Telling the Untold: Uncovering and Healing in Irish/Irish-American Writing
Sunday, March 1st, 2020 1-3pm
San Francisco Public Library, Koret Auditorium
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco
Telling the Untold: Uncovering and Healing in Irish/Irish-American Writing
Uncovering the hidden, traumatic or denied past is a recurring theme in Irish and Irish-American writing focused on family histories. Éanlaí Cronin, Emer Martin and Linda Norton will share their work and join in conversation about the importance of exploring and sharing these the untold experiences.
Éanlaí Cronin
Éanlaí Cronin is a teacher, memoirist, and certified facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists Method. She runs writing groups and retreats in San Francisco’s East Bay for anyone in recovery from addiction and trauma, and for anyone longing to return to the well of their own forgotten words and stories. Éanlaí’s work has appeared in Eastern Iowa Review, Peregrine, String Poet, Sinister Wisdom, Sonoma Women’s Voices, The Magic of Memoir Anthology, the 2018 Fish Anthology of Irish Writers and Courage To Heal. Éanlaí is currently submitting her first completed memoir, Girl in Irish, to literary agents and has begun work on her second book—another memoir.
Emer Martin
The Cruelty Men, Emer’s most recent novel is published by Lilliput Press and was nominated for Irish Novel of the Year 2019. Her first novel Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year 1996 in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. Houghton Mifflin released Breakfast in Babylon in the U.S. in 1997. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel was published internationally in 1999. Emer studied painting in New York and has had two sell-out solo shows of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt St, Dublin.Her third novel Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland March 07, and released in the U.S. 2014. She released her first children’s book Why is the Moon Following Me? in 2013. Pooka is a Halloween book for children released in 2016. Her latest children book The Pig who Danced was released in 2017.
She completed her third short film Unaccompanied. She produced Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut NUTS in 2007. Emer was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She now lives between the depths of Silicon Valley, CA and the jungles of Co. Meath, Ireland.
Linda Norton
Linda Norton is a visual artist and writer. Her book The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny Howe) was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A sequel, Wite Out: Love and Work (A Memoir with Poems), will be published by Hanging Loose Press in spring 2020. She is a writing consultant with the LEAD Project and the labor union Unite Here, an instructor at SFSU, and a columnist for SFMoMA’s Open Space. She grew up in Boston and was a New Yorker from 1987-1995. She lives in Oakland and is a dual citizen (since 2017) of the US and the Republic of Ireland/EU.