In Time For Holiday Gift-Giving

The writers in your life may be hard to buy for. You can't very well give them books, not when they know better than you what's good and what they might need for a study of style. A gift card to a big box bookshop is not of much use, either, as the average writer prefers the cozy comfort of the local independent. Plastic cards are so cold anyway, not really what you'd like to wrap and drop under the Christmas tree.

Thank heavens for the folks at RTE. They've put together a DVD that will be perfect for those on your gift-giving list who want to learn the craft of the novelist.

Don't know much about John McGahern? The late author was practically a literary god in the Irish pantheon, a man who got whacked by the heavy cudgel of Catholic censorship and lived to tell the tale. His first novel was written when he was a schoolteacher, back in the mid-1960's, but it was his second that got him fired from his teaching job, all due to the book's whiff of priestly sexual abuse. That turned out to be true enough, but at the time, no one was talking about such goings on.

As for the budding writer, this DVD is reputed to be instructional, giving insight into the creative processes used by McGahern as he crafted his amazing tales. No great heroes, his characters, just a lot of ordinary folks going about ordinary lives of poverty, hardship and misery. After reading The Barracks, I was depressed for days, so well did he create the mood and flavor of the featured family. To an extent, it was probably drawn largely from McGahern's own life, as his father was a garda, like the father in the book, and the stepmother dies of cancer, as McGahern's mother did when he was quite young. All of that would be explained in the DVD, I would expect, to demonstrate how to use events from your dull life and make things have deep meaning and so on.

Allowing fourteen days for delivery, you'd better dash up off your chair and place the order if the DVD's to arrive on time. Start off the New Year with a new pad of paper and a new pen and a new set of instructions on how to do it, and that novel could be written before the next Christmas rolls around.