The Kildare Artist Notebook project was established by Kildare County Council Arts Service in 2011. Artists were invited to take an A5 Moleskine notebook, to use it as they wished and to return it, to become part of a permanent touring collection. To date, over 150 artists from around the world have donated notebooks – sometimes reluctantly as notebooks are often very personal and private. However, seeing the notebooks displayed collectively allows participants to experience how an individual thing becomes greater in the shared experience.

The collection of notebooks has been exhibited annually in Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, as part of the Kildare Readers Festival and has toured to Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Co Louth, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick and NUI Maynooth.

This enchanting Kildare Notebook Project is a regular ‘must see’ event in the Riverbank Arts Centre Visual Arts programme. The collection now extends to over 200 notebooks made by writers, film makers and visual artists from all over the world.

Each notebook is a standard A5 Moleskine notebook, but that’s where the similarity ends. Artists have written, drawn, torn, manipulated, painted, constructed and deconstructed notebooks, making them into bespoke art objects in their own right. These notebooks have been kindly donated by participating artists to Kildare County Council to become part of a permanent touring collection.

As a writer, the notebook project afforded me the opportunity to take stock of my work up to that date — what I had achieved and what remained to be done. I included poems, some places where I read, extracts from my novels and stories together with various philosophical and literary musings from my journals which form the seeds of my writing. Hopefully such a potpourri will give a flavour of the type of writer I am at https://bit.ly/2Go0taR and https://bit.ly/2TbcN5o

It is very easy to lose a creative thought. So I carry a notebook with me wherever I go to catch the thought on the wing or on the hoof. And in bed at night the notebook is there on my bedside locker beside an unclasped pen to corral any semi-somnolent inspiration. Later I type what I have scribbled, often elaborating on the embryonic ideas and sometimes these notes find their way into my stories and poems. I number the pages and name each notebook which affords me easy sourcing when I am writing.

My novel Knowing Women evolved largely from several notebooks and reflection. It is a novel about what if, emotional and sexual blackmail. What is normal and who are society’s real deviants? It constitutes a wry look at post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Its central concern is the nature of sexuality in modern Ireland, what sex does to people, how it is exploited, sold and bartered, the natural human propensity, how it’s twisted and warped by society, how it is used to conceal inadequacies in ourselves, how we categorise and slam the slightest peccadillo in a new Puritanism, propelled along as we are by the steady flow of paedophile cases. But are we losing something along the way? This is perhaps the fundamental question the novel asks. Look at the rise in male suicides; has it something to do with what society has done to gender roles? That’s what I wanted to do with Benbo, to show his vulnerability. How easy it is to taint someone. We have more multimedia channels than ever before and yet the important channel of one to one, of soul to soul, gender to gender, how rarely does that appear? (Look at the ‘reality’ tv shows which are sprouting up all over the place, what they’re about, pretending to fulfil that need, whereas the real reality is that such shows are voyeuristically cheapening and making a mockery of the true links between people). And so the irony, with all the global communications, we were never more isolated from each other.

(c) James Lawless

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About Knowing Women:

Laurence J Benbo is a thirty seven year old graphic artist and Dublin bachelor, awkward with women and lonely after the breakup with his girlfriend Deborah. He meets Jadwiga, a lapdancer and, after winning a lottery, he bestows gifts on her. But his upwardly mobile brother Maoilíosa and his scheming wife Ena, on hearing of his win, try to blackmail the innocent Laurence into handing his money over to them by alleging that he interfered with their daughter Lydia. Laurence seeks out Jadwiga for advice in her lapdancing club. To his dismay, he sees her going into a room with Maoilíosa. He spends the night awake listening to the rain pattering at his window, thinking of Deborah and he imagines little Lydia coming to seek out her uncle Lar to finish the story he had started reading to her. As the rain gets heavier he knows there is going to be a storm.

‘Brimming with intellect and poeticism, Lawless portrays a protagonist with a breadth that is effortlessly involving.’ Sunday Independent.

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