Creative writing associate professor reads essay on Irish radio

Dr. Kerry Neville, associate professor of English and coordinator for the Masters in Fine Arts and Undergraduate Creative Writing Program, was asked in early May to read her essay “Riverkeeper” on an Irish radio program.

The essay was about mental health, hope and her time in Limerick, Ireland. Neville recorded the five-minute and 42-second reading from her home in Milledgeville. It broadcast to 250,000 listeners on the RTÉ Radio 1 Sunday Miscellany program. Its equivalent in the United States would be National Public Radio (NPR).

The Shannon River is predominate throughout the essay, stirring up memories of being “alone in aloneness.” The essay begins: “Most days in limerick, my temporary and beloved home, I was inside gray skies, a grid of buildings and strangers under hoods and umbrellas who could be friends but were not yet.” The details and descriptions are poignant: “One late night, I walked around the river, crossing over its bridges, circling the dark, circling my ordinary loneliness, circling my way to compromise. Keep moving. Don’t stop…”

Neville has written two short story collections, “Remember to Forget Me” and “Necessary Lies.” The latter received the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize in Fiction and was named ForeWord Magazine Short Story Book of the Year. Most recently, Neville was also a runner-up of the Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize for her memoir, “Disappear, Reappear.”

Her work has been published in various journals, including “The Gettysburg Review,” “Epoch” and “Triquarterly,” as well as online for “The Washington Post,” “Huffington Post” and “The Fix.” She’s received other awards and recognition for her fiction, short stories and essays.

Neville received a Tyrone Guthrie Centre Artist’s Residency in Ireland and was faculty at the Frank McCourt-University of Limerick Summer Writing Program at New York University. She was also named a 2018 Fulbright scholar to teach graduate creative writing at the University of Limerick.