On the rare occasion when I have time, I like to write through the whole night. There’s something magic that can only happen between the hours of midnight and dawn.
On bookshops
Picking a favourite bookstore is impossible. Different stores suit different moods. When I want to feel hopeful again about poetry, I go to Books Upstairs. When I want to find the perfect book gift, I go to The Winding Stair Bookshop. The Doire Press Book Tour Bodies, Belonging and Borders, which took place in November 2017, has given me a renewed respect for the vocational work of independent book shop owners all over the country. The work they do is truly not valued enough. I think that printed literature and bookshops will always have a place in society, the same way that libraries have stood the test of time. It’s a very human thing, to want to feel paper between your fingers, to want to gaze upon a page. When you read information off a screen it enters the brain in a completely inferior way. I also like to see books making their way onto the shelves of non-bookshop stores. For example, Designist in George’s Street have recently started to stock Bloodroot and I love that my little book about home and family is now available in a store which helps people design and create their homes.
On her nightstand
On my nightstand is a very special copy of A Poet in the World by Denise Levertov. It was previously owned by poet Thomas McCarthy. Thomas has a great sense of style. On the night he launched my debut collection he took me to the Gresham Hotel for a glass of bubbly and gifted me this book which he himself had owned for over thirty years.
Also on the stand is The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan (published by The Stinging Fly) The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson and Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike by David Beresford. I’m exploring the body as a site of protest for a new poem and I’m immersing myself in the films, books and art of hunger-striking.
I read mostly poetry, short stories and creative-non fiction. Right now I’m a major fan of Joan Didion essays.
I go through fits and bursts of reading and if I like a book I’ll read it cover to cover in the same day. I don’t own a kindle though I do like to listen to recordings. The New Yorker Fiction Podcast is one of my favourite things online.
On escapes
I love travel, the stranger the location the better, the more off-beat the better. So I tend to seek out new experiences rather than return to the same spots. That said, my escape haven is The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, Monaghan. During my first stay there, I visited a local palm reader who held my hand and said “you’ll be back here many times in your life.” I try to get to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at least once a year and allow myself to be pampered. I definitely work too hard, and I don’t always have a healthy attitude to rest. Therefore it’s important for me to try and get away and unwind.
Over the years I’ve sat by the Annaghmakerrig lake with various questions. How to write? Where to write? What to write about? I remember finishing my MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin in 2010 and walking around that lake with one question in my head; what next?
Annaghmakerrig is a superb place to write, but it’s also a tonic for tired hearts and heads. I always leave there feeling at ease with my decision to pursue a life as a writer.
On poetry
Poetry is a form of music that connects us to mystery. Yet, for me, writing is not only about language and mystery; it’s about control.
Even as a child I was aware of how I, as a female, was expected to be in society and perhaps I was particularly sensitive to those expectations because I am the granddaughter of a survivor of the Mother and Baby Homes.
Poetry gives me permission to be bold. Poetry, as a form, is also centrally concerned with loss. By its own construction a poem engineers a pause into the world and brings to the business of living a high regard for brokenness and repair.
The poet counts syllables, breaks lines, separates verses: in our work we strip, part and pair to free a new meaning. When the poet reads aloud is drawn towards the mouth, the lung, the exhaled air. The poet has a unique understanding of the body I think, and of autonomy.
I am right now quite interested in the current conversation in Ireland about reproductive rights and health. Certainly, as a poet, I feel that not every potential has to be born and that not every unborn potential is lost. In the same way that conflict shines in the short story form, I think desire is especially well served by the genre of poetry.
On the Writers in Prison panel
Growing up in a family that fostered children, I met very inspiring people. But sadly the overall experience left me with a very poor view of the Irish care system. I witnessed firsthand the ways in which state systems are often designed from the top-down to keep vulnerable people silent.
Essentially I believe that pain and loss can be transformed into beauty and today I am passionate about helping people in state care systems to use their voice.
One of my favourite writers Joan Didion said: “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I would go one step further and say that “when we don’t tell ourselves and other people stories we create a world where change is impossible, and where inequality and oppression can openly flourish.”
On prisons
Of all my teaching work, the workshops in prisons are the most rewarding. Often, the participants there are totally unafraid to go to the difficult and often challenging places that poetry comes from. Recently I workshopped the Chekhov short story Oysters with a group of prisoners and the conversation it opened up between us about poverty, hunger and cruelty will probably stay with me forever.
On Bloodroot
Bloodroot is a meditation on the theme of origins and in particular it looks at how our earliest experiences of landscape shape in us a sense of identity that stays with us our whole lives. The title poem is set at the Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home where in 1951 my grandmother gave birth. Many of the poems also look at my experiences of growing up in the 1980s in a family that fostered children.
The theme of mother and child separation is one that has returned to me all through my life and features quite vividly in this collection. Some of the stories referenced include those of Ann Lovett, the fifteen year old girl who died giving birth at a grotto in 1984 and Joanne Hayes of the Kerry Babies story which unfolded in the same year.
I wasn’t necessarily thinking of themes when writing Bloodroot but now, in reflection, I can see that much of the book deals with the theme of intergenerational grief.
In order to write a person must have a particular kind of sensitivity and my sensitivity was definitely cultivated by the fact of ancestral loss.
Bloodroot is dedicated to my foremothers and it’s my hope that the book will, among other things, help put current conversations about the body and the lives of Irish women into a social and historical context.
On what’s next
Bloodroot is the first, I hope, of many books to come. It’s impossible to say yet what my next collection will look like but I am quite drawn to the theme of disappeared women.
Ultimately, there is a lot I want to say about violence and the intergenerational impact of patriarchal systems.
Right now I’m committed to a number of collaborative projects with artists working in different disciplines and I’m excited to work alongside practitioners in sound, visual art and photography. Over the next year I’ll be focused on a piece of site-specific work with composer Michael Gallen that explores the intersection between physical, mythological and historical landscapes.
Travel is vital to my writing. In an ideal world I would spend six months on the road writing and six months at home editing.
In 2018, I’m lined up to read at several festivals in Ireland including the Doolin Folk Festival and the Cork International Poetry Festival. But I’m also really looking forward to taking Bloodroot to Europe and the U.S.
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