Expand+Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story. This session asks questions about the relationship between how we remember and how we articul...

Hide-Every memoir is a work of the imagination where personal observations, lived experiences and recollected memories are pulled together and made into a story. This session asks questions about the relationship between how we remember and how we articulate or represent memory and memory making, using Timothy O’Grady’s and Stephen Pyke’s I Could Read The Sky (1997). At its most basic, it tells the story of one man’s journey from the West of Ireland to the towns and cities of England, a history of Ireland’s complex migration patterns and an individual account of love and loss and regret. The book is told as an act of memory: the narrator finds himself alone at the end of the twentieth century, looking back across decades of a life lived between two islands. The full force of the collision of dislocation and belonging that afflicts the emigrant is everywhere apparent in the written and visual text. Music becomes a focal point for this collision throughout the text as a binding tie to home and fundamental expression of emigrant traditions abroad. This experience of Irish emigration is both fictional and a creative expression of historical reality. It is the memory of one man and the history of a people.

Dr Fionnuala Dillane & Dr Paul Rouse