New Publication: Sonder Magazine

Hello all, some news here from the past that I have neglected to share. My short story 'Chekhov in Roscommon' was chosen for publication in the third edition of Sonder Magazine. The story takes place during a bus journey along the R371 from Roosky to Tulsk in County Roscommon, Ireland. It's a comic drama and explores issues around reality, family, trauma and who gets to decide what version of the world is the true one. I'm delighted that that the story has found a such a welcoming home with the great people at Sonder Magazine. I'm also happy to have been given the chance to read at the Covid friendly digital launch of the magazine which can be view on YouTube HERE.   

Copies of Sonder are available HERE and is selected book shops across the country. Check out other publication HERE.

Chat soon,

Andy 

  

New Flash Fiction: Full House: Locked Down

Full House: Locked Down
By Andy Hamilton 

 

Rachel whirls in the back door, past the kitchen sink and opens the fridge.

“Any food?” she shouts.

“Wash your hands!” her mother roars from the sitting room.

“I did!” 

“Cheese sandwich on the counter, beside your Da’s tablets.”

Rachel eyes the pillbox, Sunday to Saturday, all unopened.

“Has he been downstairs yet?” she says, and scribbles ‘lockdown: day eighteen’ on the calendar. “Has he been down!” she repeats.

“Eat your lunch,” her mother says.

Rachel takes two tablets from the pillbox and jams them into the sandwich.

“I’m going back outside,” she says and quietly carries the sandwich upstairs.

 

ENDS 

In conversation with... Nuala O'Faolain

In August of 2007, I had the privilege to speak with Irish writer and journalist, Nuala O’Faolain. The topic was feminism, and in particular her upcoming symposium on that subject with Marianne Finucane and Anne Enright at the Merriman Summer School. An unknown neighbour - I grew up just a mile from her Bartra home in Clare - I had only recently became aware of her written work and her memoirs. Unbeknownst to all, four months after our chat she was was diagnosed with cancer and she passed away on May 8, 2008. Ten years after her death, with the referendum on the Eight Amendment on the horizon, we can only wonder what O'Faolain would have added to the conversation.

Naula O'Faolain who passed away on May 8, 2008

The feminist struggle. It’s a fight that many in mainstream western society have consigned to a box of forgotten things, filed safely in the dusty recesses under the title ‘Old News – For The Archive’.

Conflict and division in western nations is now, after all, driven by more 'contemporary' masters. These days religion, race and, above all, wealth are the factors which mark where a person stands when the line is drawn in the sand.
Mary Robinson and Sex in the City surely put an end to gender inequality, didn’t they?

“I think that this [the feminist struggle] has barely begun. The position of women in Irish public life as late as the 1960s was so unjust, they were so unfairly treated, that there was bound, by the late 20th century, to be an effective protest against this,” says O’Faolain.

Click HERE to read this interview in full as well as other interviews with John Connolly, Ann Enright, John Arden, Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibin, Julian Gough, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, Ian Rankin, Catherine O'Flynn and Danielle McLaughlin.

In conversation with... John Connolly

Irish mystery writer, John Connolly, has found himself in the middle of a great bromance. A friend’s chance meeting with Stan Laurel set the wheels in motion - wheels that nearly 20 years later have brought him to his latest novel, he. He spoke with Andy Hamilton.

There was something about Laurel and Hardy that struck a chord for the young John Connolly. Gathered round the Saturday morning TV, a bowl of cereal in his lap, it was the honest friendship between these two men that made them so compelling. A great bromance.

Years later, during his first American book tour, the spectre of Stan Laurel once again found John. This remembrance of the man and his friendship with Oliver Hardy planted a seed in his imagination, a seed that eventually blossomed into his latest novel, he.

“They were very much part of my childhood and I always had an affection for them, more so than for Chaplin or for Buster Keating. I think that there is something in the friendship between them that resonates with kids - kids get them,” says John.

Click HERE to read this interview in full as well as other interviews with Ann Enright, John Arden, Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibin, Julian Gough, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, Ian Rankin, Catherine O'Flynn and Danielle McLaughlin.

In conversation with... Ian Rankin

Dirty, divorced and often depressed. A stereotypical Scottish hardman, externally fierce and gruff, seeks willing companion for decades long bout of heavy drinking, detective work and self-destructive behaviour. Unwilling to make an effort.

Detective Inspector John Rebus does not make a good personal ad.

Yet, for the last 20 years, Ian Rankin has carried Rebus with him - in this work, in his heart and always, always on his mind. Is it any wonder that after spending 17 books in conversation with the Strawman of Edinburgh, a break-up would eventually have to come?

But a break can bring a lot of things. When Inspector Rebus was forced into retirement two years ago, there were fears that freed from the trials of the no-nonsense cop, the creator would find greener and happier pastures to roam in. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In  2010, I spoke with Scottish writer Ian Rankin about the recent retirement of literary muse, John Rebus. Perhaps the most interesting part of the interview however was when Rankin talked about the place of crime fiction in the broader world of literature and the subtle work that writers like Ian McEwan, John Bandville [as Benjamin Black] and himself were doing to make crime fiction and literary fiction one and the same. 

 

Click HERE to read this interview in full as well as other interviews with Ann Enright, John Arden, Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibin, Julian Gough, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, Catherine O'Flynn and Danielle McLaughlin.

In Conversation With... John Arden

In late 2009 I paid a visit to the Galway home of Man Booker Prize runner-up, John Arden. Less than three years before his sad passing, he was good enough to spare some time to speak with me about what turned out to be his last collection of stories Gallows - Tales of Suspicion and Obsession.  

There’s a man with a Palestinian flag on Shop Street. He’s 60 if he’s a day and when the rain falls on the happy shoppers of Galway, he usually gets wet. There are men and women who spend each weekend at Shannon Airport, counting airplanes as they traffic in and out and engage in uneasy staring-matches with guards through iron fences.

They are people who are placed, or place themselves, on the edge of what most people see as ‘normal’ society. People who sooner or later will pay some price for that placement.

For the last four decades, John Arden has lived in relative obscurity on Ireland’s west coast. After exploding onto the literary scene in the late 1950s, Arden was quickly hailed as one of the visionary playwrights of that era and was even christened Britain’s Brecht.

But all truths must eventually out and Arden’s unwillingness to keep quiet about his opposition to the British military machine and their presence in Ireland soon brought about a number of high profile falling-outs with the British theatre establishment. And that, as they say, was that.

Now, as he prepares to turn 80, he is about to release his most substantial collection of work in years. Set in Galway, London and Yorkshire, Gallows is a  collection of short stories that attempt to lift the carpet of polite society and peer at the goings-on in the underbelly of life.

“It’s not deliberate, you know. It’s just what happens when you write short stories over a period of years. The themes really are subconscious. It’s only after [the story] is written that I realise what the underlying theme might be,” he says.

Click HERE to read this interview in full as well as other interviews with Ann Enright, Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibin, Julian Gough, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett, Catherine O'Flynn and Danielle McLaughlin.

In conversation with... Catherine O'Flynn

Way back in 2008 I spoke with Birmingham Irish author, Catherine O'Flynn, about her debut novel 'What Was Lost'. The novel, which won a Costa Prize that year and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, took a fascinating look and the birth of modern consumer culture in the 1980 - if consumer culture isn't an oxymoron. The novel was published right at the peak of the economic boom/bubble in Ireland and much of the world - and as such provides an interesting insight into the consumer driven excesses and loss of community that many of us are looking at today. Anyway, its been on my mind lately.

“It was never really my intention to play the old ways off against the new. I was growing up in the ‘80s and it just felt natural to include some of these things. I tried to avoid having rose-tinted spectacles about the past, but there was something that I wanted to say about these huge shopping centres and the impact they’ve had on lives and on the landscape. But at the same time, I didn’t want to idealise the idea of the local shops, because some local shops are rubbish.

“What really started me off writing the book was working in a shopping centre and seeing how many people seemed totally lost there. People came thinking they were going to find something but they just seemed to hang out for an inordinate amount of time, hoping that whatever it was would appear. I was never really quite sure what they were looking for, but I’m pretty confident nobody ever found it there.”

Click HERE to read this interview in full as well as other interviews with Ann Enright, Kevin Barry, Colm Tóibin, Julian Gough, Donal Ryan, Colin Barrett and Danielle McLaughlin.