by Maria McCarthy | 20 Dec, 2024 | Uncategorized
For my last post of 2024, I am pleased to announce that my new book Learning to be Irish is forthcoming from Siglum Publishing in 2025. Here is some advance information:
Learning to be Irish showcases the best new and collected writings of a child of Irish migrants. Raised in Surrey in the 1960s and ’70s, ‘the filling in the sandwich’ of a family of five children, Maria C. McCarthy dances to Irish showbands, learns rebel songs at an uncle’s knee, hears home truths, half-truths and white lies from the women that gather in her mother’s kitchen, and learns to be English after the IRA bombs two pubs in Guildford. Learning to be Irish is a search for identity, a chronicle of a lost generation, and a yearning for truths that may never be known.
Maria C. McCarthy’s Learning To Be Irish, comprising poems, stories, and memoir, is a welcome addition to a wave of second-generation Irish writers born in England. McCarthy is a particularly fine poet, and I recommend her sequence ‘Mitchelstown’ to all who are interested in the delicate relations between native and exile. Learning To Be Irish can take its place alongside the work of such writers as Ian Duhig, Shane MacGowan, and Martina Evans. A terrific book.
John O’Donoghue, author of Sectioned: A Life Interrupted, The King From Over The Water and The Servants and Other Strange Stories
There will be further information on the Siglum website early in 2025. Also, I shall have a new author photo for the back cover courtesy of Michi Masumi. Exciting times.
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by Maria McCarthy | 28 Sep, 2024 | Uncategorized
I’m popping back to post on here, after moving most of my activity to Substack. You
The writing shed
can subscribe to my newsletter for free, to receive Substack posts every Thursday, direct to your email inbox. You can also read individual posts without subscribing. I’m finding Substack a great place to share work, read others’ posts and connect with a wider writing community. Giving myself a target of posting every Thursday is a good discipline, and has sent me to my writing shed on the brightest, dullest and rainiest of days.
Those of you that have followed me for several years know that I used to write in a big shed overlooking an orchard. I was then shedless for several years, until I purchased a 6ft x 6ft ‘Garden lodge’ with the proceeds, neatly enough, of a piece of writing and editing work for Medway Libraries. I have now had my new writing shed for about 15 months, furnished with a secondhand desk and chair, a rug from Oxfam Trading and a new electric heater. It’s my happy place, where I can spend hours reading, writing, editing, or staring out the window.
I am keeping this short, as I shall be back to editing my next Substack post in a minute. Recent posts and my archive can be found by linking to my latest post, A Fling with Mrs McQuillan, and exploring from there.
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by Maria McCarthy | 1 Aug, 2024 | Uncategorized
I am at an interesting place in the book I have been writing for the past two years. All the pieces are edited and ready, so it is a case of ordering them and looking at book titles. It’s an unusual book, a kind of single author anthology of poetry, stories, essays and memoir, mostly on the theme of being second-generation Irish. It’s had two working titles: The Portable McCarthy and Searching for Something Lost. I have been amusing and tormenting myself by coming up with alternatives. Subtitles are the most difficult things; how do you encapsulate a book in a few words? 
I sent some book title suggestions out to some of my readers and fellow/sister writers, and not one has agreed on the same title as another. One person has suggested I wait until I have given the whole manuscript to a reader, and a title may arise from that exercise. A lot of it is procrastination, of course. Instead of getting on with work required, I am fart-arsing about with titles. Maybe that’s it! Fart-arsing about would make a great title.
For my two books and poetry pamphlets, the titles have come from poems or story titles. strange fruits was chosen in a session with Maggie Drury, who was designing the image for the book cover. It was a title she felt she could work with, graphically. As Long as it Takes was my own choice. The stories in the book took five years to write, and a couple more years to edit. I wondered if I’d ever finish it. I then decided that it would take as long as it takes, which reflected the title of one of the stories, ‘As Long as it Takes’. The narrator is going home to Ireland to see her dying mother:
Bill saw me as far as the ticket barrier at Euston. ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ I said, picking a stray thread from the lapel of his jacket. ‘You know how it is. A dying woman takes as long as she takes.’
So does a book.
The book I am working on has been interrupted by tragedy (the violent death of an uncle), the triggering of old trauma during the writing and research, the unexpected death of my older brother, my husband having two heart attacks, a year apart, and my younger daughter’s treatment for breast cancer. But some things must be written, must be finished and put out into the world. This is my third attempt at writing a new book in four years. Maybe it’s third time lucky.
With two abandonned book drafts, there is much material that hasn’t found its place. I have started a Substack newsletter to publish some of these pieces. Having left Twitter/X last year, and Facebook a few months ago, I have been trying to find my online tribe. Substack is packed with good writers. I am reluctant to spend too much time ‘building my audience’, but I am steadily acquiring subscribers. I have decided to keep my content free. So if you want to head on over to Substack and subscribe, you can find me here.
Other Substacks I subscribe to are George Saunders Story Club, Local Authority and Writing a Better World with Ros Barber.
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by Maria McCarthy | 22 Feb, 2024 | Books, Childhood, Irish women, Irish writers and writing, Memoir, Russian dolls, Writing and wellbeing
Woodcut by Maggie Drury
I’ve always been fascinated by Russian dolls, ever since I saw a set on a high shelf in the kitchen of a friend’s house as a child. I never plucked up the courage to ask to play with them; I don’t know why. I had known Karan since we were babies, tucked either end of one pram as our mother’s went shopping together, and I spent hours and days with her as we grew up. Being one of only two children, Karan had more than I did, as one of five – more things to play with and, it has to be said, more love from her parents.
The Russian dolls on the shelf sparked a story that I wrote many years ago. It ended up in my collection, As Long as it Takes, which was published ten years ago this month. The story is called ‘Gillian’s dolls’, and concerns Sharon, a girl from a large family, being jealous of her friend Gillian’s Russian dolls. Gillian is an only child. Gillian and her parents are not a bit like Karan and her family, though Sharon and her family are a bit like mine. Sharon plays with Gillian’s dolls without permission, untwisting each one and lining them up in height order. She is caught by Gillian’s father, failing to put the dolls back together when she hears his key in the lock. She clumsily tries to hide them in her schoolbag. Having witnessed a scene between Gillian’s parents, Sharon drops her bag, and the dolls tumble onto the floor. Gillian’s father blackmails Sharon into keeping quiet; he won’t tell her parents about ‘stealing’ the Russian dolls if she doesn’t tell them what she has seen. It’s not until she is home that she realises that the smallest doll, the baby, is still in her bag.
‘Gillian’s dolls’ was one of the first stories I wrote with the cast of characters that came to inhabit As Long as it Takes. Further stories emerged for each character at different stages in their lives: a younger Sharon in ‘A Tea Party’; a teen Sharon in ‘Saturday Girl’; her sisters Janice and Maggie as adults in ‘Here’s Looking at You’ and ‘Self Help’. Pauline Masurel reviewed the collection for The Short Review:
As Long as it Takes is a bit like a nest of Russian dolls, with one woman packed inside another woman, each helping to contain or release the other.
I’ve been working with Russian dolls as part of my therapy – looking at how the people we were at different stages in our lives are triggered in certain situations. I am learning to contain the scared child, the fearful teen, within the casing of the adult me. And, in a way, that’s what I do with my writing – with fiction, non-fiction and poetry. It feels never ending – the work I need to do on myself, the therapy, the writing. Ten years on from publication of the story collection, I am still unpacking the Russian dolls, lining them up, putting them in height order, tucking them one inside the other, discovering new things. I am mostly writing non-fiction these days, trying to unpack the past in order to contain it within the adult me, the adult Russian doll, so it doesn’t hold so much power. There is fear as I do this; not so much when I write, but when I think of releasing the work into the public domain. Having completed the umpteenth draft of a piece I have been writing and expanding on for seventeen years, in different forms and at different times, I gave it to my husband to read. The fear of just showing it to one reader, the defensiveness with which I greeted his notes, I was that scared teen again, worried about telling tales outside of the family.
As I get older, and contemplate my remaining years, my legacy, it feels like time to unpack the Russian dolls and set them out in a public place, to work towards publication.The piece I have been working on for seventeen years has, in several iterations, been called ‘Learning to be English‘. It was the title of the column I wrote and broadcast for the BBC Radio 4 programme Home Truths in 2006; it was the title of my first self-published pamphlet; it was a piece for an anthology of second-generation Irish writers, which didn’t make it to publication; it is now the opening chapter of planned book, having grown from about 1,000 words in 2006 to 12,000 in 2024. If I don’t publish this work soon, I’ll still be writing the same thing on my death bed, an old and wizened Russian doll, too stiff to open up and reveal the dolls within me.
If you wish to buy a copy of As Long as it Takes please contact me via the email address on this page. If you wish to buy a secondhand copy, please do so via Wob, which pays royalties to authors on sales of pre-owned books.
See more of Maggie Drury’s artwork on Instagram: @maggie_drury9
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by Maria McCarthy | 12 Jan, 2024 | Childhood, Death and grieving, Family and forgiveness
I lost my voice for a few days recently. I found it frustrating, not being able to express myself freely, not being heard, resorting to writing notes to be understood. Growing up in a large family, I learned to talk loudly, but that some things must not be spoken about at all, either inside or outside the home. There were elephants all over the house, not just in one room, but they must be ignored, drowned out by noise.
My mother could not bear the thoughts in her head, so she masked them with radio and television, all day long. The radio in the kitchen always seemed slightly off station and too loud, the companion to cooking and cleaning. The television was on from lunchtime onwards – Pebble Mill at One, Crown Court, Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson. I watched them, too, when I came home for lunch, watched them with Mum, or on my own if she was out. The radio was on again when Mum prepared the dinner, then back to the screen: Crossroads, Emmerdale Farm, Coronation Street, right through to end of programmes, in the days before twenty-four hour TV. Mum would fall asleep to whatever she was watching, but if one of her children dared to switch channel, she would suddenly wake. ‘I was watching, that,’ she’d say. ‘Turn it back,’ as she was in charge of our viewing, declaring any programme she didn’t like: ‘Rubbish,’ or ‘Pure rubbish.’
I, too, used to have noise wherever I was, radios throughout the house switched on whenever I entered the room, even if for a few minutes. Perhaps I wanted to drown out my thoughts, too. Having grown up with doing homework in the corner of a room where television was blaring, people talking or arguing, I had to get used to it. There was no private space, no study space, in a small house with seven people living in it. No silence. I was reminded of this when I was sent a photo of the doorstep of my late brother’s house, after someone kindly laid flowers on my behalf on the anniversary of his death. The steps and the two low walls that flank it have been painted black, but the once-glossy red of the bricks was showing through; the colour of those steps when I lived in that house from the age of four to when I left home, a week after my nineteenth birthday.
I took my O-Levels in the hot summer of 1976, and spent many hours revising on those front steps, early in the day. Dad would get up early for work, and put the radio on as he made his sandwiches and drank his tea. The radio was loud, but it didn’t wake anyone but me. I would lie in bed until I heard Uncle Bill’s van pull up outside and the front door close as Dad left. Then up with my books to sit on the front doorstep in the relative cool of the morning, the house quiet, making notes on notes, condensing my learning into one paragraph that would trigger an entire essay in the exams. It was the only time I spent in silence while I lived in that house.
This month marks sixty years since my family of birth moved into that house, and it is just over a year since the last McCarthy to live in it left this world. The house has been silent for a year, just the ghosts of all of us humans that lived in it pass through; the spirits of the dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, white mice, hamsters and goldfish, too. Scenes and memories pass through my head unbidden. The last time I visited, it was all too much to bear. I said I would not go again, and handed back the keys; the only time I had ever held keys to that house. There was no need when I was young, when there was always someone home, when the back door was left unlocked. I now find I want to visit again, to sit on those steps, to remember some of the good times as well as the bad, to bring things to a close, but my requests are met with silence, as if I have no place, having left, having broken silence on some things that others would rather remain unspoken.
I can no longer cope with noise all the time. I cannot read and listen to the radio, I cannot write while the television is on, I cannot concentrate when there are voices around me. Silence is my friend these days, even though it lets the thoughts in that I would rather not entertain.
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