I should start with a bit of background. Shortly before I moved to Derry, when I knew personal circumstances would mean I had to work from home, I noticed that Dave Duggan was appearing at the Liverpool Irish Festival.
I went to his performance, listened to his words, and approached him once he’d finished. I knew nothing about him other than he was a writer from Derry. He didn’t know me from Adam. I asked for his advice. He asked for my email address.
With most people, that would have been it, a slick avoidance of a direct refusal. Within a week, he sent me an email containing the names and contact details of a handful of people that I should get in touch with. Any success I’ve had since moving to Derry, then, stems from him. (I know of others, and not just other writers, with similar stories to tell).
So I’m biased, but that doesn’t mean I like everything he’s written. I’ve always admired it, though, and him.
His latest book does nothing to diminish that admiration.
The anecdote, incidentally, is not there simply as a notice of potential partiality, but also to illustrate an important fact about Duggan, which is that he treats people well, and with respect. He lives by his beliefs, and he writes as he lives.
So, then, Journeywork. When asked about the title, Duggan recalls an anecdote he heard about Picasso.
“When Picasso and his mates gathered round together, they didn’t talk about periods, or movements,” he says. “They talked about paints and the price of turpentine.”
Creating a piece of art, whether it’s a novel or a painting or a poem, is more to do with the nuts and bolts of the process. The inspiration is the easy bit. The hard part is getting to your laptop or canvas every day and slogging through it.
“Sitting your arse down at the desk,” is how Duggan puts it.
It’s an unusual title, Journeywork, not a word I’d heard before. In the dictionary I consulted, it’s defined as necessary, routine, and menial work, the work of a journeyman. Duggan is proud to be a journeyman, and would happily accept those definitions, apart from the menial: requiring little skill and lacking prestige. He has no interest in any prestige. But the skill? What he does requires it, and the fact that he has it is clear in every sentence he writes.
Journeywork is a collection of personal essays. While he has written poetry, novels, plays for both theatre and radio, and film scripts, this is the first time he’s written in this form. The nearest he has come to it before is a blog, Breathing With A Limp. Journeywork considers Duggan’s life as a writer, and follows an arc from first efforts to the present day. And it was written with age in mind.
“Why did I write it?” Duggan repeats my question. “I’m suffering from TMB, too many birthdays.”
It’s a throwaway joke, but it’s true. Duggan will soon be 70, and says he has an awareness of ending, although he adds, “No more than yesterday. Any one of us could get hit by a bus any day.”
But while there’s the sense of an ending, the book is lively, and the fact that it’s written in a form new to him shows the desire to pursue freshness.
While not strictly speaking an autobiography, full of dates and places and gossip, it does include elements of one – born in London to Irish parents, a move to Waterford, settling in Derry – and it broadly follows a chronological order.
The book starts, unusually, with an appendix. His. Being taken out while Duggan was in his late teens. It’s not uncommon for a writer to refer to an enforced stay in hospital at a young age as the starting point for their career, and this is what happened with Duggan, filling exercise books with stories and ideas and experiences.
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This establishes a theme, as illness has dogged Duggan his entire life. The illnesses that have plagued him feature throughout. It’s dizzying to read about – the symptoms, the diagnoses, the treatments – all the additions and the subtractions suffered – partial amputations of the feet, the loss of mobility, of liberty, the striking from the list of much-loved hobbies – all recorded meticulously, almost coldly, in many ways a medical history written by a doctor, at a distance, rather than the sufferer. In chapter six, the distance shortens, coming too close to home, as the activity most loved, the writing, comes under threat.
The conditions are listed, but rarely dwelt upon, at least with not any self-pity or sense of grievance – more like log entries, a simple statement of events on a patient’s file.
There are elements of travelogue, too, as work takes Duggan to Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Places are evoked, then, and illnesses and treatments recorded. He moves smoothly through a wide range of subjects – football, philosophy, world events. But what is at the heart of this book is the examination of a writing life – why he writes, what he writes about, how he writes. There’s no false modesty or self-aggrandisement. Duggan knows both his place and his worth and is happy with both. And he knows what’s what and what matters. One chapter describes dispassionately the scene at the Oscars ceremony he attended and finishes with a comment on the fire lit inside a young boy for Shakespeare. Here’s a man who knows the difference between FAME, Fame and fame, and disregards all three.
The personal essays are intensely that. The book almost feels like Duggan writing to himself. The reader looks over his shoulder and is allowed to share in what Duggan is saying, and is grateful for it. There’s a feeling of stumbling across private papers – nothing lurid or confidential – and gaining lessons in how to live a life true to oneself, honestly and bravely, dutifully, with the right balance of humility and pride.
One chapter describes dispassionately the scene at the Oscars ceremony he attended and finishes with a comment on the fire lit inside a young boy for Shakespeare. Here’s a man who knows the difference between FAME, Fame and fame, and disregards all three
Not all the chapters grip as powerfully as others, but they all impart something worth knowing and examples worth learning from. The regular references to Sisyphus remind of the need to keep pushing up the hill, to never give up laying the next brick or writing the next word, because the pursuit is the life and its reward.
Duggan’s work, as he explains here, is all about power and violence, and asking how we advance without violence. He characterises his work as acts of art that can shift us closer to equality, justice and peace. In his writing, broad social issues are brought down to human, family, recognisably real levels.
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If his work is embedded firmly in ordinary, everyday society, the same can be said of Duggan himself. He calls himself “a worker, in the bluecollar tradition”. He is an engaged writer, and will remain so. In one chapter, he talks of Brian Friel’s burial place “in a graveyard on a hillside, looking across the Owenea river and the bogs that climb the slopes around Meenavillagh. It is a fitting site for the bones of such a person, resting comfortably amidst the farmers, the tradespeople, the teachers, the shopworkers and the homemakers of a place celebrated in his work.”
Duggan’s work, and Duggan himself, live comfortably in similar surroundings, among all the other journeymen and women who get up and go to work every day, or who nip to the corner shop for the paper and some bread rolls. He talks easily to all and sundry, not mining for material, but because that’s who he is. He’s all and sundry, too, and proud of it.
I wouldn’t hesitate to describe this as a beautiful book. It’s learned and wise, for one thing, not to mention beautifully written – spare, fluid, detailed, cool, unfussy. But it’s also beautiful in its honesty and sensitivity, and in its lessons in how to live right. And it’s the end of neither the journey nor the work.
Journeywork, A Creative Life by Dave Duggan is published by the Nerve Centre, Derry. It is due to be launched on November 25 at 7pm in the Nerve Centre, Magazine Street, Derry. Available to order from the Nerve Centre, nervecentre.org, and in all good bookshops
