A Writer in the Family:
Shared rituals, inherited talents, black sheep and secrets – families provide rich material for writers. From her painter great aunt to her teenaged daughter – both named Phoebe - Katie Donovan looks at how her own family’s stories have inspired her poems. With references to the Wexford cousins who took opposing sides in 1798 and the three sisters who founded Avoca Woollen Mills in Wicklow; not to mention her First Nation ancestor in Canada and the tragic slow death of her American-born husband from throat cancer; Donovan describes how family has influenced her poetic vision and output.
Family stories influence Irish writers – Joyce spoke openly of his debt to his father, and, when he came to write the Penelope section of Ulysses, it was his wife Nora Barnacle’s letters that inspired Molly Bloom’s breathless, unpunctuated narrative voice.
Our Nobel prize-winning poet, Seamus Heaney, is an example of a writer who sought to respect family ties, while honouring his right to an independent identity. “Digging”, his famous poem about his father, articulates this urge to self-differentiate without losing a familial bond.
Looking at the Yeats family we can see how members of the same family unit can express creativity in ways that are distinct yet linked. Donovan suggests that one member of a family can feel pressure to create because of the frustrated ambitions of those who have gone before. However, as her own work attests, she does not believe the contention of Nobel-prizewinning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milozs, that “when a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”
Katie Donovan has published five collections of poetry, the most recent of which is “Off Duty”, all with Bloodaxe Books. In 2017 she won the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry. A former journalist with the Irish Times, she has lectured in Creative Writing at both Dun Laoghaire IADT and NUI Maynooth.
This FREE Expert Workshop takes place on Fri 9 March 2018, 3pm - 4.30pm at the Royal Irish Academy, Dawson Street, Dublin. Tickets are available through Eventbrite.
