by Maria McCarthy | 30 Apr, 2025 | Uncategorized
I am pleased to announce that my new book, Learning to be Irish, is published. Many thanks to Siglum Publishing for taking this book into their fold, and to all those that have made it look so wonderful. Maggie Drury designed the cover image; Mark Holihan designed the cover and Bob Carling did the typesetting and internal design. Thanks are also due to fellow/sister second-generation Irish writers John O’Donoghue and S.M.Jenkin for their endorsements.
This book has been a long time coming, and much of the content is deeply personal. Learning to be Irish explores my Irish heritage in memoir, poetry and short fiction. Like an artist drawing several sketches, I have worked the material in different forms over the years, staying curious, looking for meanings.
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
Quietly devastating. A mature and truthful exploration of complex emotions, conflicting loyalties, identity, belonging. Through her mastery of different forms of writing: poetry, story, memoir, McCarthy shows us the beating heart of the second-generation Irish in England.
S.M. Jenkin, author of Fire in the Head and Unspeakable, and co-editor of Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World
I shall be launching Learning to be Irish on Saturday 19 July 2025, 1.00 – 2.30 p.m. at Sun Pier House in Chatham. There will be readings, music and books! I hope to have several events in the coming months, and am open to invitations as a guest writer.
The book is available from the usual online retailers, but can I ask that UK readers order copies from me? Small presses like Siglum Publishing, and their authors, make a small profit from direct sales, and only a tiny amount from Amazon.
I shall be sending out orders from mid-May. Details of how to order are here: Learning to be Irish
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by Maria McCarthy | 6 Feb, 2025 | Uncategorized
Bob and Maria at the Natural History Museum. Photo by Caitlin, our granddaughter
Many of you will know that my husband Bob Carling and I ran an indie press, Cultured Llama Publishing. Steven Keevil of the excellent, award-winning Local Authority Substack newsletter, interviewed Bob and I about publishing, writing, music, and finding each other via Internet dating. You can read it here.
Steven approached us just at the time we were about to close Cultured Llama, but kindly thought we would be interesting interviewees. When he arrived for the interview, I said ‘I don’t know what you want to talk to us about.’ Two hours later… Sorry for rambling, Steven, and thanks for a great job editing the conversation.
Please subscribe to Local Authority, and if you can, take out a paid subscription. Local news is rarely as good as this.
My recent Substack post DO NOT ALIGHT, on Rochester in the ’90s, has proved surprisingly popular. You can read it here.
This week’s Substack is about my love of medical dramas: CBC, Chem 5 and Tacky Cardies
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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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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.
