Roisin Kelly
Roisin Kelly was born in Northern Ireland but has mostly lived south of the border in the Republic. After completing her MA in Writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway, she moved to Cork City where she continues to live and write. Her work has been published in journals such as The Stinging Fly, Southword and The Interpreter’s House. In 2014 she won second and third place in the Red Line Poetry Competition and the Dromineer Poetry Competition respectively, and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award. Her work is forthcoming in the Raving Beauties Anthology (Bloodaxe 2015) and in a future issue of Poetry.
What is your creative process? Are you a night owl or an early bird? Are you in a writing group or a lone wolf?
I work best when I have a few hours to myself, whether that’s after breakfast or at midnight. When I’m writing poetry, I work quite slowly–it helps if I pick up a poetry collection and read some poems there before writing my own draft of something. Then I might distract myself for a while before going back to what I wrote earlier and editing it. I need a good bit of time to let a poem ‘settle’, hence the slow nature of my writing process. Editing a poem can take days or weeks for me, and some have even taken a year or more of re-writing before they feel complete. I am also part of a writing workshop that meets every week, and the advice from the others in my group is always immensely helpful when it comes to making changes and revisions.
What are you reading right now?
I am reading the novel The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman at the minute. It’s set in a dystopian future America, and written in an invented dialect which is difficult to follow sometimes, but every page of dense, beautiful language is worth it. I love when writers put such effort into imagining alternative forms of the English language. Kevin Barry did it with City of Bohane, and David Mitchell did it with parts of Cloud Atlas (both set in future dystopian societies as well!) I am also reading Ellen Bass’ poetry collection Like a Beggar; I picked it up at random in a second-hand bookshop on a trip to New York, and until I read it I never imagined that I had just found one of my newest favourite poets.
What are some of your favorite books of all time?
Supposedly the books you read as an adolescent are the ones that will have the most influence on your life, and after reading Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials as a twelve-year-old, it seems not a day goes by that I don’t think of it in some way. Other favourites include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Maus by Art Spiegelman, The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki and The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. As for poetry, my essential anthology is Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times, edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. It’s one of my main sources of inspiration when writer’s block strikes.