In this careers series, Martina Mulhall, Gold Star Careers, speaks with high-profile figures across a range of industries to explore the stories behind their success.
From early career choices to pivotal moments, challenges overcome, and advice for the next generation, every interview offers a personal insight into the many different paths a career can take.
This week we turn our attention to multi-award winning Portlaoise poet, publisher, writer, broadcaster and poetry film maker Pat Boran.
Since receiving the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry in 1989 he has published almost 20 books of poetry and prose.
Most of his books draw on his experience of growing up and living in Portlaoise. His work has been translated into many languages, including Italian, Portuguese, Hungarian, Macedonian, French, Greek and Georgian.
He is the editor and publisher of Dedalus Press, one of Ireland’s most energetic and long-standing poetry imprints. A member of Aosdána, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, he is a regular contributor to RTE Radio 1 programmes such as Sunday Miscellany, Arena, and Poetry People.
He is a former presenter of both The Enchanted Way and The Poetry Programme on the station.
Earlier this month one of Boran’s poems, As Far as Turn Back , featured on the ‘Unseen Poetry’ section of the Leaving Cert Higher Level English paper.
1 – What was your very first job, and what did it teach you?
The offer of a first ‘proper’ job (I was working as a temp typist for a week with a legal company in London and, at the end, they offered me a full-time job) was the shock I needed to rethink my life!
To be clear, I have nothing against employment, but I’d begun to suspect than I wanted to write, or play music, or both, as a full-time ‘occupation’.
And it seemed clear to me that a lot of people who started out with the same impulse had lost their appetite for it because of the demands of a 9 to 5 working week.
In my simplistic way of thinking, that meant I had two choices:
1) to do some kind of formal training (which wasn’t in my nature and, in any case, at the time (the early 1980s) there were no MFA courses in Creative Writing available in the Irish system;
Or, 2) to odd-job my way along, a bit of busking here, a bit of basic admin there, so that I had enough to live on (most of the time) but not so much as would distract me from the goal of learning to be a writer, or whatever other outcome might present itself.
2 – Did you always know you wanted to work in this field, or did your career path evolve over time?
Like a lot of people, I think I figured out what I wanted to do by a process of elimination – trying things and realizing they weren’t for me.
Because I’ve always had an interest in reading and writing, people who were kind enough to show an interest early on invariably pointed me towards journalism as a way to get by.
And I did publish various bits and pieces, book reviews and things of that nature for many years.
But, while these helped to pay what bills I had, doing odd-jobs in the wider literary world turned out to be more valuable in the long run, forming a kind of broad education about how that world actually works, about how people learn to survive without regular, dependable incomes.
Over the years I’ve edited books by lots of other writers, designed and typeset books and journals, built websites, presented radio and TV programmes, managed a literature festival, made short films, run writing workshops all over the country (in schools, prisons, arts centres) and various other related activities.
And though none of these could be said to be a dependable job or source of income, all of them in their own way allowed me to keep my primary interest at the centre of my life.
And there’s a lot to be said for that. It’s not the only way to do it, of course, and there have been plenty of good writers and poets, for instance, who made their living in other ways (Robert Graves said, famously, ‘There is no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money either.’
So it’s often a bit of a juggle finding a way to keep the wolf from the door when you work in any area of the arts, particularly when starting out. But, while the financial rewards are mostly miniscule, the ‘job satisfaction’ more than makes up for it.
3 – Was there a turning point or moment that shaped your career most significantly?
In the later 1980s, at a loose end, I volunteered to help out at the offices of Poetry Ireland, to be doing something useful with at least some of my time.
Out of that accidental connection, a lot of other connections in the wider arts world followed.
It’s definitely true to say that I got as much out of being a volunteer (a sense of purpose, a community beyond myself) as the organisation got out of trying to find things for me to do!
4 – What’s one challenge you faced in your career, and how did you overcome it?
Making a living as a writer at any time is a considerable challenge. Doing so by writing poems is pretty much impossible. Being a poet is seldom a full-time job.
Historically, the majority of the poets we might be familiar with today had some other income — a patron, an inheritance, or a job/profession that paid the bills — or wrote for the personal experience rather than the visibility.
Emily Dickinson, for instance, published just a handful of individual poems in her lifetime.
TS Elliot was a banker, Wallace Stevens was a doctor, and many of our best-known poets of more recent times (Eavan Boland, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, etc) held positions in one or other university.
A small few write in multiple genres and in that way supplement their negligible incomes from poetry.
In my case, I became interested in writing at a time when PCs were starting to appear in every household, so I was able to teach myself how to design and typeset books, and from there got into publishing and broadcasting and other aspects of the literary world.
To be honest, this was less a plan than a fortunate accident: but the important ingredient for me has always been to be learning something new ‘on the side’, to find new elements to add to the few things I can already do, well or just adequately.
A constant changing of the ingredients is one way to ensure the cake doesn’t always taste exactly the same.
5 – How important were education and qualifications in getting to where you are today?
I’m not sure that education and qualifications have meant all that much to me, to be honest, in the sense of an accepted syllabus of things to study and recognition achieved.
Without an option to study Writing (as opposed to English) at University, I skipped third level and took what I think of as the scenic route to wherever I am now.
For years, I busked on and off and hung around with musicians and writers and actors and painters: I like to imagine that I absorbed some of their education and experience by osmosis (and argument and debate).
In many ways the best educator for a writer is the work of other writers.
So I also put myself through a determined course of reading and attending book-related events.
And as well as teaching me some of the things I’ve learned (to be counted on one hand), they also inspired me to keep working through those periods when the rewards and encouragement were thin on the ground.
6 – What does a typical day look like in your role—or is there no such thing?
I don’t really have a typical working day, as such. That said, there are maybe four or five modules (think Lego pieces) that can be assembled in different combinations to make up any 24-hour period.
In fact I think this is one of the reasons why the so-called ‘creative life’ may not for everyone.
Working for yourself, often entirely alone, and often for days or weeks or months on end, requires an ability to ‘keep it fresh’, to depend on a successful routine but to vary it enough that you don’t get bored of your own company or distracted by something beyond your window.
Ask most taxi drivers: the novelty of being your own boss wears off quickly.
One of my solutions has been to blur the line between my ordinary life (which happens to be one of the basic subjects of my writing anyway) and my working life, so that when I go out for the daily walk with the dog, for instance, I don’t think of that as a break but as an essential part not of my time off but of my working day.
I’m either listening to something, playing back something I’ve been trying to work out in my head, or recording rough ideas on my phone or in a notebook as I go along.
Even when I’m determinedly not thinking about anything at all (trying to unscramble what’s left of my brain after spending too long on a particular problem) that too I think is part of the working process.
Equally when I might seem to others to be working hard (poring over a manuscript or sat up into the wee hours editing a film) that often feels to me like time off, like the highlight of my day.
Even when it’s tiring and not going how I’d like, it doesn’t do it justice to call it ‘work’. In many ways, the artistic life (not to make too much of it) is all about changing your attitude to the world of work.
Otherwise the excuses take over and, without a boss asking where are today’s results, nothing gets done.
I like the fact that when ‘working’ musicians are performing on stage, for instance, we say that they are ‘playing’. Writing doesn’t feel like ‘playing’ all the time, of course; if only it did.
It can be frustrating and exhausting to spend an age at something, only to find that it’s going nowhere, that not only will no one else care, but you don’t even really care yourself.
But when it’s going well, when it’s like a wave and you’re the surfer on it, when it’s a cave and you get to be the first person to go in with nothing but a flashlamp in your hand, ‘playing’ is as good a word as any.
7 – Who inspired or mentored you along the way, and what did you learn from them?
Most musicians will also listen to music in genres other than their own. We can all learn from other people’s ways of doing things.
I never had a formal mentor, as such, but always felt like the writers and artists I admired had put their best work out there for people like me (and anyone else who was interested) to emulate and learn from.
Most artists earn little to nothing for their work (even before AI made a bad situation immeasurably worse), certainly in comparison with other ways of making a living.
But there are few other human activities where the results of the best exponents are there for anyone, with our without qualifications, with or without institutions or exam boards, to study and learn from.
There may be many problems and inequalities, as in any aspect of human life, but in the arts at least a kind of democracy applies: we each get to decide for ourselves what we like, what we admire, what we are ready for or determined to learn.
8 – What advice would you give to Leaving Cert students who aren’t sure what they want to do yet? Or to adults seeking a career change?
We live in a time when it’s increasingly unlikely that any school leaver will have a job that lasts unchanged for years or decades to come, let alone for their whole lives.
This idea would have frightened my parents, and maybe still frightens parents who want the best for their daughters and sons.
But why is it considered a bad thing? As we know when we go on holiday, we are all capable to some extent of becoming someone else, of adapting to new situations and challenges, of thriving in situations we never imagined we’d be able to handle, let alone enjoy.
We don’t necessarily want the upset of complete change every day of our lives, but without change and the opportunities it can bring, we never really get to know what we’re capable of.
The only mistake we can make when confronted with the prospect of change is to refuse it, to brace against it rather than roll with and into it (like the drunk falling off the bicycle!).
We don’t always have to be anticipating what may come next (that way lies madness and exhaustion), but by reminding ourselves that the current situation (what it is) is impermanent, we can always experiment with the small changes and experiments that often prove to be the things that sustain and nourish us through less clear, less forgiving times.
Having a hobby, an ambition, ‘playing’ an instrument, a sport, joining a choir: these are not alone among the very best things we can do with the ‘free time’ in our lives, but they are some of the best insurance we can take out against loneliness and disenchantment and the doom-scrolling of our age.
They are also the essential elements to keeping ourselves open to surprise and to change.
To be clear, there have been many time I’ve felt like there was no continuity or consistency through the various things I’ve done or found myself drawn to.
Then, almost magically, one day I turn around and something I learned (for the same of learning something new) turned out to be an essential skill for the road ahead.
Myths and fairytales are constantly reminding us of this. In the end, there are no accidents, only obvious futures we were unable to see because we were too invested in one or other version of ourselves.
9 – If you could go back and give your younger self one piece of career advice, what would it be?
Stick with it. If you screw up, shrug and move on. If you break something, pay for it or replace it. Walk someone’s dog if you don’t have a dog of your own.
Talk to people who are not like you, who don’t share your beliefs or ambitions: you’ll learn more from them than from anyone in your life.
If you end up in the world of the arts, don’t be an elitist twit or don’t apologise too much. Don’t patronise people. Don’t let anyone patronise you.
10 – What’s next for you—any goals, projects, or new challenges on the horizon?
In recent years (since Covid, really), I’ve been making short films, playing more music, trying to shake myself up a bit, trying to remember than not everyone ‘gets’ what poetry is about, and that one of the ‘solutions’ might be to take it off the page more often and bring it out into the world.
Instead of a next book, maybe I’ll do something with a musician, or a dancer, or actors. I’m just trying to keep myself from developing habits that will only result in the same work being produced, again and again.
One of the essential things about working in the arts is trying to ensure that one success (however modest) doesn’t get in the way of the next essential failure, ha ha.
Your Laois connection?
With the exception of two small books that respond to specific places in Dublin, all of my books in some way draw on my experience of growing up and living in Portlaoise.
Many of my poems in particular go back to early experiences in and around the town, and my prose memoir The Invisible Prison is entirely set on the Main Street and its then-wild back gardens in the late 1960s and ’70s.
(The fact that it’s been re-published in Italian and Turkish boggles the mind, but the truth is that the more earthed and ‘local’ a piece of writing is, the more it can speak to readers elsewhere. This is often something beginning writers overlook.)
Portlaoise is important for me in a lot of ways, not least now in the fact that the house we grew up in on Main Street no longer exists. (It’s where Paddy Power’s bookmaker now stands.)
This finality, for a writer at least, is not so much the closing of a door as a kind of invitation to go back and try to tell a story, to see what other elements might have been there that escaped attention at the time. In many ways, writing is a kind of archaeology: you have to have some distance in time from the thing you’re writing about in order to see it more clearly.
That said, I’m also drawn to Portlaoise because of its geographical position in the middle of the country, because of its historical plantation, because of the effect of the prison as a major employer and (for some) a major aspect of its identity, particularly during the 1970s and early 1980s when I was still there.
But writing always has to be more than just a personal story. When I’m writing about it, I’m always thinking both about what it means to me personally, but also, crucially, what it might mean for someone who doesn’t know me or the place at all.
That’s what people mean when they talk about the universality of writing: it’s not that it should be so vague that it could be about anyone or anywhere.
It’s that it tries to be so detailed and specific that we feel we know the people and places even if they have no prior connection to us.
As someone very interested in the past, though, it’s also essential for me to remember that the town is not something that happened once and is now over and done with.
The town and the county are ongoing stories for the people who live here, for the new people from up the road or from the other side of the world.
The interaction between town and country, between country and wider country, all of these are fascinating and relatively unexplored.
I have a number of other projects, small and bigger, on the back boiler with strong Laois connections. So it’s a well that, for me, seems far from running dry.
You can read more about Pat Boran’s work here.
Martina Mulhall, Gold Star Careers offers one-to-one or small group career advice, in-person or online, to people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds. Follow on Instagram for updates and reminders about all things careers, or head over to the website to book a personalised guidance session.
SEE ALSO – Check out all of the other Martina Mulhall pieces here
