Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a notable and sensitive Irish nature writer whose work, examining today’s urgent need to counter climate change and the profound connections between the human and the non-human, as well as her concern for the environment, is clearly honest, brave and sympathetic. Her first book, Thin Places, was published by Canongate in January 2021, and was awarded the Butler Literary Award 2022, highly commended for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021, longlisted for the Prix Nicolas Bouvier 2024 and shortlisted for the Ireland Francophonie Ambassador’s Literary Award the same year. Cacophony of Bone was published by Canongate in May 2023 and was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2023.[1]

Thin Places offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the eyes of a child who survived a bomb attack on their house in Derry, a town devastated by paramilitary violence between 1983 and 1998. Ní Dochartaigh did not feel safe at any point during the Troubles, and, in this book, she uncovers the horrors of the past, recreating in moving detail the sorrow, suffering and terrible consequences of the conflict as well as the stages she went through on her path of recovery from past trauma and loss, building a new life away from her hometown. However, a few months before the final Brexit negotiations, her confusion and concern for the people of Derry and across the United Kingdom, and for their future, drove her to determinedly return to her hometown in her thirties. By that time, nature and what the author identifies as “thin places” helped her through a healing process. The book ends with a reflection on the importance of living with her lover, M, for her mental health, the positive consequences of the interconnectedness of things, the irrelevance of barriers to nature and animals, and hope for people from the North.

Cacophony of Bone is a groundbreaking work that reconsiders anthropocentric attitudes and displays a posthuman perspective, a commitment to decentre the human subject from its exceptional status by defining it over and against the technological, ecological, social and animal worlds in which it is embedded.[2] Cacophony of Bone is a memoir of ní Dochartaigh’s personal experiences over a year spent in the quiet of a small stone railway cottage in the West of Ireland, from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic through the various lockdowns – a period during which she found out that she was pregnant with her first child in a place that changed her life for good. This cottage and its garden in the West of Ireland where she, her lover M, their son and their dog stayed put becomes their thin or safe place, a place to be grateful for and to feel alive. As she says: “that long-drawn winter is long gone, of course, but it left its moths & birds, its nests & bones, it its wake. Slowly, with the passing nights, I have begun to understand it all. That year that came along and changed our lives” (281).

The works of Anne Enright, Claire Kilroy and Niamh Mulvey, among other recent Irish female writers, present women experiencing the positive side of pregnancy and motherhood, yet also explore the anxieties and difficulties faced by women who either do not choose motherhood, or those whose experience of pregnancy is marked by feelings of helplessness, sadness, even post-natal depression. Such images have also been the focus of recent successful collections of essays such as Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self (2018), Lynn Ruane’s People Like Me (2018), Sinéad Gleeson’s Constellations: Reflections from Life (2019) and Caelainn Hogan’s Republic of Shame: How Ireland Punished “Fallen Women” and Their Children (2020). Their works explore Irish motherhood by interrogating the reproductive act and the choice not to have a child, and present images of empowered motherhood. In these images, the sense of maternity is not always there, or perhaps is less all-defining than it was for other, older mothers, that is, those who represented the old Irish mammy who only had agency and power within the domestic realm. These recent authors acknowledge the trauma experienced by Irish women continually forced to justify their decisions regarding motherhood and to build social agency rather than the fear, tears and dispossession that society allotted them. Within this context, Thin Places and Cacophony of Bone have been described as remarkable because of some of the aforementioned ideas, yet also because they are “part-memoir, part-nature writing”.[3] However, the two books are groundbreaking in the memoir-nature writing field for other reasons besides: they can be read together as a coming-of-age story whose positive outcome is triggered by both an ethics of care and gratefulness, and an experience of motherhood which is unique because it occurs in a safe land without borders.

Melania Terrazas: Kerri, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Last year your work was included in the longlist for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, what would you tell your younger self now?

Kerri ní Dochartaigh: Thanks for having me! That is such an interesting question. I think I would be gentle with her and remind her that she is of value and worth, totally outside of any prize listing, publication or otherwise. It may feel like a big deal to have these things happen for our work, but ultimately – for me – all that matters is that the work is true and comes from the heart. Art has always been, for me, the way I make sense of the world. Writing is something that makes being alive so much easier for me, and for that I will be ever grateful. And being read, especially by open, supportive readers, is a gift unlike any other. I will never get over how lucky I am.

MT: Thin Places is a memoir of growing up during the Troubles. You write that a bomb was thrown through your bedroom window when you were eleven.[4] The book also describes you leaving Derry as a teenager for various places in the United Kingdom and promising yourself that you would never go back. However, nature helped you heal, and you returned to the North in your thirties. Why did you choose the memoir genre for your book and was writing it cathartic for you?

KnD: Actually, Thin Places began as an illustrated children’s story about a little girl and a magpie. It then became a series of political essays, which shapeshifted into a short poem. Then I made my way towards life-writing as a genre, and the work in progress became a series of braided poetic fragments. I would not so much say I chose memoir but would say I spent a lot of time with the memories I share in Thin Places, specifically finding a mode of writing them that would be the gentlest on the reader as I could find. I would never strictly situate Thin Places within one given genre, or any of my writing in general, as words are written in the way we feel most comfortable with. I find this question, “Was writing it cathartic?” so interesting. Female writers of creative non-fiction are asked this so often and yet I have never heard a female writer who writes of trauma say they found such an excavation cathartic. I found it exceptionally difficult, traumatic work, and I am very grateful that I have been able to move on to other topics now my first book has been written.

MT: Given your roots in Derry and the fact that your father was Protestant and your mother Catholic, it would not be surprising that these circumstances affected you later on as a Northern Irish woman living in England and Scotland. Have you ever felt like you were living in a liminal condition? Would you describe your position as ambivalent?[5] You have lived in the South for some time now.

KnD: I believe many of us who grew up in liminal, shifting times, whether they were traumatic or not, have experienced moments in our lives when we feel neither here nor there – as Heaney so beautifully puts it in his poem “Postscript”. Moments when we feel outside of time and place. Moments when we struggle with any sense of real belonging. And I feel like in such moments, there are things, places and beings that can remind us of what it means to be human. To be part of a global family, too, of kin that go beyond being human. I am moss, I am lichen, I am oak, I am sea, I am land, I am seed, I am here. These days I try to sit with ideas of one-anotherness in as wide a way as I can, and find it helps me immeasurably in feeling at home here.

MT: In Thin Places, you recount that you returned to Derry in November 2019, a few months before the final Brexit negotiations. The book recreates this legacy of Boris Johnson. How do you view that period now?

KnD: I found it a very difficult moment to live through in Derry – to watch so much deep work that had been done to heal the place and the people – become undone simply based on a thing that the people of Derry had not even nearly voted in favour of. It felt such a stark and scary reminder that the everyday lives of those who live in places colonised by other nations are so delicate in the hands of people who almost never have their well-being in mind, head or heart. Writing about that time period was hard, and when I think back on it now, I understand that I was correct to have imagined at the time that it would be extremely transformative for my life and my work, as it has been. That time radicalised me, and I am extremely grateful to have been in a position to be able to choose to leave Derry, as I feel it has helped immeasurably in my healing process and has supported me in re-entering a relationship with my hometown based on love.

MT: In Thin Places you acknowledge that changing your surname back to its Irish original form, long before you returned to Ireland, was “one of the bravest decisions” (2021: 35) you have ever made. Why?

KnD: I explore in both my books the way that language and identity are interwoven for me. Allowing myself to make my way back to my origin story has changed the whole of my internal make-up, to be really honest. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves really matter, and to begin telling the story of myself as a colonised woman has been extremely curative for me. The Irish language is an ancient, dancing, shape-shifting creature. I am so keen to know her better as I age.

MT: In Thin Places you write: “I sometimes still feel like maybe I have no right to talk about these things – these feelings – these experiences that are fully mine to own, and to work through as best I can” (2021: 63). As an Irish memoir writer, did you ever think of self-censorship?

KnD: I have never believed that Irish memoir writers self-censor; if anything I find Irish writers to be open, honest and extremely generous with the truth they offer readers. I am always wary of terming a writer, especially a female one, “brave” or “courageous” as I don’t quite feel this is a proper fit when it comes to exploring what it means to speak our truths, and to place them into the world. I would love to imagine other adjectives instead, ones that sing to me more beautifully of what we really are giving when we give the stories of our lives, and the telling of all the ways we made it through.

MT: You are a remarkable writer for how you describe your past episodes of severe depression, suicidal thoughts and severe addiction to alcohol in Thin Places. You recount that you suffered all of them in deepest silence. Why did you decide to reveal such intimate episodes through your art? And I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate you on the almost seven years you have already been sober.

KnD: Thanks for this kindness. Truth is integral in my writing process, and in the journey of my life really. I ask myself, always, am I being true with my reader? I think that in a trauma memoir, this is very important. You are recounting difficult experiences that might be triggering for them or might be traumatising for them. I try to be very authentic and genuine with them. That is a kindness, a care-giving, a truth that the author is giving them, and I hope that in all I write, the reader feels I trust them, and respect them, and am so grateful for them.

MT: In Thin Places, you also talk about the importance of real, deep and honest communication. Has this memoir been therapeutic for you? Is it also intended to help others that may have undergone or are still suffering a similar experience?

KnD: If people find solace in this story, as I know they have done, this makes me extremely happy. But I can’t say this was my motivation in writing the book. Really, I simply had to write this book. To not write it would have stunted my growth; as a writer, a person, a woman. I had to get that story out in order to free myself to write all the other things I so deeply want to write.

MT: In Thin Places you describe these “thin places” as “áiteanna tanaí, caol áit” (23), liminal spaces “to imagine what it all might mean, how we have been, how we maybe could be – a space to more clearly see a way through” (24). What is the relationship between the healing power of such thin places and the fact that your grandfather’s “most affecting tales, the ones he gave you that shaped your life, were about place” (11)?

KnD: I am certainly the person I am today, in great part, because of the ways place was described by my grandfather through his stories. Many of us with a deep love of the natural world have been blessed by the patience, attention, care and guidance of an elder. We need these stories, we need these elders, now more than ever. To help us find the way back into deep, sustainable, fair and loving relationship with our mother earth, and all the beings with which we share her. I wish more than anything that I could listen to my grandfather’s stories now, as we hurtle towards even deeper emergency. But I am grateful for his presence at all, and keen to focus on how I might carry such light into the lives of other wee ones in the future. Are we being good ancestors? How can we be? These questions hold me close right now; more tightly than ever before.

MT: The book ends with thoughts about positive change triggered by the natural world for all of us. But the younger generations inhabit a predominantly urban world. Do you also find hope for the younger Northern Irish generations, the city of Derry, and the victims of sectarianism? Has anything changed in the last two decades?

KnD: I believe that as long as there are human hands and human hearts, there is hope. Hope is a doing word. It is active. It carries us along; hand in hand – ready to meet all that is ahead. Onwards, we go, says hope. ONWARDS TOGETHER.

As to your second question, I think that with every generation that has come after that deep brutality of the height of the Troubles, they know that it takes many generations for a big trauma to make its way through the bloodline, and I believe that with every generation that comes, it has less of an impact on human beings. I find it very hopeful the way we have indulged inside us the ability to heal.

MT: In your writing you care immensely about the mass extinction of species that is happening in Ireland. You do not hide your eco-friendly sympathy for creatures, plants and places. In other words, you deploy posthumanist concerns since you see the world in a different way and interpret your place in it in a different manner. Do you consider that these matters have entered a renewed type of Irish memoir based on the pursuit of a posthuman agenda?

KnD: I am not sure I would be equipped to speak to the viewpoint of Irish readers regarding, say, my views on the other-than-human world in my work. I generally do not read reviews of my work, so I am unsure if, for example, this has been criticised by reviewers – the way I write about both human and other-than-human alongside one another. I write about the world, so I imagine that readers approaching my work would already have a sense of the ways in which my views of kinship, community, one-anotherness and love extend beyond simply the human. I would say that in recent years we have seen many memoirs hit the shelves in Ireland that offer ways of thinking with the earth and all her beings, and these have seen huge success in the Irish market, which delivers great hope to me.

MT: The last pages of Thin Places read as follows, in a way that conveys a critique of the Anthropocene and points to a posthumanist stance: “Our planet is changing vastly – so much of it is directly connected to things that are our doing, and we do not know what the future holds … Migration, humanity, solitude, cruelty and healing. Place – our connection to the land we share – is a story we are all drawn to, in one way or another” (247-48). Would you consider yourself an eco-activist?

KnD: I am very wary of calling myself anything, really, apart from a mother, a holder, a grower and a writer. These things are what I give my days to; these are the seeds I sow and tend to. I live my life in a way that is tender, caring, respectful to all the beings on the planetary home, and I try to do that through my work. These phrases are maybe not so important. It is more the choices that we make on how we live that are important.

MT: Tell me, how do you view the intertwining of the nurturing mother figure and nature? It seems that the mother in your work achieves self-realisation by growing a garden that is home to both humans and non-humans in Cacophony of Bone. Is this a correct interpretation of your work?

KnD: Gardening and mothering are so finely linked for me it is almost impossible to separate them. To grow is to heal, to forgive, to love. As is to mother. I am moved beyond words by the fact that much of life is due completely to two places: the soil and the womb. Perhaps we had better care for these sacred containers, and all who tend to them. Now more than ever.

MT: The book was written in a year, from one winter to the next, begun a few months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. You had recently moved to the South, to County Longford. You hint at the fact that COVID and lockdowns pushed people there back into friendly conversation with nature. Do you believe that our relationship with nature can reshape our whole world, if we allow it?

KnD: This last line is so beautifully put, and I agree with all of my heart and soul and mind and body. There really is nothing more I could say aside from we are here, still, together, and there is much, so very much, still to love. To care for, and to hold close; to keep safe. It is in our hands now what we want. We are given such beauty, such goodness, such grace, and greatness, and such forgiveness from the earth, our mother, and we choose how and what we give back.

MT: In Cacophony of Bone, you are concerned about the politics of place and space, and the suffering experienced by those living forced migration, borders and borderlines. You also deal with the politics of the Irish language and its relationship to the natural world, to the Celtic identity of your ancestors, to the Irish land, and the relevance of its preservation for understanding the past. Was the motive for writing these two memoirs to memorialise – I mean, to preserve – the Irish narrative that would otherwise be lost?

KnD: I would not say that the motive was that of memorialising as such but would say that I hoped within the narratives to pay respect to these ideas through writing of them as tenderly and as humanly as I could. I tried to speak as openly as I could on the various emergencies through which we are living right now. I feel that to write a life, in any way at this current point in our human story, without speaking to the brutal, heartbreaking reality of the lives of so many of our human kin, would be disingenuous for me.

MT: In Cacophony of Bone, you acknowledge that the title was taken from another woman writer’s work (2023: 251). You mention Sylvia Plath and Maggie O’Farrell, but you do not confirm who wrote those words. Could you talk about the title’s significance and its relation to these two important writers?

KnD: On the very first page of the book, I include the excerpt from the poem – Cacophony of Bone was taken from “The Statue of the Virgin at Granard Speaks” by the poet Paula Meehan. Readers could read the book for more information and also research for themselves. On the page beside the excerpt, I speak to the reader of the significance of this poem for me and the book. It was important, this poem, because the year of which I write, I lived in a stone cottage just a handful of kilometres from the place where this poem is set. The poem speaks of the heartbreaking death of a teenage girl, Ann Lovett, and her baby boy Patrick, who both died during his birth, on a bitter cold night, with only stone statues there by their sides, in the very heart of Ireland. The book is in their memory.

MT: During those lockdown months, you realised that you were pregnant with your first child. In the book you repeat, “everything is going to be OK” (275), both in lower-case and capital letters. Did you need encouragement that your life and your baby were worth telling?

KnD: No, not at all. They had nothing to do with my writing about my life or my baby, neither of which I needed constant encouragement for, given that I write my life each and every day, and always have done. Journalling is what holds me in the storm. It is how I make sense of being alive in this achy, beautiful world.

These words – “everything is going to be OK” – act as refrain, reminder, and a way in towards the time we lived through. They make sense, really, when read in the context of their placement within the text each time they appear. These words were a balm for me, a gift, and offered them to the reader in this same way.

MT: What is motherhood for Kerri, the young woman from Derry, and for Kerri, the writer hugely concerned with an ethics of ecology and the threats of climate change?

KnD: I do not view myself as separate beings, at all, in any way so I can only really answer what motherhood is for me – the person I am – one in an ever ebbing and flowing state of becoming.

Motherhood is the most exquisite, achingly beautiful, terrifying, heart-expanding and radicalising thing I have ever experienced. I write lots in my work about the ways that I feel MOTHER as a word is begging for us to let it grow; to widen, we all mother, and we are all mothered in turn, by many beings. Human and more-than-human. Moss mothers. I have been mothered by moss. By oak tree, and by my young son, and by the fields through which I walk each morning. I am you; you are me; we are we. Mothering is what allowed me to see the threads that so finely connect us; mycelial; mycorrhizal. To see that we have the choice, every single day, to hold each other close. To be as tender as a mother. To all our kin on this beautiful, bright earth.

MT: In Cacophony of Bone, you name your lover and son’s dad as “M”. You acknowledge that M is the love of your life and has been hugely inspirational and supportive since you met in Derry. You also write that long ago you accepted the fact that M did not want to share his dreams with you. You present an array of personal experiences that you have been through together since then. How did you negotiate with M what could be disclosed about your life together in your book? M is not a writer, but does he support you in your writing career? If so, how?

KnD: Although it is true that M does not want to share details of his dreams with me, because he does not remember his dreams, we never had any type of secrecy in who we are and what our experiences are. Our relationship is founded on openness, honesty and togetherness, as I believe all good relationships should be. We trust each other so implicitly that there is an unspoken agreement between us that we always act in the best interest for the other person. A dear writer friend shared with me very early the view that what we choose to share with our readers is more than enough sharing on our part as writers. That is how I feel about this topic, I have shared what I wish to share in my work about every one of whom I have written.

As to your second question, yes, M is not a writer, but he is the most creative person I know, and I think that that has really impacted on my writing because I have watched and lived with him, and he has been able to feed into my work in a very direct way. Most importantly, he has facilitated my ability to write in a very real, concrete way by minding the house and caring for our child, and that is more meaningful to me than any kind of inspiration he can provide. I think it is important to acknowledge these unseen and unpaid activities that allow writers to write. I will always be grateful for that.

MT: Mental health is an important issue in your books, but in Cacophony of Bone you deal with this serious matter in the contexts of pregnancy and motherhood, describing your feelings about not wanting to be a mother. You also confess how emotional and afraid you felt when you were about to become one. You even ask yourself if you have any right to feel that way and write about “your bullshit” (263). Writing about mental health in an Irish memoir dealing with nature-writing is something that defines your work, making is not just unique, but very courageous, too. What were you trying to achieve by linking these aspects in your work?

KnD: Absolutely. I really think that we are all living in a culture that is very separatist. For example, we all live in our individual boxes. We cook meals just for ourselves and we raise our money to pay for our own children’s needs, etc., etc., etc. I think that that is the reason why we are in the mess we are in, as a human race. This idea of separatism has fed into our ideas of self. Mental health is seen as being so separate from physical health, emotional health. They are all seen as very separate, but they are not. They are all so linked. My physical state of becoming a mother, growing a baby, of course they played into my emotional and mental state, and in being truthful about that, and naming them on the page, allowing those things to be together, was a way of trying to take that step a bit deeper into the kind of writing that I really want to do. A writing that looks at the fact that you are not just you, and I am not just me. We are we. We are part of an ecosystem that relies on one another. All thriving is mutual, you know. If some of us are not doing well, none of us are doing well. And I think that in allowing those things to be all tied up together, inside me, it allowed me to understand my link with the world I was in, with the other-than-human, the human, the place that I lived, and I could begin to make those connections in a much easier way. And, for me, motherhood has been the most radicalising experience of my life. It allowed me to fully step into my ideas of the ecologies of care, what care giving means, what one-anotherness means, what we do, and its impact. And these things are pertinent now, as we write through the various crises of our age. I think that how we look at motherhood, how we view mothering, care-giving, tending, are ways into words, are ways of asking the questions that we need. It is not about answers to me; it is about questions. What questions do we need to be asking? What do you need and how can I help with that? What are we supposed to do and how do we do our best? I suppose that represents how my mind works, how my body works, how my heart works, all of them tied together.

MT: Do you wish the reader to become your accomplice in this memoir?

KnD: Yes, that is such a wonderful observation! I very much worked on the ways in which I could invite the reader in in this book, in particular through the use of gaps, white text and formatting. We had come out of a time framed by separation, lockdown and deep fear. I wanted my reader to feel safe, like a womb, even when reading potentially traumatic and triggering material. I wanted to keep them close, like a wee bird on my shoulder, and wanted them to know they were held by both the physical book and me the writer. That they were with me. That they were absorbed in this day-to-day life. [That I am] someone who really cares for life and for the world, for the reader. It felt like an act of love by which I am forever changed.

MT: Cacophony of Bone is an innovative work of nature-writing. It is highly rhetorical in its questioning, disruptive in its layout, encyclopaedical in its references to hundreds of texts and intertexts by writers dead and alive, and repetitive in the use of certain sentences and terms. Did you have a specific aim in making your second book so experimental?

KnD: The very interesting thing is that I never have, and never would, call myself a “nature writer”. I have a very interesting relationship with labels such as this as I think, really, we are all just writers, putting our hand to the pen, and trusting in whatever comes out, free from worry about what box it is supposed to sit in. I always wanted my work to be allowed to bend genres, and when my second book was being written I knew for certain I would allow myself, properly and fully, to be guided by the book itself. To follow its lead, dance to the tune of its delicate unfurling. And I adore the shape it took. I am humbled, truly I am, to have written a book that is so of its own self. And a book that pays such respect, as best I could, to the many creatives who get me through dark days and bright days alike. How lucky we are to have them all!

MT: What do “moon” and “light”, the most recurrent terms in Cacophony of Bone, mean for you?

KnD: Oh, this is a vast question! It is a very long book, and the moon and light are woven as delicately as I could into the entire fabric of the work. They are characters, in many ways, as well as meditations, guides, prayers and more. My relationship with the moon makes up a core part of my creative identity, as does my relationship with light. We often do not realise the ways in which things affect our inner landscapes until many years later, and I find light a way back, as well as forward, as well as being an anchor: a way to stay with. I am so grateful for these guides in my life, ever and always. Also, too, I am grateful for the wisdom offered us by darkness, as equally important for our lives as the light.

MT: Did you draw the birds that appear inside the book?

KnD: Yes, I did. Why do we draw, write, sing, make? I think because we simply must! It is how many of us find our way in the dark; how we make light in harrowing times. I create because it reminds me of who I am, and why I am here, and because it makes the journey brighter, and gentler by far. A very beautiful thing happened in my early 30s, just after I got sober; I began drawing for the very first time properly. And it was extremely humbling and beautiful and more. I knew I needed a wee bird in Cacophony of Bone, and knew I needed to draw her. And so there she lives, within the nest of those pages.

MT: In Cacophony of Bone you put emphasis on having moved in and out of places all your life. Do you still feel like a migratory bird flitting from place to place or have you found the home you desperately searched for when you were younger?

KnD: I have found home, very much so, and I found it in the family I have made and am so grateful to be a part of. I explored, at length, the meaning of this word “home” in each of my books, and I am confident it will not be the last time I sit with ideas of what home means. I believe ideas of home are crucial as we navigate the various, deepening crises of these times. Belonging is the best hope we have; ensuring each of us feels at home in ourselves, on the land and with all the beings of this exquisite, varied, breathtaking planet we call home.

MT: In the book you confess that you stopped dreaming when you were drinking every day and show your concern about not dreaming any more. Do you still have dreams? Why is dreaming so important in your work?

KnD: I still dream, and they are still one of the deepest forms of magic in my whole life! They are so relevant because they simply are! They are part of who we are, they nourish, warn and guide us. They remind and free us, and I am the kind of dreamer that will ever and always write about her dreams!

MT: Can you say anything about the projects you are working on now?

KnD: This is one of my favourite questions as a writer as I am always dreaming of the next thing! I think many writers are the same, right? Right now, for the first time, I am working on two big pieces of work alongside one another. Another long-form creative non-fiction on (m)othering and a novella – a short dystopian fiction. Who knows what I will do with either of them, but I am loving the freedom of working away in peace, with no deadline or expectation, at my mint-green desk in the attic!

Notes

[1] I acknowledge support for this publication as part of the project “Post-Human Intersections in Irish and Galician Literatures” PID2022-136251NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF: A Way of Making Europe”.

[2] On critical posthumanism see Hayles (1999), Badmington (2003), Haraway (2016 [2003]), Wolfe (2010), Braidotti (2013).

[3] For a detailed study of other Irish female writers’ observations of nature and profound interest in the connections between the human and the non-human environment in their works, see Estévez-Saá’s enlightening interview with Sara Baume (2020: 117–28).

[4] For more on Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s traumatic experience of survival, see O’Hagan (2021).

[5] See Bhabha (1994) for his views on “mimicry”, “ambivalence” and “in-betweenness”, which illuminate ní Dochartaigh’s mixed feelings and her cultural identity.