Catherine Morris

CATHERINE MORRIS

CATHERINE MORRIS is a writer, academic, and curator based in Dublin. Her first book Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2012) uncovered the forgotten cultural feminist arts practice of one of the founders of modern Ireland. Morris is Assistant Professor of Literature at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Previously, she was Associate Professor in Creative Writing & Literature in Liverpool where she was elected the Central Library’s first Writer-in-Residence.

book cover with still of Liverpool by Lumière

INTIMATE POWER
Autobiography of a City
by CATHERINE MORRIS

Paperback original, 126 pages, color and b&w images, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-179-4

Kindle ebook, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-180-0

Intimate Power: Autobiography of a City is a meditation on forms of personal losses that we carry with us all our lives. It simultaneously serves as a recovery of voice for the kinds of trauma that the city has carried through successive generations, be it slavery, famine, war, asylum, or exile. The book is a series of walks through Liverpool made on a return journey from a feeling of long exile. It is a recovery of voice through which the author situates parts of her own life into a collective solidarity that she sought out in conversations, chance encounters and in the stories that she uncovered in the city's local and international multimedia archives. Morris walks through versions of herself in Liverpool via twenty-one episodes that she names after revolutions: moments in which transformations occur. Each episode is separated by an intersection of “Walking” that carry the words of the living and of the dead.

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Haunting and beautiful.
—STEPHEN REA, actor

I really liked and admired this text: its openness at once to European historical moments and to personal insights, at that point where the two might merge. The citations and quotations also bring out the sense in which each of the “historical” quotations was once an individual history, with the pressure of felt experience, before becoming a social truth. The I\she bifurcation helped to bring out the dichotomy but also the hope of some underlying unity knotting all of these disparate experiences together. The same could be said of the various parent/child meditations. The images come at exactly the appropriate moment. The different texts, taken together, seemed to offer an analysis of the city as a sort of urban-peasant-place— a point of convergence for modernity, yes, but also a holding-centre for the multiple experiences of those who fetched up there.
—DECLAN KIBERD, Professor emeritus of Irish Studies, Notre Dame University

THE ART OF AFTERMATH
Words and Pictures Exchanged between 07/2020 – 03/2023
by TIM MAUL and CATHERINE MORRIS

Paperback original, 70 pages, 29 color images, $20
ISBN: 978-0-88214-140-4

Kindle/Apple ebook, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-141-1

In the summer of 2020, the American artist Tim Maul and the Irish author Catherine Morris agreed to develop a writing project around a set of 35mm slides he had gifted her from his 1994 commission with the National Library of Ireland. The result is an attempt at an image/writing exchange outside of the positivist “creative” busywork that appeared early in the ongoing pandemic.