6 YEAR BLOGOVERSARY & GIVEAWAY

It's Women Rule Writer's 6 year blogoversary today, which is hard to believe. So much has happened to me in those six years: divorce, remarriage, new baby, new books, new friends, lots and lots of writing related trips and festivals and conferences. One of the many things I love about being a writer - and about being an active blogger - is that even at this age and stage of life it is possible to make new and proper friends through what I do. There can be very few jobs that provide that opportunity.

I love blogging, I must say. Even if most of the time it feels as though I am talking into the wind. I know there are lurkers out there who never comment, and I know there are those who comment only the odd time. Anyway, I want to thank those of you who do read this blog for taking the time.

I have made tentative moves re. setting up the Irish Literary Bloggers Association and I will be doing more on that towards the end of the year. Things are too hectic for me to do much with it at the moment as I have 3 USA trips in the next 3 months as well as a new fiction chapbook and spring's novel to prepare for. But if you are interested in joining or getting involved email me at nuala AT nualanichonchuir DOT com.

Anyway, to celebrate 6 years a-blogging, I am having a little giveaway. Just leave a comment to be in the draw and I will give one of my books to one lovely blog reader. Simple as that.

SYLVIA PLATH - 50 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

 
This day fifty years ago Sylvia Plath took her own life. She was a mother of two and a writer. If she were alive today she would be 80 years old. I am a fan of her work - she wrote motherhood and inner turmoil so well - and her prose is as bright and energetic as her poetry. What would she have written if she had lived? Wonderful things, no doubt. She may even have grown into her own skin and mind more, and come to terms with her troubles.

Sylvia Plath was clever, beautiful, sensual and ambitious; she was an American living in England. One gets the impression that people were afraid of her (men and women) because they had never met anyone quite like her. Much of the world's opinion of her depends on the testimony of people who maybe were not the best witnesses: her estranged husband Ted Hughes and various friends of his; her mother with whom she had an up-and-down relationship since the death of her beloved father when she was just eight.

It bothers me that suicide is the word most often attached to Plath, as if that were the most important thing about her. The word is not attached to Ernest Hemingway or Vincent Van Gogh in the same way - neither they, nor their artistic output, is defined by the fact that they killed themselves. I also dislike the choice of title of the newest biography of Plath: Mad Girl's Love Song. It is the title of a Plath villanelle but hardly appropriate as a book title. Mad? Really?

So maybe today the best we can do to honour Sylvia Plath's memory is to remember her with sympathy and empathy as the brilliant writer and, at the end, distressed young mother that she was. And we can read her work - there is plenty online if you don't have one of her books. Alternatively you can listen to John Bowman's excellent programme from yesterday morning on RTÉ Radio 1 about her here. The contributions from Eavan Boland are particularly good.

The Guardian also ran a piece on Saturday where various women writers, including Lena Dunham and Sharon Olds, reflect on Sylvia Plath's legacy - lots of sympathetic viewpoints. In the article Jeanette Winterson says, about The Bell Jar and its author: 'The early 60s was a terrible time for women. Worse for clever ambitious women...The Bell Jar was a call to action because it is a diary of despair. Plath was gifted. She could have been great. Wrong generation. Wrong medication.' Read the full piece here.