Dalkey Delights

The joy of book festivals

20 June 2025

Dear Smythe,

Book festivals are magical places, where readers, writers, and lovers of learning of all kinds come together to celebrate those funny little creations – sheets of paper bound together that contain greater multitudes than we can imagine until we open them – books! I was lucky enough to attend the Dalkey Book Festival last weekend, which attracts literati and glitterati from around the world, and after the days I spent there, I understood why. Dalkey is a picturesque town, only a few miles outside of Dublin but containing the tiny winding streets and colorful buildings that I’ve always considered more distinctive of the west of Ireland. And the coastal views are, in a word, lovely; walking to my first event on Friday, I saw two fishermen standing by the water, poles hanging, overlooking the picturesque Dalkey Island and its ancient ruins. Could it get better than that? I suspected they’d say no.

Over Friday and Saturday, I listened to a number of talented and interesting writers speak about their work and their craft. Teenage Marguerite came close to dying with joy when she got to listen to Steven Pinker speak with David McWilliams about the psychology of money. I grew up with Pinker on our family bookshelves and to hear him talk, and to meet him afterwards and tell him just that, was a thrill. And that was just the start! I attended a talk by Cauvery Madhavan, an Indian-Irish writer whose work and reflections appeal to me for obvious reasons – there aren’t too many of us out there as far as I know. And then I listened to John Banville, Jean Hanff Korelitz, and James Shapiro debate plot in writing and the perils of AI. “Fiction is nothing like life and yet it feels like it,” I wrote in my notebook during the talk. Isn’t it funny, that while nothing about our lives is plotted (though the deists might disagree), we can look back and make a story out of it? But what makes a written story real to us – in part – is that plot, the causation that starts the domino effect of beginning, middle, and end. At the end, though, I had to agree with James Shapiro, that while plot is important, what makes a story great is something else – those moments that are powerful and profoundly human, that make our breath catch and heart beat just a bit faster. When we read a scene and feel what the character does more powerfully than we do our own emotions – that is great literature.

It was the last talk that stuck with me the most. Called “Writing from the Edge,” it consisted of four writers: Christine Dwyer Hickey, Donal Ryan, Elif Shafak and Nelofer Pazira-Fisk. My hand couldn’t move fast enough trying to take down everything they said. I was fascinated by their discussion about the responsibility of writers to chase the questions, the taboos, and most importantly the silences. That it is our responsibility to be exposed to what is happening around the world, to think about it, to write about it. The job of the writer is to increase the world’s empathy, which is so vital for humanity, and in a way, writers are the worst person to do this because we are so sensitive. These ideas deeply resonated with me, but I felt something troubling me throughout the discussion; a question burned within me and I felt I had no choice but to ask. So, at the end, when the moderator called with questions, my hand shot up. Once, twice, I was ignored. I did it again, and this time the assistant holding the mic on the side saw me and winked. Then I realized that I had just volunteered to ask a question in a room full of a thousand people and my heart began to beat so hard I thought I might faint. Did you forget you are terrified of public speaking? I berated myself.

My turn came, and suddenly there was a microphone in my hand, and I was standing, and the panel, though tiny on the other side of the room, were all clearly staring at me.

“Hi,” I said, cursing how my voice had suddenly become high-pitched. I continued. “I have a question for all of you, actually.”

My voice was trembling and I abused myself to control whatever was happening in my throat. They are going to think the topic is making you cry, not that you are too much of a wimp to ask a question.

“I’m a writer, well, an aspiring writer. I believe it’s really important, as you said, to write about what is happening in the world, to bring awareness and to have empathy. But what I really struggle with, and what I’d like to know is, how do you do this and not get so overwhelmed by what you feel? How do you find peace within yourself and still write and tell these stories?”

I handed back the microphone and sat down, relieved my part was over and eager to hear their answers to something that has demoralized me for years.

The Western writers, Christine Dwyer Hickey, and Donal Ryan, had similar answers. Separate yourself from the character, they said. “You have to remove yourself from the feeling,” Christine said, “It’s your character feeling it, not you.” And Donal said something similar. This is dissatisfying, I thought, if I’m feeling something I can’t just snap my finger and not feel it. How can you separate yourself from something so intrinsically a part of you?

Then Elif Shafak answered.

“There is this idea that you’re not supposed to feel emotions, and that feeling something and having an emotion is somehow feminine. You see this in the conversation about the feud between those two guys in the United States, everyone talks about them as being so emotional, so female. Feeling the emotion is not a bad thing. Feel it! I always think about that Toni Morrison essay where she says she gets angry, and then sits down and writes. Feel the thing and then use that to write, and accept that the feeling is a part of the experience.”

Nelofer Pazira-Fisk came after her.

“When I was working on my memoir, I had all of these overwhelming experiences to write about, seeing people blown up in front of me when I was a child in Afghanistan, and so on. Every time I sat down to write, I looked at the words, and I got overwhelmed and it was too much. Instead, don’t look at it, cover your screen, and just write. You will get it out, and this is a part of feeling it.”

I was fascinated and in a strange way, relieved, to hear this answer. It struck me that both of the Western writers had said to not feeling the feelings, or to separate yourself from them and make them only the characters’. On the other hand, the Eastern writers had said that feeling was not only inevitable but crucial. The fundamental truth of this resonated.

It is such a dichotomy between east and west, something I have experienced since birth, having an American father and Indian mother. The societies I have lived in, in America and in Ireland, tells us that we must try to understand our feelings, to rationalize them and break them down into parts that can be explained. But what if in experiencing the feeling itself, we have access to an understanding that we could never find otherwise? The feeling itself is the truth, and this is why we write.

After the talk, I waited in line for an hour to meet the writers. I went first to Nelofer and thanked her for answering my question. She was so kind, so open, and thanked me for asking it, and advised me to just sit and write, to literally cover my computer screen with a towel, and let the words out. Not to read it until it was all done, and that I could edit it after. “The story told with feeling is more moving,” she said. “The readers can tell.” And she told me to sit alone in a room, and that the truth would come to me. Don’t fight it. “Good luck,” she smiled, and my breath caught, with the thrill of speaking to such an accomplished, intelligent, and strong woman, from her incredible kindness, and, indeed, from her striking beauty. “I hope to see you here as a writer one day.”

I was still floating from this when I arrived at Elif.

“I’m so sorry you have been waiting so long,” she said. She looked tired. Very tired.

Was this world-famous writer really thanking all of us for waiting? This spoke volumes about her, I thought.

“Not at all,” I said, “Thank you for staying and signing books for so long!”

I thanked her, as I had thanked Nelofer, for answering my question.

“Yes,” Elif said. “You need to feel it.”

“It has been such a struggle for me, to know what to do with these feelings when I try to write, I needed to hear this,” I said.

Elif shook her head. “No, you don’t need judgement. Not from in here,” and she gestured towards her heart, “Or from out here,” she gestured towards world beyond.

She gave me a signed copy of the book I had handed her, The Bastard of Istanbul.

For Marguerite,

More power to your words.

Elif Shafak

The power of feeling. Indeed, it was the feeling of this book festival that moved me in my two days there. There was such warmth, which I experienced myself, from the stranger who told me how lovely I looked, to the writers who wished me well, to the knowledge I gained and creativity that was inspired, to the friends I met, all of whom were in good spirts, delighted to learn and share with others.

And this came at the right time for me, though I didn’t realize that until I sat to pen these words to you, Smythe. I’ve been on the verge of writing you another letter, to tell you that I must quit writing for a while. These months have been too much for me, as I struggle to find some normality and respite with this illness while laboring through difficult PhD applications, immense visa applications, job hunting in a labor market that seems to hate non-EU citizens, fighting day-by-day, hour-by-hour, to survive – thriving has long gone out the window. In such a period, who could find time for creativity? How could I pay attention to my own feelings, much less find the time to write about it? It has all simply been too much.

But wait. Something tells me that I must stop, pause, and experience all that this time has entailed. It feels incredibly bad, much of the time, as rejection and failure pile on top of each other and the mountain of NO grows. No PhD, no work sponsorship, no sleep, no energy, no healing. No, no, no. My brain tells me I should feel it, that I need to, but it’s too much. I can’t.

But there is a whisper, a thread of yes. Yes, you must feel it. Yes, you must write it. And this makes no sense to me. But I pause, and I listen. I turn off my thoughts, and I experience the sensations that move within. The Writer’s Hour every weekday morning I drag myself to, no matter how exhausted, because I must. The unlikely friendship with a fellow writer on Substack, whose words and ideas constantly inspire. The meeting with a great writer a few weeks ago, who fundamentally disproved the saying “Don’t meet your heroes.” The pull of the book festival, where I met so many writers and kind readers who encouraged and supported me. I can feel the bad, because there is also so much good.

I understand something. I must feel. All of it. And because of that, I must write.

Love,

Marguerite