Monica comes home to help others tell their stories
For Monica Corish, a writer's first draft of a manuscript or a poem is like a newborn baby. "And you're only allowed to say wonderful things about a newborn baby," she said. There's time for critiquing later.
"The idea is that you grow through being told what is strong about your work," she said.
Monica, herself a writer, poet and painter, knows the importance of a safe environment for writing. She remembered, with a grimace, a writers group she attended some time ago.
"I put my soul on the table and they just went" – here she makes a large, slashing "X" in the air with her hand. "They tore it to shreds," she said. She never went back.
Now, as a facilitator of a writers group in Ballyshannon and a leader of writing workshops around the county, Monica uses those lessons of helpful encouragement herself.
"I recognise late bloomers at 100 paces," said Monica, who counts herself among them. She didn't start writing until 1990 and published her first poems six years later. It was shyness that held her back, she said.
Her writing "started out as wanting to express something, then I became fascinated with the words and the shape of words and the best way to say something," she said. "It began to be poetry."
She hasn't looked back. You may have heard Monica's work on RT's "Sunday Miscellany" or on Lyric FM's "Quiet Quarter," and her poems and articles have appeared in journals and magazines. In February, she will be the featured poet in the Irish literary journal "The Stinging Fly."
She has been involved with writing groups for 10 years, but it was an experience last year that led to "The Scratching Hens," the fortnightly Ballyshannon Women's Creative Writing Group that Monica facilitates. She had written a couple of pieces for the Donegal Women's Network page in the Donegal Democrat, and when the call came for more women to contribute, Monica held writing workshops for women, funded by the network and the Donegal Vocational Education Committee's Community Education Department. The idea was to encourage women to write for publication.
The workshops did result in more women writing for the newspaper, but the group decided to continue with a broader focus. Some members wanted to publish and for others, "it was enough to put pen to paper," Monica said. They all became "The Scratching Hens," which continues this month after its summer break – and welcomes new members, Monica added.
Monica took an interesting path to writing. Originally from Dublin, she "always knew I would settle in the west and as near the sea as I could afford to get," she said. She now lives in Kinlough, Co. Leitrim, less than three miles from Bundoran, and most of her writing and social connections are here in Donegal.
But she often finds herself influenced by experiences a world away.
"It's amazing how often Africa comes up in my writing," she said.
She was introduced to Africa in 1983, when she travelled on her own overland from Nairobi to Cairo at age 25. "I had done quite a bit of travelling in Europe and the states and I never really felt I had left home" she said. "Africa was 'other,' but in a way that was deeply attractive." She took six months to make the journey, visiting Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, north and south Sudan and Egypt.
"I liked the people, the land, the warmth," she said. She came home to Ireland but returned to Sudan in 1984, teaching English through the Agency for Personal Service Overseas. During the Ethiopian Famine, she worked in a refugee camp in Sudan.
After coming home for six months she returned to north Sudan for a year with the International Rescue Committee (IRC). When she came home this time she trained as a nurse and spent seven years studying and working in London and Dublin.
"And then the bug hit again," she said.
That meant a longer stint with the IRC and then a writing job with the World Health Organisation that based her in Ireland but sent her back and forth to Geneva.
"I wanted to be here. I love it here," Monica said of Ireland. "I'm not one of those returned emigrants who doesn't want to be here." After earning a master's degree in development studies she served as a health advisor to Irish aid agencies, work that brought her back to Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Angola.
Now she has thrown herself into her writing, her poetry and her painting. She has a three-bedroom house "and only one bedroom is for sleeping in," Monica said. Another bedroom is an office and the third is her painter's studio.
She has notebooks of drafts that she wants to revisit and hopes to
craft another five or six poems to publish, and send her art portfolio to galleries. "That's the task until Christmas," she said.
Workshops
But that's not all. Monica will also lead a series of workshops, "Write for Your Life," on Sept. 20, Oct. 11, Nov. 8 and Dec. 6 at the Regional Cultural Centre in Letterkenny. People interested in participating should contact the centre at 074 9129186. And on Oct. 17, during Organic Week at The Organic Centre in Leitrim, she will teach a workshop on "Writing a Garden Haiku."
Monica trained with Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) before leading writing groups, and her work is underscored by the AWA emphasis on providing every writer with a safe environment in which to experiment and develop. The groups she is involved with, including the group she belongs to as a member, include people who do not consider themselves writers as well as authors. But there seems to be a tradition that connects them all.
"In Ireland we are a profoundly literary people," she said. "It's unknown and new, but it is a ground they know as well."
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Weather for Donegal
Thursday 17 May 2012
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