We are delighted to welcome Dr. Roxanne Bodsworth to our interview series. Dr. Bodsworth holds a PhD from Victoria University, Melbourne, and is an academic and poet. Dr. Bodsworth is the winner of the 2024 Ceræ Essay Prize, awarded to the best themed or non-themed article submission submitted by a graduate student or early-career researcher for Volume 12. Dr. Bodsworth’s varia, Meet Me in My World: a creative prosimetric reconstruction of Aislinge Óenguso, retells an Irish poem that uses free verse to address the lacuna of the female character. We are grateful to Dr. Bodsworth for her time and congratulate her on her win!
1. What projects are you currently working on?
Meet Me in My World was drawn from a reconstruction of the Early Medieval tale of Aislinge Óenguso: The Dream of Óengus in my PhD thesis. For that project, I also undertook prosimetric reconstructions of two other tales including Tóruigheacht Dhiarmada agus Ghráinne: The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne and Longes mac n-Uislenn: The Exile of the Sons of Uisliu. I would like to find a publisher for them and, at a future date, apply the same methodology to other Irish tales.
I am developing a number of academic articles in line with that goal. Topics include comparing Aislinge Óenguso and Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus; exploring the female hero’s journey in Irish mythology; and developing the language of feminist reconstruction. Otherarticles in progress range from Yeats’s transformations of mythology in his poetry and women’s cultural attitudes to their bodies.
I have also been working on a fantasy trilogy for a couple of decades. It keeps expanding, has undergone several rewrites, and is nearing completion. I have a children’s fantasy series (think of The Magic Faraway Tree), and the poems just keep coming.
2. What are you currently reading for fun?
All reading is fun! Except when they are dealing with harsh realities.
Centred around the crisis in Gaza, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Aaingst This by Omar El Akkad is a critical examination of how narratives are formed, who controls the narrative, how that is changing (or not) in a multimedia world, and our participatory social responsibility. It is about history permeating the present, cultures that seek the destruction of others, and how individuals navigate living amongst such hatred, prejudice and fear. It calls to mind, for me, the Crusades, and also the Burning Times, and I wonder what name will be given to these times.
A quote most often attributed to C. S. Lewis says, “I sat with my Anger for long enough until I learned its true name was Grief.” I bring my current confusion of feelings to reading Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, a remarkable verse novel that evokes the crows that haunt old castles, ruins, and battlefields, and all that they represent to the human psyche. I am also reading Volte Face by Dominique Hecq for the sheer power and wonder of words deep-diving into the sensual and intellectual experience of corporeality.
I am reviewing The Boy from the Sea by Garret Carr, a contemporary Irish novel that poignantly explores a type of mythic wishfulness that never fully allows an escape from the mundane but may make it more bearable.
As soon as I have finished the review, I can start to read Silence of the Gods: the Untold History of Europe’s Last Pagan Peoples by Francis Young, described as “a masterful new history of Europe’s last unchristianised peoples in the period between 1387 and 1900, from the Sámi of northern Fennoscandia to the Balts and the Finno-Ugric peoples of European Russia, exploring the reasons for their late adoption of Christianity and their creative religious responses to encounters with missionaries.”
3. What is a book that you would recommend to someone who reads your piece in Ceræ and wants to learn more?
One??? There are many. These would be core.
Gantz, Jeffrey, ed. and transl. “The Dream of Oengus.” In Early Irish Myths and Sagas, 108-12. London: Penguin, 1981.
Bitel, Lisa M. Land of Women: Tales of Sex and Gender from Early Ireland. New York: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. Dublin: New Island Books, 2002. 1989.
Ó Cathasaigh, Tomás. Coire Sois. The Cauldron of Knowledge. Edited by Matthieu Boyd. Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014.
Spender, Dale. Man Made Language. 2nd ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.
Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002.
4. Can you talk us through your creative process when it came to this piece? What prompted the reconsideration of this medieval text in this manner?
My love affair with this story began in a classroom at University College Cork in 2003, when the lecturer informed us that there was no commonality between W. B. Yeats’ poem The Song of Wandering Aengus and an eighth century tale called Aislinge Óenguso – The Dream of Óengus, certainly nothing to warrant Yeats attaching the title to the poem. It was my first introduction to the Aislinge and set me on a course of study of the interaction between poetry and mythic literature that is never-ending as the fisherman’s search in the poem.
In concurrent study of the mythological stories of Ireland, I identified a motif where, even though it is the woman who initiates an illicit affair with a lover of her choice, she recedes into the background while the male hero dominates the narrative. Even though women were the prime catalysts of action, they were relegated to a secondary position in the narrative and sometimes disappeared altogether. This injustice continued to play on my mind until, many years on, I made it the subject of my academic research. I use poetry as a tool for the creative excavation of the feminine threads, and for weaving them back together. Poetry, for me, is a form of thinking and analysing, making sense of what I am reading. Reading becomes not just an intellectual exercise but a bodily experience of the emotions, the psyche, and the intellect. I hope that what emerges from this process provokes a new way of reading traditional stories that reveals aspects previously unconsidered, such as the ongoing struggle for feminine autonomy.
5. Where can we find you on social media?
Website www.sunwyse.com.au
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/61550850394029/about/
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/roxanne_bodsworth/
LinkedIn https://au.linkedin.com/in/roxanne-bodsworth-247213166
Thank you again, and congratulations!
Image credit: BL Egerton 1782 f. 19r