I began my writing life with novels and plays and had success with three books, Priest, The Trouble with Sarah Gullion, and Bird in the Snow, and 6 plays produced by the Abbey Theatre.
But my stories were always close to my lived experience and after a while I realised that memoir was my new fiction; memoir is not biography; it’s a selection of memories that one relishes, and from which one can create a kind of true fiction. A story to live by. A love story to remember and sustain one in the present.
After 9 volumes I decided to change course again. This time I have been inspired by various Asian traditions of writing such as Haibun.
In ancient Japan Haibun, and Zuihitsu, were two of many literary forms that involved a tradition of mixing prose and poetry, combining concise imagistic prose with haiku, and jumbling together travel journals with personal essays, focusing on the ephemeral nature of experiences to create something like meditations on the impermanence of things.
One great master of this was a writer called Yoshida Kenko who wrote a book called Essays in Idleness back in 1330. And it struck me that my own unruly books of memoir often seem like a jumble of essays on impermanence and the delights of just being present in the world for a short and fleeting life.
For me this new book, Midwinter marks a final departure from memoir and what for me will be a deep dive into a new form; Meditations on Everything.
I have begun with this book that journeys through winter, and I hold my gaze unflinchingly on all that decays and all that is impermanent and how the winter teaches us this truth.
But also how winter teaches us that even death is impermanent and that life and creation begin again in springtime and that just as sure as death follows life, so too does life follow death in the great cycle of cosmic time.
Midwinter is available at Dubraybooks.ie
