Siofra is writing the What About Us story and a novel based around the original story

Siofra is a full time author whose recent book about Kevin Barry, Yours Til Hell Freezes: A Memoir of Kevin Barry, was recently published by Currach Books. Siofra is also a writing coach, creative writing workshop facilitator and creative meditation facilitator for the Writers in Prisons and the Writers in Schools Panels by Poetry Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland. Siofra is writing the What About Us Story. 

 In her own words:

“I’ve been writing stories since I was nine. Most of my books come from dreams that are more than nudges, they are downright demands. When I dreamed of an old man on the top floor of a tower block, locked in a world of war memories, I knew I had to write Malinski about two brothers separated during World War Two. I was in my mid twenties and everyone was writing chick lit, but this had to be done.

 And while it was in gestation in a wooden chalet at the foot of the Sugarloaf mountain in Wicklow, I had another dream, about an old woman who lived in the woods I’d known all my life, hiding in a hut painting pictures, unknown to anyone. This was the character Baba Yaga, in my novel The Secret of Pocock Grange, the most beloved of all my books, rewritten twenty times over twenty years.

Writing is inextricably linked to dreaming. Writing is allowing yourself to dream and to create, as John Gardner says, ‘the continuous dream’. Seamless prose. Wonders. Jewels. Horrors. All delivered as if they were already there, in that other world, waiting to be discovered. Or, as Stephen King puts it, excavated. Stories are already in tact, waiting to be discovered. I passionately love storytelling through writing and I love teaching this art to others in creative writing workshops. Giving others the opportunity to dream again, through words.