Donal Conaty's writing tends to rail against the world while celebrating it. His intention is to produce work that is a distillation of his random thoughts about all aspects of lived experience. Donal will use his residency at The Dock to continue work on a poetry collection and a novel in progress.
The poems are called Splinters because they tend to be sharp and can get under the skin of the reader. Although the subject matter varies, mortality and a sense of life passing us by even as we are living it are recurring themes. The poems can be sardonic, knowing, cynical and, occasionally, poignant and insightful.
The novel, Splintered, draws out and develops themes found in the poems. It is a third-person narrative of the interior thoughts of a man in middle age who teeters between insight and absurdity as he contemplates all aspects of what a life is against what it could be.
The work is composed of a collection of short prose pieces that, when finished and taken together, will add up to a novel. The pieces that have already been written eschew much of the exposition and plotting of conventional storytelling to deliver an intimate portrait of the central character through his innermost thoughts.
Donal is interested in literary readings as performance and plans to use The Dock’s theatrical and audiovisual facilities to help him to explore methods of enhancing the performance of a literary reading. As part of this process, he will make short videos of readings to explore the extent to which sound, lighting, facial expressions and intonation can be used to make a literary reading riveting for its audience.
Donal’s writing is influenced by writers such as Samuel Beckett, Anna Burns and Anakana Schofield – or any literature that makes him laugh and think and want to write.
