Reading, Writing, and Me

On October 1, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a reading and conversation for Caragh Maxwell's debut novel, Sugartown. I absolutely love attending events at Books Upstairs, and this was made even more interesting by the fact that Maxwell is a graduate of the M.Phil program at Trinity that I'm currently attending. Thusly, many of my professors were in attendance as well, including Eoin McNamee, who was the conversation partner for the evening.  The event began customarily with free wine before McNamee introduced Maxwell to the audience, sharing his story of first hearing Maxwell read a piece in class, knowing she was special. They discussed her extremely successful essay in the Irish Times where she wrote about having cancer in her late teens. This led to heaps of interest in her work, but Maxwell stuck with her degree. That was where Sugartown began to form as her culminating course project. The book received over forty rejections after completion, but just when Maxwel...

On the Clock  by Claire Baglin (Translated by Jordan Stump) Overview: I would classify Claire Baglin's book as a novella as it is quite short. It makes the perfect paperback to carry around with you because it's so slim. It's translated from French by Jordan Stump and chronicles two strands of story. The first is focused on a young adult's job working in fast food for the summer. This is interlaced with her father's story of working in a factory. The book examines how these jobs take advantage of their employees without offering a path to advancement or a way out of the intensely labor focused work. The point being mostly that these jobs will chew you up and spit you out, no matter how much pride and diligence you put into the work, how good you are. And in the disillusionment of that particular myth, it succeeds. Overall: 3.75 Thoughts: My thesis on this book is that it would've been an incredible short story made out of the first thirty or so pages but that st...

Welcome back to the world's most inconsistent monthly series—my wrap-ups! They should get more consistent now that I'm in school and reading is definitionally part of my job. Operative word is should ... Hopefully, they'll also be more interesting because I'll be exploring a wider range of books and texts as I keep expanding my knowledge, doing class readings, and picking up books for fun. I'm currently reading like twelve different things at the moment, and my brain is thriving being stretched in so many ways! I'm using it again! So needless to say, we're forcibly putting an end to the summer reading slump. This month started slow because I had my last week at work where I really prioritized hanging out with everyone and then I moved to an entirely new country and had to settle in, but the ending is promising. I'm also so excited about all the writing I've managed to do in the last week now that I'm no longer scrambling to buy enough household s...

The Wardrobe Department  by Elaine Garvey Overview: Mairéad moved from Ireland to London to work in the wardrobe department of a theater. She rents a room in a shabby house with many other people, she doesn't quite fit with her coworkers and despises the producer of Uncle Vanya, and she spends much of her time feeling out of place. Even her clothes don't fit right. After chronicling a day at the theater in great detail, Mairéad learns her grandmother died, and she has to return to Ireland for the funeral. There, she has to confront awkward family situations and feeling out of place in a different way. Still, the time helps her unearth more information than she had before, and she returns to London with a new energy. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3 For being a first person novel, Mairéad renders herself somewhat flat on the page. She feels uncomfortable and withdrawn from everyone, but beyond flinching away and being defensive and also chronicling all of the clothing she feels deeply...

Back to school is funny in grad school, or at least in my limited experience of it. My program (an M.Phil in creative writing) is so different than anything I've done before in school when it comes to structure and expectations, but at the same time, I've been doing this school thing for a long time. I've tried to put a lot of thought into the systems I've used before—what worked and what didn't—and adapt them to the needs of this new school endeavor that requires something different than what I've really encountered before.  The way my program is set up, we have classes 3 days a week for about nine hours total. The majority of the time required for the degree is outside of classroom hours. We have to generate a fairly significant amount of creative work (though nowhere near the number of assignments that undergrad requires where you have to regularly turn things in to prove you're paying attention), do a pretty overwhelming amount of reading for each class ...

Disappoint Me  by Nicola Dinan  Overview: Max falls down the stairs at a New Years party, and her life begins to drift in a new direction, away from her break-up with Arthur and her poetry collection and to a phase of life where she learns to love domesticity with her new boyfriend, Vincent. She hits it off immediately with Vincent and then her story begins to descend into the dramas that befall daily life—secrets that eventually come out, health scares, forgiving your parents, etc. By the end of the novel, Max's life is full of questions once again, and she has to decide if she wants to keep running or turn around and face them head on. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 I like Max and her voice. She has that sad girl lit vibe that I tend to eat up (I mean, look at the cover). She works as a lawyer training AI for this online company but has also published a book of poetry and is a part of the queer arts scene in London. She goes through an interesting evolution over the course of the ...