AUDREY ROBINSON

My poetry exploits the layers of meaning in words to explore our bond with nature and to capture those instants when she reminds us of the accident of our existence. As I am based in the rugged, bleak, and unpredictable landscape of the Wild Atlantic Way, the work is inextricably linked to this environment.

My narratives explore the relationship between place and psychological spaces. My short stories and flash fictions centre around moments when external conditions force characters to decide how they want to be in the world. As an exjournalist, who has lived in both the Global North and South, the impacts of world politics and global warming find their way into my non-fiction, which questions the way we treat each other and the planet.

I am inspired to push words to the limit of meaning by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Emily Dickinson. I am also influenced by the compassion evident in the works of Samuel Beckett, Terry Pratchett, and Claire Keegan. Like these writers, I want to create characters and situations that uncover our humanity and explore its potential as well as its failings.

Reflections

At the top of Richmond Hill we turn to catch our breath, and find the city lit beneath us:

A motorways phosphorescence, ribboned with red and white, softly spiderwebbed with lythe streetlamps.

So that we go reeling back to an apple-tinged night near Conn, where over the moonbright lake a spill of tailed meteors marbled the canopy, and saw their sky-roving reflected in dark water.

Reflections

So, I packed my things, throwing all into the back of my Golf, and drove the three hour teary-eyed drive to Sligo, a town I had long since turned my back on with the coming of Anna to my life.

Now, a week later, I sat in McCool’s pub, waiting for my old friend Ray to arrive in. I had not been in Cool’s for a long time, but I could see no changes to the place: the blinds entirely down, patrons dashed by the slits of light piercing through; yellow tungsten bulbs created moody shadow, and the light in the far-left corner still quivered; the same creased faces and dark sunken eyes occupied the bar with mad John Swift still sat at the cheap fruity machine, a flat pint of muddy Carling beside him, pressing those buttons with all the hope in the world. Sitting directly under the glow of the cheap warm bulb, I felt like a hare in a wolf’s den.

Finally, Ray arrived in and I saw those lightbulb blue eyes that were so synonymous with him. He took my hand in his, those coarse gravel palms scratching my soft boyish mitt.

I try to write tender and intimate stories that reflect the human condition while also vividly describing a scene. My recurring themes are identity, masculinity, love, and loneliness. Currently, I am working on a story about an isolated young man who feels stagnant in his west of Ireland home. Jack Kerouac is an inspiration and his use of roman à clef is something I have adapted to my own stories. Other inspirations are Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Charles Bukowski. As a child I struggled in school and sport due to health problems I was born with. This sense of isolation and feeling different to the rest of the boys in school is something I have embraced in my life and has become a strong component of my work. My writing explores possibilities for young Irish men and exposes the limitations of toxic masculinity.

I grew up in a small town close to the border in Donegal. Spending most of my life in the Irish countryside has influenced my style of writing with a strong sense of place. My nonfiction focuses on complex relationships with family and being nine thousand miles away from them and the place I called home for twenty years.

I decided to move to Perth, Australia in the middle of my final year of college, switching to the online version of the course. Growing up in a working-class household, travelling to the other side of the world and working various part-time jobs along the way has led to a mountain of stories I want to tell.

My non-fiction consists of issues I have personally experienced laid bare using scene rather than reflection. My nonfiction piece explores issues that so many young people face such as addiction, being away from home for the first time and of course family and relationship issues.

My nonfiction attempts to make sense of the world as I see it. My short stories attempt to distract from the world when things don’t make sense.

In Ireland, when I was still in primary school, the family next door had a cat who they thought was a girl. It was called Sarafina and he seemed to enjoy sitting on my back doorstep more than staying in their house because we gave him bacon and fish scraps. A black kitten appeared beside him one day and she was my cat from then on.

My whole family seemed to hate animals. My mum, dad and brother would kick the cat if it was sitting on the doorstep in their way. The cat stayed regardless. I would bring her in and hold her purring on my lap when I was home alone. She eventually had kittens and they all died off one by one. Their hardened bodies snuggled in a blanket I sacrificed for them in a cardboard box in the corner of the shed. I didn’t cry until the last one died. I sat holding the last kitten glaring at my cat who washed herself nonchalantly.

She had more kittens a while later and one of them lived. I came back from school one day and the cats were gone. I thought nothing of it, they would always come back. A few days passed and I asked my mum if she had seen them. She and my brother had put them in the boot of her car, drove somewhere and left them at the side of the road.