Irish poet sidesteps Covid lockdowns to deliver a virtual residency in Nanjing
Scenery of Qinhuai River in Nanjing. During Covid restrictions, Nanjing Writers’ Centre hosted several virtual residencies with overseas writers, including writers from Ireland.
William Wall is a successful and wide-ranging writer with a PhD in creative writing from UCC.
Six novels have come from him to date, most recently Suzy Suzy (2019) and Grace’s Day (2018), plus three collections of short fiction and four collections of poetry.
He was the first European to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2017), with awards including the Virginia Faulkner Prize and The Sean O’Faolain prize.
Accepted for a residency in Nanjing Literature Centre in China’s Jiangsu province back in 2020, the unexpected emergence of Covid threw the planned project right out of consideration.
Or did it? Enter modern technology. With a willingness from both the Chinese side and Cork County Council (Ian McDonagh, the County’s Arts Officer, was to the fore here) to do all they could to assist, it emerged that William could in fact go on an online journey, into a virtual residency. No passport required — and yet it proved a hugely fruitful, creative experience, a residency like no other.
“A formal twinning agreement was made between Jiangsu province and Cork County Council in 2017,” said Ian McDonagh, Cork County Arts Officer. “This agreement covers a number of areas of mutual interest in the area of economic activity, culture, tourism and education. The designation of Nanjing as a UNESCO City of Literature in 2019 has focused attention on literary exchange which is supported in Nanjing by the Nanjing Literature Centre."
In 2019, the first official residency by a Cork-based writer took place when Kinsale-based poet Matthew Geden undertook a month long residency in the City. This exchange resulted in new connections being made with the literary community in the capital Nanjing and the neighbouring city of Xinghua.
The next project was William Wall’s residency, but Ian McDonagh and his team had to do some quick thinking and Nanjing Writers’ Centre hosted a virtual residency, enabling William to meet online with several prominent authors from Jiangsu and to engage in literary discussion with them.
“This virtual exchange was a new approach, and he found it absolutely fascinating — as did we! We also had writer Billy O’Callaghan doing a virtual piece for World Book Day in 2021. It’s very much in keeping with the arts office promotion of Cork artists internationally.
"In the future, we would hope to build on this formal agreement with a view to developing artist and other cultural exchanges across a range of art forms.”
So how did Wall do his virtual travel planning?
“I selected a number of ‘virtual visits’ from the list helpfully provided by Nanjing Writers’ Centre. These included a ‘visit’ to the Ming Wall and a ‘visit’ to the libraries and bookshops of the city. Before seeing the video tours, I undertook some research on Nanjing and its history to prepare myself for what I would see, and also to begin the work of putting together a piece of writing which was a requirement of the residency.
“In addition to these fascinating ‘virtual tours’ I chose a face-to-face encounter with the novelist Pang Yu. This is the part of the residency I was most looking forward to, and in the event, it was a most interesting encounter. Ably interpreted by my contact at Nanjing, Sifan Zhao, Pang Yu and I found ourselves in agreement on so many points of style and theme, such as the role of the sea and water in our work.
"I pointed out that I grew up on the shores of the Atlantic as Cork is very much a maritime city. We talked about the part the Yangtze River delta played in the city of Nanjing and in Pang Yu’s work. Sifan had sent each of us some of the other’s work and we discussed aspects of that work. I found it remarkable that two writers from such extraordinarily different cultures, two vastly different educational and literary backgrounds, could come to agreement on so much.
“My research and my encounters helped me to understand the connections between a city like Cork and one like Nanjing. It is a pity it had to be a virtual residency, but at a time of global pandemic I would like to commend both the Nanjing Writers’ Centre and Cork County Council for persevering with the initiative.”
So inspirational indeed were the residency and the contacts he made, that William was moved to create a poem sequence, two of which appear below as especially pinpointing the unexpected connections and the realities of moving from one language to another.
Read them. Both give an entirely new way of looking at life and creativity.
