Beth Ann Fennelly, distinguished professor of English at the University of Mississippi, launched her new book titled “The Irish Goodbye” at Off Square Books on Tuesday, Feb. 24.
“The Irish Goodbye” marks her second autobiographical book. This release is written in the form of micro-memoirs, in which she explores aspects of her everyday life through short pieces of writing.
After co-writing a novel with her husband, UM Associate Professor of Fiction Writing Tom Franklin, Fennelly stumbled upon the micro-memoir format while trying to conceptualize her own novel.
“Every day I would go to my notebook and I’d try to wait for the novel to announce itself,” Fennelly said. “While I did that, I killed time by writing down little memories or funny bits of overheard conversation in my notebook. I was beginning to feel really frustrated, because time was going by and I wasn’t writing. One day, I just paged through my notebook, and I thought, ‘This is not a novel, not poems that I recognize, not essays. I don’t know what this is, but I’m having fun.’”
Fennelly likened her micro-memoir method of storytelling to hummingbirds.
“Hummingbirds are so small that they can do things other birds can’t do,” Fennelly said. “It’s the only bird that can fly forward, backward, sideways, hover and for short distances, fly upside down. So I thought, ‘What are the possibilities of this short form? What are things I can do in a tiny form that I couldn’t do in a bigger form?’ And I thought of the term ‘micro-memoir.’”
Evelyn Barnett, a junior creative writing major, enjoyed learning about micro-memoirs.
“I haven’t taken any of Beth Ann (Fennelly)’s classes before, so it felt very meaningful to be able to attend one of her events, especially one of her book releases,” Barnett said. “I thought that the stories were very touching. As a BFA (in) creative writing student, it feels very illuminating to hear about some of the options out there that you can write about and directions you can take your writing.”
After writing her first micro-memoir collection, Fennelly chose to continue the format in “The Irish Goodbye,” which she named after a line in the book about her sister, Julie, who died in 2008.
“An Irish goodbye is when you leave a party and you duck out the back door without saying goodbye,” Fennelly said. “I have a one-sentence piece in the book: ‘The Irish goodbye, how you ducked out the back door of the party of your life, oh, my sister.’ I was looking at the most significant pieces to try to see if I could harvest a title. I saw that one, and I liked how, like an Irish goodbye, it was over before you realized it.”
Fennelly shared some of what she likes about writing in the genre of micro-memoirs.
“One of the joys of writing in short form is you can actually change the tone a lot,” Fennelly said. “You can have a piece that’s sassy and one that’s sad, one that’s poetic and one that’s wry. You can have all the emotions. I hope that one of the pleasures made available to a reader from this book is getting to feel a lot of different things.”
Texas resident Danielle Sellers, a friend of Fennelly’s, travelled to attend the book launch with her daughter, who was recently accepted into UM.
“We decided to come for a college visit, but really what I wanted to come for was Beth Ann (Fennelly)’s reading,” Sellers said. “I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I was so happy to be here. … This book means a lot to me personally, so I just really was happy to be able to come out and support it.”
