About Me — Martin French

Overthinking overwriter exploring arts and human nature, among other things

I cannot blame anyone who sees the pic, and thinks to themselves “Yaay, another white cishet guy here to write about his feelings and stuff and how hard done by they are”. Well, I hope that is not who I am.

In terms of being some white guy, I am Irish from Ireland (a distinction I have learned from the past 11 years mostly in the US. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in rural Ireland: it was a lonely, isolated, chastening experience. I shovelled shit and I wandered fields, and I didn’t speak to many outside my family if I wasn’t at school. I lived a much more vivid life inside my head, nurtured by my mother, and fed largely through the books I picked up from the library, or occasionally was given for birthdays. I soon found myself swallowed whole by books, writing, and the idea of expression through words. I think the isolation helped nurture that, and words were the first of my abiding loves.

Somehow, the poverty and isolation of my youth gave way to life in Dublin for a spell in third level education. It was there that I discovered the theatre, the second of my abiding loves. I acted poorly in one play. A year later, I was inspired by what I would now describe as a performance art piece highlighting the lack of activity of the drama society. As a result, I found myself poorly directing a show the next year, and accidentally poorly learning how to do a ton of stuff theatrically — unfortunately, it was mostly by trial and error, and I didn’t receive any formal or structured introduction to theatre until a masters degree. But oh, how I loved what I was doing, and how I love so much of it still. I have given it up at least twice, and found myself dragged back before very long on both occasions. Somehow, I managed for years to have it as my main income source, be it designing, directing, acting, or whatever paid. It was the reason I joined Medium first — I wanted to say things about what theatre should do in the light of the first covid lockdown, and I had no platform beyond the local and facebook, and I was put to it indirectly by a friend who is remarkably successful at this Medium writing malarky. Needless to say, at most a quarter of what I have written here is about theatre.

From Dublin I was able to bounce on to London, still working in the theatre. There I met a woman, and followed her to the US — following her still, and now following a boy who has supplanted theatre as my main work focus. Mercifully, he loves soccer, my third abiding love from years before. I was never much a player, better than I should have been but never good enough to get beyond occasional appearances on my school team. Indeed, my first proper regular writing job (unpaid as it was) was as a contributor to the match day program of Waterford United (now Waterford FC), the local professional club. I think I must have spent 5 years producing 10–15 articles a year of 800 words on various aspects of the game, almost all while living in the US.

At the moment, with covid keeping theatre things tamped down, I am chiefly homemaker, child wrangler & wife supporter, feeder of innumerate cats, volunteer doer of volunteery things, occasional kids’ soccer coach, and, it would seem, writer. I try to only write about things I care about, which varies wildly. For some few examples, I got very excited about the MAT-SU school district in Alaska banning 10 books from schools, so did a short series on that. I wrote a piece explaining the way the Irish government is elected and formed, and about how my HVAC problems are a reminder of why I have massive unearned privilege being white in the US. I have lately been writing #LegalHorrorStories for a publication here called I Taught The Law, which my wife JoAnne Sweeny and my friend Dan Canon run. I also just set up a publication — Many Mini Manifestos — as I am currently in love with the idea of the manifesto as a means of expression. So, as Peter in The Zoo Story says, “I have a broad catholicity of tastes”.

I have (like most of us here, I suspect) tended to over think things. From the common place of whether I said something awful inadvertently, to the wondering if we had the same colour cones as dogs would we have evolved differently, and all the way to the question of whether this paragraph adds anything or not. I have held myself back as a writer by presuming that a piece was either not good enough or not finished enough. When I started writing / editing / adapting for the theatre, this started finally to change — a deadline has traditionally been to my advantage, as it forced me to get the job done, no matter how happy I was or not. I have finally been able to export that to writing that doesn’t have a deadline, but with mixed success. My aim this year is to do the job more consistently.

As I have reached my maturity, I become increasingly aware of just how extraordinarily lucky I am. Born 100 years earlier, I would have had no opportunity to live a life like I have. Even 10 years earlier, I would never have had a chance to go to university. I am fortunate and privileged to be in a position to share my ideas and thoughts, and to be a reasonably capable communicator. Knowing that, I have generally felt that I had a responsibility to advocate for social improvement. Thanks to the past 18 months, I now have allied it to the desire to be positive too, as well as looking at problems that we should acknowledge in order to change things. Hopefully, something somewhere that I write might influence someone to think differently, or try to be more positive.