This year I’m setting myself two quite achievable reading goals which I know I’m going to enjoy. I’ll be reading all Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf’s fiction in chronological order,
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I suspect we’ll all look back on 2021 as a dreadful year for being alive but a pretty epic reading year.
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I’m so incredibly relieved to be able to make a list of the best things I saw at the cinema this year. 2021 began in Lockdown and I’m not ashamed to admit I actually cried when the QFT reopened and I got to be in the audience for their first screening
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My third novel, The Raptures is launching on January 6th 2022. That date’s getting scarily close. If you’d like to support me and the team who are working hard behind the scenes you can pre-order a copy from your favourite Indie Book Store. Mine’s No Alibis, Belfast but buying from any independent bookseller is a brilliant and much-appreciated thing to do.
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Sometimes you get an absolute gift of a commission and you can’t believe your own good fortune. Am delighted to be working with the Ulster Orchestra on a spoken word and music collaboration to be launched early next year. “In The Beginnings” will explore the way the wonderful Primary School I attended as a child (Carniny Primary, Ballymena) impacted my journey as a writer and artist and will seek to honour Dr Sam Simpson who was principal of Carniny during my stay and an incredibly visionary man. Sadly Dr Simpson is no longer with us but here’s a small obituary article I wrote a few years ago when he passed away. I’m looking forward to sharing the final piece with the Ulster Orchestra early next year.
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I spent a wonderful few days in Paris last week launching Les Lanceurs de Feu, (the French translation of The Fire Starters).
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Seven days ago, sat in a coffee shop, much like the one I’m currently sitting in, I read Nick Laird’s new poem in Granta. Up Late is a brutal and beautiful howl of a poem in which the poet writes about the recent death of his father. I read, as I read most things, through a self-centric lens, tearing up at the loss Laird described, but primarily drawn to the parallels between his experience and my own
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While the dolmens surrounding John Montague’s childhood were regular old people, my own early years were witnessed by a vast cloud of rural spinsters.
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I’m stuck in my house today listening to my neighbours grow increasingly more drunk as they prepare for their annual post-parade barbecue and Garth Brooks sing-along. I have decided to use my time profitably. I have washed the bin and waded my way through a fortnight’s worth of laundry, tackled the admin mountain and am now compiling a list of twelve novels which you might have missed the first time round.
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Basically, I am chancing my arm here. I’m probably going to write some of these pieces anyway, then try to find a home for them. But if there’s anyone out there who’d like to commission an article or essay on any of these topics please give me a wee shout and I can tailor to your word count and theme. My DMs are open on Twitter @jancarson7280
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POTPiRiVANJE, the Croatian translation of The Fire Starters has recently launched in Croatia and I wanted to introduce you all to the fantastic translator who’s done such an amazing job, bringing this novel to a Croatian audience.
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I’ve wanted to write something about artists and ageing for a while now. Now seems as good a time as ever. Bob Dylan turns 80 tomorrow and I first started thinking along these lines at one of his concerts in 2017.
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The Last Resort, my series of linked short stories set in a caravan park in Ballycastle is being published next Thursday. Yes, that is April 1st. And, yes I am trying not to read too much into that date. This will be my second attempt to launch a book during Lockdown. Postcard Stories 2 came out back in August. I don’t know anyone else who’s published two books during Lockdown, (cue everyone tweeting to point out writers who’ve published three or four), so I’m setting myself up as a kind of expert, offering straight from the hip, hard learnt wisdom and advice to the very very many people who are sending their wee books out into a locked down world.
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“Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. ‘It’s just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it’s not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we’ve got. body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That’s all I ask. And we haven’t got a body.”
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I completed the first Morse novel at the end of last week. My dad, had already flown through it, is now tearing through the latest Ian Rankin and threatening to start into February’s Morse. We had a debrief on Saturday past.
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On Thursday I hosted an online symposium showcasing contemporary Northern Irish writers and discussing the issues raised by their work. It was an incredibly heartening experience. An enormous range of different voices contributed to a programme which emphasised just how accomplished, nuanced and eclectic our writing community is.
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I’m really proud of the fact that for the next ten weeks, as we wade through the early implications of Brexit, Radio 4 will be broadcasting Northern Irish stories, voiced by people who live and work here.
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“Nothing in my education or experience prepared me even to expect the horror and anxiety and moral bewilderment that I have felt during these years of racism and disintegration at home and a war of unprecedented violence and senselessness abroad. The attempt to keep meaning in one’s life at such a time is a continuous strain, and perhaps ultimately futile: there is undoubtedly a limit to how long private integrity can hold out in the face of, and within, public disintegration.”
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I have very little to say in defence of 2020. It felt like an utter vacuum of a year. It was hard to write. It was hard to think. It was hard to be. Reading was the only thing which came easy to me in 2020.
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Charles made the application without telling either Mother or Father. He’d seen a documentary on the television and thought it would be interesting to be a host.
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