A Leap in the Dark 40

A Leap in the Dark 40  Saturday 15th August 2020

  Tramp Press Night

An evening curated by Laura Waddell, UK Publishing Director of the  Dublin-based independent publisher Tramp Press, co-founded in 2014 by Lisa Coen and Sarah Davis-Goff.

Laura has brought together some of the very best contemporary writers for a special Leap featuring prose and poetry in English and Irish. 

There's no charge for taking part in A Leap in the Dark, so please make a donation, no matter how large, to The Trussell Trust.

The Programme

The Pale Usher welcomes you

1 Laura Waddell introduces Tramp Press

2 Doireann Ní Ghríofa

The poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut A Ghost in the Throat will be launched by Tramp Press on August 27th.

In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that reaches across the centuries to another poet. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with finding out the rest of the story. A Ghost in the Throat is a fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction exploring the ways in which a life can be changed in response to the discovery of another.

3 Ian Maleney

Set around a small family farm on the edge of a bog, a few miles from the river Shannon, Minor Monuments is a collection of essays unfolding from the landscape of the Irish midlands. Taking in the physical and philosophical power of sound and music, and the effects of Alzheimers disease on a family, Ian Maleney questions the nature of home, memory, and the complex nature of belonging.

4 Sara Baume

handiwork is a contemplative short narrative from acclaimed writer and visual artist Sara Baume. It charts her daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Her first work of non-fiction offers readers a glimpse into the process of one of Ireland’s best writers, written with the keen eye for nature and beauty.

handiwork is Sara Baume’s third book, following on from her acclaimed novels Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither and A Line Made By Walking which were also published by Tramp Press.

5 Doireann Ní Ghríofa reads some poetry

Interval

6 Jack Fennell

Editor of A Brilliant Void, a collection of fifteen darkly funny stories illuminate a side of Irish literary history that is often overlooked. This collection of lesser-known works of classic Irish science fiction.\

7 Joanna Walsh

7 Laura & The Pale Usher in conversation

8 The Pale Usher signs off

The Company

Sara Baume grew up in county Cork and studied Fine Art at Dun Laoghaire College of Art and Design before completing the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. She first came to prominence when she won the Davy Byrne Short Story award for her story ˜Solesearcher1™ in 2014. Her debut novel Spill, Simmer, Falter, Wither was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has been widely translated. In 2017 A Line Made by Walking was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award (previously known as the IMPAC). She has also been awarded the Rooney Prize and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. She works as a visual artist as well as a writer, and her first solo exhibition took place in autumn 2018. handiwork is her first work of non-fiction. She lives in west Cork.

Jack Fennell is a writer, editor, translator and researcher whose academic publications include pieces on science fiction, utopian and dystopian literature, monsters, Irish literature, and the legal philosophy of comic books. He is the author of Irish Science Fiction (2014), a contributing translator for The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013), and a former Visiting Fellow at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway. He lives in Limerick.

Ian Maleney is a writer based in Dublin. Born and raised in Co. Offaly, he works as a freelance arts journalist, primarily for the Irish Times, and as the online editor at the Stinging Fly. His essays have been published by Winter Papers, gorse, and the Dublin Review. He is the founder of Fallow Media, an interdisciplinary publication for music, photography, and long-form writing on the internet. Minor Monuments is his debut.

Doireann Ní Ghriofa writes both prose and poetry, in both Irish and English. Among her awards are a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. 

Doireann is the author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Her most recent publications are Lies (An Irish Times Book of the Year and an Irish Independent Book of 2018), and 9 Silences, a collaborative book of poetry and art, created with acclaimed visual artist Alice Maher. 

Laura Waddell is a writer of fiction and narrative non-fiction published in 3:AM Magazine, McSweeneys, and Kinfolk and contributor to several books including Nasty Women, Know Your Place, The Digital Critic, We’ll Never Have Paris, We Were Always Here, and others. She writes a weekly column for the Scotsman newspaper, and her debut non-fiction book, Exit, will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. 

Joanna Walsh is an internationally-published writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She is also a critic (The Guardian, The New Statesman, Los Angeles Review of Books), and an editor at 3:AM Magazine and gorse editions. She was a judge on the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize and won the Arts Foundation Award for Creative Non-fiction in 2017. She founded @read_women. She is the author of Vertigo, Hotel, Fractals, Grow A Pair, Worlds From The Word’s End and the digital work Seed-story.com. Her ‘novel in essays’ Break.up was published in the UK by Tuskar Rock Press and in the US by Semiotext(e) in Spring 2018.

The next Leap in the Dark on Friday 21st August will feature:

- Spring Journal canto XXIII by Jonathan Gibbs, read by Michael Hughes

- splendidly dodgy yoga with David 'Guru Dave' Holzer

- Amy McCauley (as Malady Nelson) performs 24/7 Brexitland (part 3)

- a reading by Vlatka Horvat

- a performance by Tim Etchells, Melanie Pappenheim and Giles Perring

- Settling the World: Selected Stories 1969-2019 

  M. John Harrison in conversation with Jen Hodgson

- the Settee Salon with Mike, Jen, Tim and Vlatka

Stay well!

The Pale Usher