Reviewing Dublin

So last week, I packed up and rocked out all happy-like for a few days at home. Flying at lunchtime on a Wednesday, let me tell you... why have one seat when you can have six?

Arrived to an office with a view across the Green and on to the Dublin Mountains (I can't even know where to start on that one) a humus wrap and a smiley Brendan, friend and fearless editor of the Dublin Review and the resulting Dublin Review Reader. The launch of the Reader was my excuse to come over, but God knows I don't need one. I can't imagine how pleased he must have been, and how mortified to be lauded by the likes of Colm Tóibín. Mortifying, but deserved. All the great and the good were there, but better still, it was a pleasingly young crowd to boot. Finally met Claire Kilroy, who's as lovely as billed by our own good selves here, and naturally by many more important people. Met a girl whose family house we once rented, which was extremely surreal. The whole thing got a nice write-up and photo in the paper (shout if you need help with the link).

After staying up until five (fine choice), I then met the Ex, who thought my state hilarious because it's usually his. Later, in the same coffee shop, I met the only editorial staff member of New Island press. Sorry, did you follow? The ONLY editor or editorial anything for a list spanning history, memoir, travel, lit crit, women's studies and fiction, thirty strong per year. Thirty. Now, as she modestly said herself, some are in series, many are rather straightforward... but I know a few people on this more monied side of the publishing waters who might learn something.

She explained that, of course, they don't have plans to expand, but I would have fallen off my chair had she said otherwise. She did suggest that I freelance on copy-editing and the like - I can't imagine that one could make a living like that, but what, as I ask myself daily, do I know. I think a better plan might be to convince an existing house to give me reign to do a fiction list, and dammit, Janet, I still want to do the MPhil in Literary Translation at Trinity (TCD, not Trinity, Dublin... we are not an Oxbridge outpost, dahlink). I can't get enough of their webpage and how it bears the practical, approachable, multiple-hat wearing mark of my favourite professor, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, who fosters the kind of interdisciplinary view of academic study seen in American degrees with none of the accompanying bullshit. But clearly, he's an interdisciplinary kinda guy.

I then toddled down to Wicklow and thought too much. Dangerous, female and generally ill-advised, thinking too much, particularly about the unknowable, vaguely near future is completely exhausting. The whole mid-week weekend left me shaken and wanting to relocate home to Dublin for good, now, and I don't know what to do. It's hard to have a night of the kind of working life you want with a combination of people you've known and loved for years and people you'd love to get to know, and then get back on the plane, alone - I do wish that the Bearded One had been with me. As people like to remind me, I have an interesting job with great potential on a good and growing fiction list in an old, famous publishing house, I've landed some great reviewing gigs, I live in a bustling city with lots to do that's also close to home, I'm coming on for four years with one of the best men on the planet who is kind, intelligent, adoring and adored. After one of the worst years on record, we have made a happy heap in a cheap, beautiful flat in a leafy bit of the city, 20 minutes from work, rented to us by a wonderfully warm publishing grande dame. Friends from all over regularly fill the house. To welcome me home were white peaches and pomegranates in the fruit basket, and a pastel de nata from the Portuguese deli.

PDG, right? Right.

Still, bring on November '08 and the decisions that it will bring.