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Fred’s words dance from the asylum

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By John Rainsford

 

A PROPHET is never recognised in his own land, according to biblical tradition. However, a new book by a writer in residence with Clare-based writers’ group,Three-Legged Stool is threatening to buck that ancient trend.
Fred Johnston was born in Belfast and educated in St Malachy’s College before a brief sojourn took him to Toronto in Canada. He moved to Dublin in 1968 and then to Galway in 1976, living in Spain and Africa somewhere along the way. He is a founder/director of the Western Writers’ Centre in Galway.
Suitably enough, given his political focus, Dancing in the Asylum is the title of his latest collection of stories, published by Parthian Books in Wales. The collected works have been written variously over the past quarter of a century. Orangeman, a collection of stories in French, was published by Terre de Brum (France) in October 2010.
“This anthology was described by critics as being somewhat ‘dark’,” explains Fred. “I suppose one or two of the new stories could be termed dark but I do not see them all in that light. Basically, I am interested in situations in which individuals have little or no control over their lives, yet seek it desperately. I do not believe in a god, who sits directing human life on a fluffy cloud. I think we are responsible for our own destinies. My stories tend to be about that situation and a certain loss of faith.
“I try to write about that which I find difficult to talk about. We are each of us alone from birth. We never quite get over the shock of being hurled into the world and out of the safety of the womb. Perhaps all writing, to an extent, is about dealing with that trauma. I also believe strongly that writers should be engaged with the politics of their time, though that opinion has not earned me too many friends in literary Ireland.”
He added, “One contemporary Irish painter inspired me to remain true to my own art over the years because through all manner of adversity, they remained true to theirs. However, I cannot encourage people to be writers if they have not got the desire, patience, mania and talent to be so. I may as well try to encourage them to be brain surgeons. Ultimately, if you are serious, writing will find you.”
As an only child, he tended to retreat into a world of his own. He found, in books, the possibility of new experiences and by writing about them found a certain level of control over his own desti]er.”
Writing poetry comes to him more frequently than prose but he believes they are very different beasts and cannot really be compared.  Over the past few years, he has written and published poetry mainly in French.
“I found that I had come to a point where I needed a new vocabulary and a new voice. I wanted to peel myself away from what I had come to see as an ‘industrialised’ poetry machine in Ireland. The age of the ‘instant poet’ was then upon us, unfortunately. In fact, poetry involves an apprenticeship like any other craft and neither workshops nor well-meaning friends can create a poet out of nothing,” he believes.
Both John Steinbeck and James Baldwin inspired his early forays into writing. He was also influenced by the great book, Let us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee and Walker Evans. His work as a journalist also made him see writing as an act of recording and defiance, allowing him to say things that others would rather not.
“Irish writers have been notoriously silent throughout our recent political scandals and seem, in the main, to have forsaken any sense of political consciousness. Why has no one yet written a novel about the banking scandals?  Brian Cleeve’s novel, Cry of Morning, published at the start of the ’70s, tackled the looming avarice of modern Ireland but there has been nothing since. Some of our novelists seem only to have the American market in mind.
“I was writer in residence in the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco in 2004 but interestingly, before I went out there someone had forwarded, to the library from Galway, an edited version of a confidential report on the Western Writers’ Centre with a view to blackening me in some way. It was ignored, of course but it did not reflect well on Galway’s arts scene, which tends to be factional and desperately self-reverential. But we do good work, putting on festivals, such as The Forge at Gort, annually, events, courses and providing publishing guidance.”
He agrees with Brian Moore’s infamous assessment that writing was ‘bloody hard work’ adding that it can also be very boring, tedious and above all, lonely. However, he feels there is nothing special about it. “No writer is more important than the chaps who collect the refuse bins in my street, or my doctor. Only academics and quasi-intellectuals describe writers as ‘important’ because writers sustain their careers. You might say that the only relevant writer is the one whose work lands him or her in jail. For the most part, the rest is a sort of cogitative entertainment.”
What inspires him to write a story or a poem? They tend to find him, he says. “A phrase or an image dances around in my head until it tires itself out and then I have to find somewhere for it to sleep. That is about it. When arts organisers come to putting festivals together, they tend to go for the most publicised names, regardless of whether they are any good or not as writers. So if Dublin is not talking about you, or The View on RTÉ, then you tend not to exist as a writer in some minds. This is all down to laziness, of course and an eye for fashion and celebrity over talent.”
Currently, he is working occasionally with the Clare-based Three-Leggéd Stool writers’ group and he finds this takes up a lot of the time that he would otherwise lend to writing. However, it is no less political.
“Running a writers’ centre is as much about playing politics, which I detest, as anything else. Perhaps it is my Northern upbringing but I prefer plain-speaking to waffle and the use of language as a disguise rather than as a tool for direct communication.
“I like to go to France and have been there frequently to translate French writing, which is so alive and imaginative. In France, you feel surrounded by a respect for culture not readily existing here, where we have, to our eternal shame, managed to permit Thoor Ballylee, once the home of WB Yeats, to rot. This is incomprehensible to writers from abroad who have visited here. Such things would never be permitted in France.”
For more information on Fred Johnston see www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/j/Johnston_F2/life.htm.

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