Wild Atlantic Women

Writing is easy, getting published is hard. In the old days, the actual mechanics of getting words down on the page were onerous. It wasn't so much pushing the pen or banging away on your Olivetti typewriter (altho both will give you a case of R.S.I.); it was the drafts, the revisions, the fair-copy, the final final manuscript. With MS-Word or similar, all that rewriting, correcting, re-ordering is taken care of with ctlr-C ctrl-V. As the mechanics have gotten easier, more and more people have notions of authoring. The poor bloody commissioning editors are deluged with unsolicited mss. Which means less time available for finding a truly original, different, engaging, voice.

The Blob is now more than 2 million words in extent: I can and do write. But I refuse to go to a writing workshop fearing that will knock the corners of my authentic voice and reduce it to something samey. My experience with professional copy editors was informative and interesting. Re-ordering my narrative from time-sequential to bring a Hook up to the first paragraph undoubtedly made it a better product in keep-eyes-on-page terms. But every damned article in that, and every, issue of Natural History used the first para is hook trope as taught in journalism school.

I'm after reading Wild Atlantic Women - walking Ireland's West coast by Gráinne Lyons. It has a chapter on Maude Delap, and has a good bit of walking, so it's basically my jam. Old Maude has gotten a much bigger profile since I wrote about her ten years ago. The publisher's blurb tropes the book up a bit: "At a crossroads in her life, Gráinne Lyons set out to travel Ireland’s west coast on foot. She set a simple intention: to walk in the footsteps of eleven pioneering Irish women deeply rooted in this coastal landscape and explore their lives and work along the way. As a Londoner born to Irish parents, she also sought answers in her own identity". Which is fair enough, except for the hook At a crossroads in her life,  which is lazy and rather first world problemy. The walks in the drizzle which wash through the book were carried out over several years as Lyons bounced between making money in London [in television] and passing it to Ryanair and many B&Bs between Cork and Donegal. The genesis of the book as A cross-roads, is true only in the sense that every set of traffic-lights is a crossroads.

My hot-take is that the blurb quoted above is a post-hoc rationalization by publisher, editor, author and sounding-board pals to hammer the text into marketable shape. Adjacent to this is PB Medawar's essay about the scientific paper which, in all its magisterial data gathering and relentless logic, is a big fib. The process which a paper describes often starts with an Aha! result; and then goes back and makes it seem like the paper's suprising-coz-novel finding was part of a cunning plan which started forming way-back-when in the PI's rational mind.

Lyons works with words and images. She went to visit Cape Clear because an ancestor made lace there, [an ancestor was rector there etc etc] and, as a writer, she wondered how the essence of that windy wet visit could be captured and presented to an audience. There's not enough stand-alone meat in the story of Ellen Cotter, Lyons great-grandmother . . . but it could make a convincing chapter in a longer book. That required some legwork, on paths and in archives so that more tales of horizontal rain in the present moment could be chopped fine and inter-saladed with personal back-story and something about each chapter's star. It's a bit of a scrabble to find enough interesting women more-or-less associated with the West Coast to fill 200+ pages that can be printed, bound, distributed, marketed and sold. Not even a round dozen - eleven (11) will have to do. But that's all sour-puss carping: my book Barrowomen of Science so far only has one chapter - about Yvonne [Epstein] Barr [Virus].

But those 11 women are, indeed, all interesting in their own way. Some already famous to be point of being cliché - like Peig Sayers and Pirate Queen Gráinne Ní Mháille. But the list includes others who really deserve to be drug up and recognised by us moderns - like scientist Maude Delap and philanthropist of the dispossessed Charlotte Grace O'Brien. There are two more mná Uí Bhriain: Edna "Tuamgraney Co Clare" O'Brien and Kate "Roundstone, Co Galway" O'Brien. The latter's two cats - Kelly and La Grise -  feature above L with the village in the background.

Wild Atlantic Women is a professional piece of work in a particular genre [walking with meditation and a hook] and it reads easy. We await the telly-series‽ It took me months to start-and-finish it, but that's because I owned a copy (tnx Dau.I), while library books need to be returned, so they got more of my eyes and attention. I don't need to keep this book, though; and I'll happily pass it free-to-good-home on.