In conversation with FRANCES O'ROURKE
DERMOT BOLGER
A prolific poet, playwright, and novelist Dermot Bolger started his first publishing company when he was 18. He lives in Dublin with his two sons. Tea Chests and Dreams: A Night of First Nights, Dermot Bolger's new play about the experience of five women moving into new homes, runs in the Axis Theatre, Ballymun, from April 10th to April 14th and in the Civic Theatre, Tallaght on April 20th and 21st.
'MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Tony was when he took over the New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press from David Marcus. I'd got married and needed money so I sent an extract from a novel, The Journey Home, cunningly disguised as a short story. Tony accepted it and it won a Hennessy award. But I hadn't really met him. That was in 1988.
“Years later, after I’d started New Island Books, I was doing a reading with Ferdia Mac Anna in Ballymun library. There were about four people there. The introduction has always stuck in my head: it was by a community worker who said ‘Jaysus, we had a massive crowd for Roddy Doyle last night, there were 200 people turned away at the front door.Now we have Dermot Mac Anna and Ferdia Bolger to do their bits and bobs’.
When the reading was over, this member of the audience came up to say hello to me – and it was Tony. So I did what one immediately does when you meet someone you admire from your past, I offered him a job as editor of New Island. That was August 1994.
“I’d started New Island in 1991 because I realised I couldn’t run a publishing company and be a full-time writer. When I was published by Penguin I discovered there were people called executive editors, so I decided I’d become one of those and disappear into the background. I was able to establish a company with the ethos of Raven Arts Press – which I founded when I was 18 – but when there was a misprint on page 31 it wasn’t my fault.
“I felt Tony had handled my story so well, he was a capable, literate, intelligent editor. I told him the one thing you have to do is publish Nuala O’Faolain, because her journalism was so great. Tony did a fantastic job coaxing Are You Somebody from her and it became a huge seller, was a huge success for New Island, in which I had no part.
“He became a really really good family friend to myself and my late wife Bernie and my boys Donnacha and Diarmuid. When I was through my tough times, Tony was one of the first people I phoned . . . he’s one of those guys you know will always be there for you. Some of my happiest memories would be of me and my late wife dining at Adrienne and Tony’s table.
“Tony is an incredibly underrated writer, who’s written an extraordinarily good novel called Nighthawk Alley . He’s not so well known to the general public but is hugely respected in the writing community in Ireland and abroad. I would trust his judgment on everything. He came into my life late and became an integral part of my family.”
ANTHONY GLAVIN
Boston-Irish author Anthony Glavin first came to Ireland in 1974, and lived in Donegal before moving to Dublin. An editor with New Island, for which he edited Nuala O’Faolain’s bestselling memoir, Are You Somebody?. He lives in Dublin with his wife Adrienne and has three children and five grandchildren.
‘WE MET FIRST at the Hennessy awards in the year Dermot won one of the prizes – the judges were David Marcus and Ian McEwan. I made no impression on him at all, but he did own up to the fact his entry wasn’t a short story but a novel extract. After I started working as an editor in New Island, we quickly became tight friends. We were simpatico from the get go.
“I first came to Ireland from the US in 1967 for just two weeks and fell in love with Donegal, came back in 1974: I’d done all sort of things, been a secondary school teacher, been in the Peace Corps and was associate editor of a magazine in the state of Maine. I wanted to try writing and had a couple of stories published in New Irish Writing; Poolbeg published a collection, One for Sorrow.
“Then I succeeded David Marcus as editor of New Irish Writing for a year and a half from 1987 to 1988, working from Glencolumbkille. I was reading 70 stories and 200 poems a month: it was a world institution, and for me a labour of love, the best gig ever I had.
“When the New York Times gave his novel The Journey Home a front page rave review in 2008 – nearly 20 years after it was published over here – I nearly picked up the phone to remind him who first published it. New Island, which Dermot had started with Edwin Higel, who distributed Raven Arts, had been going two or three years by the time I came on board. They’d just had a huge success with Joe O’Connor’s The Secret World of the Irish Male – every time they reprinted they’d try to fix a few more typos. Dermot quickly saw what Nuala [O’Faolain] called my ‘constructive pickiness’. I enjoy editing so much: I was very proud of Nuala’s success: it was a New York Times number one bestseller, over a million copies sold.
“Dermot’s generosity can’t be overstated: with Raven Arts, he was the first publisher/editor of a generation of Irish writers. Like Colm Toibín, he’s hugely generous to other writers in terms of contacts, recommendations, suggesting outlets, agents, editors. My book Nighthawk Alley followed from Dermot’s suggestion that a short story I’d written had the legs to become a novel.
“It’s hard to articulate the depth of Dermot’s and my friendship or to talk about how he’s had to survive Bernie’s death, which he has done so magnificently: he’s a fabulous homekeeper and father to his two lads. He’s sheer fun to be with. It’s hard to express exactly how we turned into such a team so quickly, despite our disparate backgrounds, but perhaps that wonderful Irishism, ‘One spider knows another’ explains it. That, or we were brothers in a previous life. ”
