TypeFace

The Writers Portrait Project

TypeFace is a portrait project where I am asking authors, poets and playwrights to allow me to take a classic black and white portrait of them, and I am also asking them to nominate a piece of their writing to overlay onto the image.

The basis of the idea is that, unlike actors, musicians and comedians, writers shouldn’t need to project a personality in their portraits, their words should reflect their personality instead.

Each portrait is shot with the same background, the same lighting, the same lens and edited in the same way to create a uniform body of work.

Each passage chosen by the writer will have a significance and a story behind it, and eventually, I plan to have an exhibition of large format prints of the images and an accompanying book with the images and the written work.

There is no charge for taking part and I will give each participant a colour and a b&w digital image for their own promotional use. 

Contact me on 086 806 4613 or at dermot.photo@gmail.com for more information.

Louise O'Neill - Author

"I wrote the article for the Irish Examiner in the days following Ashling Murphy’s murder, trying to channel the grief, fury, and helplessness that so many of us felt into something that would ask deeper. I wanted to interrogate the cultural conditions that make violence against women feel so inevitable, and to expose how deeply embedded the fear of male violence is in women’s everyday lives."

David Mitchell - Author

'These are two micro-chapters begin a tale in my new book.  The first describes one of those dreams that starts off feeling real but then feeds clues about its true status as Not Real, or surreal, or alternatively real.  The second joins the dreamer, waking in a hospice bed.  I've always had a fondness for that twilit state between sleeping and waking.  These excerpts bridge that state.'

Sean Ronayne - Ornatholigist and Author

Sean's piece is from his book "Natureboy" and is a description of why the Whitethroat is his favourite bird.

Catherine Ryan Howard - Author

"It's the opening scene to my debut novel Distress Signals (2016) and I chose them because they're the words that started everything. They started my first novel but also got me my agent, first book deal, etc. and when it came time to do events, it was always those words I read aloud."

Cónal Creedon - Author

Cónal's piece is called Pluto’s Vision of Heaven and is an extract from a longer piece called Passion Play. Cónal sent me three pieces of work and I chose this one because of it's connection to Cork city,

Gráinne Murphy - Author

Time Immemorial for her daughter Ali. It was written during Covid, when I was missing being able to visit our local graveyard, where our baby daughter is buried. At its simplest, I've picked the piece because I'm proud of it and it feels as true to me today as when I wrote it. At another level, I've picked it to honour Ali and to remember her in another place and another way. 

Patrick Holloway - Author

Patrick sent me a fantastic short story called The Spider.

Danielle McLaughlin - Author

I chose that extract for its setting, which is inspired by my own home and garden in winter (though I do not, sadly, have a fish pond!) and by the stretch of road that leads from my home to Cork city. It's a stretch of road by a river that is incredibly beautiful when everything freezes over. It's also quite a scary road to drive when that happens, and so there's a sense sometimes of being isolated, trapped, a hint of threat running alongside the beauty of nature. The river in the story is the Shournagh River that runs through Donoughmore towards Blarney.

John Patrick McHugh - Author

This is an extract from a story of mine called Bonfire. It was the first 'good' 'proper' story I ever finished so it is special to me.

Kate Durrant - Author

Just to be beside you (is enough). Living with someone who has dementia makes you acutely aware of how often you ask, “Do you remember?” My partner has lived with dementia since 2017, and writing helps me to navigate our way through this. Reminding me, not of what we have lost, but of the love that still speaks within the silence.

Garrett Carr - Author

These are all extracts from my border notes and journals from when I was writing The Rule of the Land.

Kitty Murphy - Author

Freezer Space. Because I love it - and I own copyright! It’s true to my voice as Kitty, and you are seeing my face as Kitty, so they matched.

Dean Browne - Poet

Aide-Mémoire - This is the first poem from my book Afterparty

Chloe Howarth - Author

The section of the girls in the chipper, Susannah eating, and Lucy’s reaction to her eating, was written fairly early on in the process of creating Sunburn. I remember being excited by it, and enjoying the more visceral, unusual angle of attraction that Lucy's was coming from. This has become somewhat of a theme in my writing, so it’s nice to look back on an early iteration of it. It's of the sections that readers mention to me the most, and sets the tone for the rest of the book.

John FitzGerald - Poet

John sent me his poem Boulevard du Temple, 1838.

Brendan MacEvilly - Author

In the novel, there are a number of fictional art works which the fictional characters create, but more and more, I want to create these works myself. This section describes one project conceived of by the main character which I pursued myself, to find abandoned houses around the landscape, light fires in the fire places and photograph the results. It is one of the ways I've been trying to bring the book to life, and keep it alive, to make it more real for me and the reader, and it's also a nice contemplative moment between all the mayhem in the book.

Lynda Marron - Author

HOW TO BECOME A WRITER IN NINETY-SEVEN-ISH EASY STEPS. "Even with two novels under my belt, I’m still surprised when anyone calls me a writer. I was delighted to be asked to take part in the Typeface Project. It seemed a good occasion to ask myself how I got here."

Madeleine D'Arcy - Author

Madeleine sent me the beginning of a story called Ezinna's Flamboyant Tree

Mary Morrissy - Author

From Penelope Unbound (p189-194) with kind permission of Banshee Press.

Molly Twomey - Poet

'Stop Hitting Yourself' is a really personal poem. It's me in conversation with myself and with others who suffer from the same inclination towards using self harm to deal with frustration. Often, when I am writing, I get aggravated because I never feel good enough, my words always straggling behind an impossible standard I've set for myself. In these instances, the only solution is to get up and walk away from the desk, to distract myself, to change my body temperature. I rarely adhere to the advice in this poem so it is really a wish for the future, that I may understand and treat myself better. 

Joy Larkcom - Gardener and Author

This is the opening chapter from “Just Vegetating”, by acclaimed garden and travel writer Joy Larkcom.  Joy chose this piece from her extensive writing because it is the beginning of her story, which leads on the Grand Vegetable Tour she undertook with her husband, Don, and their two young children in the 1970s, travelling around Europe by caravan. That tour was followed by her books and her travels in China and Japan and finally her move to West Cork, to set up her “retirement garden”.

Paul McMahon - Poet

"Tom’s Pouch of Cure-Stones" Paul chose this poem which is about an old neighbour of his in Co. Sligo who had an ancient folk remedy for curing ailments in cattle.

Ruth Padel - Poet

Diver. "This is the poem I'd like to use, and the reason it matters to me is that I wrote it for a very dear friend, when she was dying from a very suddenly discovered cancer. She had started a poetry press and done so many generous and creative things in her life.

Brian Connolly - Author

Chapter 5 from my second book Annihilation Theory. I thoroughly enjoyed creating my villains for this book. Unhinged, untethered and utterly convinced that they are doing the right thing, I often found myself surprised by the direction they took me. In this particular scene, my antagonist has a cruel contraption that is designed to test his young followers devotion. I would like to say I had prepared this device prior to writing the chapter but it was as much a surprise to me as the young man that fell foul of it. It's moments of discovery like that where the process of writing can be a real joy. 

Allyson McCabe - Author

This is a passage from my 2023 book "Why Sinead O'Connor Matters." It's the moment where I break the fourth wall between journalist and subject, writer and reader. The experience of interviewing Sinéad in 2021 and then going on to write this book changed everything for me.

Dominic Moore - Playwright and Actor

This is an extract from Dominic's one man show "Mr Punch" and it contains a pivotal moment in the play.

Afric McGlinchey - Author & Poet

"In which my father is a sun and I star too." Afric sent me four memoir pieces about growing up in South Africa and living in Ireland as an adult.

Joe Horgan - Poet

Joe sent me a piece he wrote for The Irish Post newspaper. It is the defining experience of growing up in an Irish immigrant family in a huge Irish community in an English city. I return to this theme again and again. In a world now so often defined by migration and the often haunted lives of immigrants
and the hostility emigrants now encounter in so much of the world I write to recount a factual experience. The utterly human experience of belonging to immigration. My parents left Cork and Cork left them but at the same time they never, ever left Cork and Cork never, ever left them.

Tina Pisco - Author

"Imagine This/ Imagine that." Sunrise Sunset and other fictions (Fish Publishing 2018)

Sadhbh Moriarty - Author

Martha Bayne - Author

The essay I'm sharing is from Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us, the book on Sinéad O'Connor that I coedited, and  the book that brought me to Bantry this summer.

Mieke Keerens - Author

I chose it because being at the festival in Bantry among all the writers, presenting on a panel and having this portrait taken, all makes me still feel so grateful and shocked at my life as a writer. I wrote a narrative essay, one of the first I ever published (in the anthology Best Travel Writing, after the events in this essay, just after getting accepted to the top Creative Writing MFA program in the United States, which I had never believed possible. But this period in France of reinventing myself and starting to believe perhaps this was something I could do, was the seed that grew into my writing career and my identity as a writer today. So it feels like a very significant, personal piece of writing to me, as a type of genesis story.

Orna Dunlevy - Author

I selected it as I like comedy as a medium and love short stories. It is largely autobiographical and is set in a changing Ireland.

Paul Duffy - Author

The Birthday is a extract from my book Into The Island