Mary Rose Callaghan

WEB was the brainchild of Arlen House founder Catherine Rose, who appointed poet Eavan Boland as Creative Director. As an editor at Arlen House from 1978, Boland did much extraordinary work to develop, mentor and promote Irish women writers. The founders of WEB writers’ group initially met at these empowering, transformative workshops hosted by Boland, and they have been meeting continuously for almost forty years, making WEB one of the longest-running writing groups in Ireland. Over the decades, WEB writers and alumni have established highly-successful literary careers, publishing books, having plays and film scripts produced, and winning prestigious literary prizes. This anthology of new poetry, prose and drama, edited by Nessa O’Mahony, is dedicated to the memory of Eavan Boland.

Mary Rose Callaghan’s Awkward Women introduces readers to Sally Ann Fitzpatrick, an untidy, unruly, uncertain young woman living her life as best she can in a rapidly changing world. She strives bravely, and with delightfully self-deprecating irony, for a sense of her own identity and independence. Full of gentle sympathy and humorous understanding, these interconnected stories, set between the 1960s and the 1980s in Ireland and the United States, are thoroughly engaging and enriching.

One day, when Mary Rose Callaghan was 13, her mother jumped into the freezing Irish Sea. Knowing that her mother was an asthmatic, the shock of seeing her dive into “the deep end” began Mary Rose’s curiosity about her mother’s life. That curiosity spawned the writing of this memoir, a coming-of-age tale focused on Mary Rose’s relationship with her mother, which endured through economic hardship, and her mother’s descent into mental illness and alcoholism. The Deep End begins by tracing her mother’s arrival in Ireland in the 1930s, training to be a nurse, and marriage to Mary Rose’s father, continues through Mary Rose’s difficult childhood and later success as a writer, and culminates with her marriage to Robert Hogan and her mother’s death.