Style is the writer’s ghost in the language machine: a series of decisions about what to write and how to write it which is both unconscious and deliberate. With this series UCD Writer in Residence Niamh Campbell is delighted to invite 8 writers to describe and discuss their process, craft, and the context of contemporary life – a world mediated by the internet, ruminating on recent history, making room for new stories, or pushing back against these – in relation to their work and their sense of style. We will talk about possible selves, multiple selves, found or concrete iterations of ‘self’; the self online, the self on drugs, the embodied or disembodied self; destruction, confession, reconstitution, and the experience of launching a debut.
Christodoulos Makris has published three books of poetry – most recently this is no longer entertainment: A Documentary Poem(Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019) – as well as several pamphlets, artists’ books and other poetry objects. His practice is rooted in contemporary experimental, cross-disciplinary, hybrid and collaborative poetics, and his work is concerned with language use, modes of communication, multiple/shifting identities, and the conflation of the public and the private enabled by digital technologies. In 2018/19 he was Writer in Residence at Maynooth University, and he received a 2020/21 Literature Project Award from Arts Council Ireland. He is the poetry editor at gorse journal and associated imprint Gorse Editions.
Kimberly Campanello’s most recent project is MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page poetry-object comprising conceptual and visual poetry on the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam. She was recently awarded an Arts Council Ireland Literature Project Award for a digital writing collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media, as well as a Markievicz Award and residencies at the Heinrich Böll Cottage on Achill Island and the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. She leads the BA English Literature with Creative Writing and supervises PhDs in innovative poetry at the University of Leeds.