Interviews
Poetry Notes: The Eamon Grennan Interview
‘I think poets who are serious about what they do want their language to be honest, and in being that I suppose they understand poetry as somehow keeping faith with the language in a way some other aspects of the world don’t, like politics, commerce, religion even…Maybe poetry also reminds us that there is somehow sense in things, no matter how this may seem not the case, in the private world and also in the world at large. Poetry, a poem, is a place for, maybe, attending to the little things of the day and night, the mostly unspoken zones of the psyche, the minute observations of the ordinary stuff in the world we mostly pass through without paying much attention to. Even if it’s “about” some big issue (the North, Palestine/Israel, South Africa, terrorism, whatever) I think it’s best when it enters at an oblique angle, through something specific and small. A good poem always wakens me up a little more, makes me say “someone was really here”…
Doe on Fush: John Douglas Talks to Ben Doe About Nottwel
Nearing the summer of 2001, and the end of Nottwel’s second season of mags, reformed English teacher John Douglas approached Ben Doe about doing an interview-with-the-editor for a future edition of Totally Fushed. JD conducted the interview with Ben one sunny afternoon over Bewley’s cherry cake and tea, and it was meant to be included in the first TF of Season Three. Unfortunately, by the time Ben had recovered from his bone marrow transplant in June-September ’01, JD’s interview seemed out of date, and was left by the wayside. During a recent clean-out of his room, however, Mr. Doe miraculously discovered the hour-long tape of his conversation with JD from that sunny afternoon so many years ago. The following is an edited transcript of the conversation…
Maximum Exposure: A Snapshot of Photographer David Stephenson
‘I always wanted to take photography and sort of…travel with it, have it as a reason to travel’, Dave says.
A Very American Blog: John Hawkins Interviewed
‘I thought the press coverage of the 2000 election was horribly biased against George W. Bush’, says John. ‘It was clear as a bell that Bush had won the election and that Gore was trying to steal the election with the help of the ultra-liberal Florida State Supreme Court. As the controversy over the elections dragged on and on, I became more and more disillusioned with how the media was covering it. The breaking point for me came when I was watching TV and a viewer commented that Bush should concede. Concede? Concede?! The votes had been counted multiple times and he had never been behind! That was the moment I decided to create a conservative website…
In One Life: The Bill Long Interview
‘There were two big influences in my childhood that made me want to become a writer’, he begins. One of these was ‘an alcoholic schoolteacher’, in Bill’s primary school in Waterford, who used to get Bill books to read: ‘It was very difficult to get books in the country at that time. I was born in ’32, so I’m now talking about [the late ’30s and early ’40s]. We didn’t have a county library then, and the National Library, they didn’t send a van around…’
