By Brigid O’Connor
Brigid O’Connor was recently shortlisted for The RTE Francis MacManus Short Story Competition 2010 with ‘In a minute Rita.’ You can check out her very witty blog at Sort of Writing.
My prized possession as a child was my library card. Living in a house full of nine people, I escaped into a world of books. The books revealed worlds away from my own Dublin terrace.
Before long, I started imagining my own stories and at the age of 13, I sent off a poem to The Irish Press for their Junior page. It was entitled ‘Lizzie’ and was about a six year old homeless girl:
“Today’s her birthday, she’s six years old, Nobody loves her, she’s hungry and cold”. That’s all I can remember of it, I lost the original cutting.
I know, not exactly Seamus Heaney, but I received the princely sum of a one-pound note, was published and even more importantly, I was hooked by the magic of seeing my name in print.
Life intervened and I graduated from U.C.D. with an Arts degree and like a lot of other people in 1986, emigrated to London. Returning in the 1990s, I gained a husband and two children.
I worked in sales and marketing roles in both London and Ireland but always felt that there was something else out there waiting for me. I returned to writing while raising my children to try and find my own identity and find some hush in the daily chaos. I started writing in diary form and managed to edit some pieces that I felt were possibly good enough to send out for publication.
I plucked up the courage last year to send some of these pieces out and was delighted to be chosen to record five radio essays for RTE Lyric fm’s The Quiet Quarter. The pieces were broadcast last year and one piece was selected for their anthology. The same piece was chosen for RTE Playback’s Best of 2009 programme.
I write poetry and short stories and I live in hope that some of my submitted pieces will be successful. I am a huge fan of Anne Tyler and love the way she turns the ordinary into the extraordinary and would aspire to be able to do that myself. I owe all my interest in the arts and literature to my parents, who always recognised that education was the key to unlock the riches of the world.
I would like to end by quoting a line out of one of my radio pieces ‘Grief’ about them. The ‘he’ refers to my father.
‘Yes, Mother, you were the earth and he was the sky……..
We floated somewhere in between…………’
I hope I can make them proud.