Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap?
In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction.
What if this essay is a poem, a song, or a piece of flash? What if I want to invite a collaborator in? What do I do when the words start to get out of hand and begin to ask if they can occupy a different shape?
Much of my recent work has taken the form of hybrid texts. When I was asked to write an essay for the 'Craft - Non-Fiction' section of The Irish Writers Handbook 2025, I described this as, "writing that occupies a space between fact, memoir, fiction, opinion, and maybe something else." I wrote that this type of text, including autofiction, critico-fiction, archive-based fiction, and fact-ion (a combination of fact and fiction) "must find a shape of its own, every time, if it is really going to work." The essay called for its own shape, and so my Quintet on Hybrid Texts contained anecdotes with writing advice under the headings ‘Cello’, ‘Chimes’, ‘Gong’, ‘Clarinet’ and ‘Cymbals’, to which editor Ruth McKee added a precursor taken from the final line of the piece: ‘Until the Words Sing’.
published in the Irish Writers Handbook 2025, edited by Ruth McKee.
The previous year I had been approached by artist Debbie Godsell to write an essay about a new body of work she was making as part of her exploration of her Church of Ireland heritage, which went on to be exhibited under the title ‘Flail’. In response, I also wrote the lyrics for a hymn, which emerged from the notes I had made in her studio. Harvesting History went on to have music composed by Susan Nares and a choir performance at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in February 2025, an outcome I could not have anticipated when I wrote it. The hymn uses language written in response to Godsell’s work: thresh, flail, genteel, neat, fuss, snub, congregate, beat, lessons, history, harvest, heft, identity.
From 2022 to 2024, I gave myself three writing instructions: Be Brave, Experiment, Collaborate.
I had been thinking more about new forms and shapes for writing since the Royal Hibernian Academy commissioned me to write a book to commemorate the 2023 bicentenary of its foundation. From Ten Till Dusk (2023) became what I often describe as a chocolate box, with each of its twelve chapters taking a different, often experimental, approach to the material it covers.
included in Chapter 9, Dear Dorothy.
Design by Oonagh Young
The book includes historical fiction, lyric essay, epistolary creative non-fiction, archive-based writing, poetry and song. In her 2024 essay for The Paper, Gaps on the Chain, Theo Hynan-Ratcliffe calls it "a creative loosening and unpicking of the archives": "a piece of history told as a series of a hundred questions pressed into blocks on the page, a portrait as professed by the writer… a slant glance through the archives and its cracks. A document of a location across different temporal moments."
edition of 25. OPW and private art collections.
From 2022 to 2024, I gave myself three writing instructions: Be Brave, Experiment, Collaborate. The power of words can be unexpected. Since then, I have collaborated with artists, including the painter Deirdre Frost, for whom I made a text response in the form of a haptic artwork, To the Line, now part of the OPW collection; and written hybrid and collaborative texts, including a poem with the writer Oonagh Montague selected for the Shauna Gilligan and Niamh Boyce-edited anthology, Fire, published by Arlen House. All of it came from asking speculative questions: What if this poem is a sculpture? What if this essay is a hymn? What if this sculpture is a mobile poem is a game?
Begin.
The Irish Writers Handbook 2025 is published by Wordwell Books.
