Trinity Reading Review

I've been to 2 of the 3 Trinity readings.

Tuesday April 1st Derek Mahon, Mary Morrissy and George Szirtes
Introduced by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

This had a huge turnout. We had to change lecture theatre to fit everyone in.

Derek Mahon, the Belfast poet was the main draw here. He doesn't read much these days, I believe. He read some new stuff and was warm, witty and entertaining. His Collected Poems has been reprinted by Gallery Press.
He was followed by the writer and current Irish Writing Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre, Mary Morrissy who read a imaginative but long extract from her creative non-fiction from the point of view of Sean O'Casey's sister.
Then George Szirtes, the political and sometimes humorous Anglo-Hungarian poet with a well known blog.

I didn't make it to the following Tuesday, Sebastian Barry, Poet and Professor in the School of English, the University of St Andrews, Douglas Dunn, and Creative Writing graduate and author of The Mushroom Pickers, Jacqueline McCarrick. Introduced by Deirdre Madden.

Then last Tuesday I went to Anne Enright, Peter Fallon and Bernard O’Donoghue. Introduced by Gerald Dawe.

Peter Fallon poet and publisher started and did a low key reading.
Anne Enright, Ireland's famous, most recent Booker winner read a great short story from her new collection, Talking Pictures. She's a good reader and the voice in the story was very strong, funny, poignant.
Last was Bernard O’Donoghue, a witty Cork poet with great stories/introductions for each poem.

I saw Anne Enright again this weekend in an interview at the Franco-Irish festival in Dublin Castle. I went mainly to experience simultaneous interpretation. The lesson is, incoherence in French can only be translated as incohenrence in English. Ah well.

Over the Edge Competition

Over The Edge New Writer of the Year 2008

New Writer of The Year 2008 competition

€1,000 in prizes plus major reading opportunity
Deadline: August 1 2008

The Over The Edge is open to both poets and fiction writers
The winner will receive a cash prize of €600, a spot as a Featured Reader at an Over The Edge: Open Reading, and the title Over The Edge New Writer of The Year 2008.
The runner-up will receive a cash prize of €300
the third-placed writer will receive €100.

Entries should be sent to Over The Edge, New Writer of the Year competition, 3 Carbry Road, Newcastle, Galway, Ireland with an accompanying SAE.

Entries will be judged anonymously, so do not put your name on your poem(s) or story. Put your contact details on a separate sheet.

Criteria: fiction of up to 3,000 words, three poems of up to 40 lines, or one poem of up to 100 lines.
Poems and stories entered in the competition must not have been previously published.

Fee €15 and an SAE. Fee payable by cheque or money order to Over The Edge.
All entries must be typed.

To take part you must be at least sixteen years old by August 1st 2008 and not have a book published or accepted for publication. Chapbooks excepted.

A shortlist of 8 will be announced in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008.
The Over The Edge New Writer of The Year 2008 will be announced at the Over The Edge reading in Galway City Library on Thursday, September 25th, 2008. The winner will be a Featured Reader at a reading to be scheduled in Galway City Library in Winter 08/09.

Judge is Celeste Augé. Celeste Augé was born in Canada, but moved to Galway, Ireland when she was 12 years old. She writes both poetry and fiction, and is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway’s MA in Writing Programme. Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. She has read her work as part of Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series and also at the Cúirt Festival/Over The Edge showcase reading in 2006. In 2006, she was awarded the Publication Assistance Grant by Galway County Council. Tornadoes For The Weathergirl, a chapbook of her poems, was published in 2007. Her first full collection, The Essential Guide to Flight, will be published next year by Salmon Poetry.

For further details contact Over The Edge on 087-6431748 or e-mail over-the-edge-openreadings@hotmail.com or see http://overtheedgeliteraryevents.blogspot.com/

Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

I blogged about this when it was announced. The winner has now been picked. Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm.
Home Page (The top three are all men, 5 of the top 10 were women.) Amazon customers voted to pick the grand-prize winner. I wonder were the lads better at drumming up votes? Just a thought.

The Hellraiser of the Hollywood Hills by Jennifer Colt
Casting Off by Nicole R. Dickson
Bad Things Happen by Harry Dolan
The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer
The Butterflies of Grand Canyon by Margaret Erhart
Ring of Lies by Karen Laugel
Fresh Kills by Bill Loehfelm
Motherless Children by Randall Luce
The Prospect of My Arrival by Dwight Okita
Wrecking Civilization Before Lunch by John Ring

They received more than 5,000 entries. Over 800 fiction entries were eligible for Amazon.com customers to read, rate, and review.
Editors at Penguin Group (USA) reviewed the Top 100 semifinalists based on early customer reads and full manuscript reviews provided by Publishers' Weekly.
The leading Top 10 finalists were selected for the customers' vote.

Interview with a writer

I'm thinking of interviewing writers and agents and maybe publishers as part of this blog, different genres and levels of publications.

Any burning questions you want me to ask?
Anything unique and insightful?
Anyone volunteer or you can suggest?

I have a few people in mind I know but am open to ideas.

Salman Rushdie Reading

As a kind of trailer for the Dublin Writers Festival (which I always think should be renamed the Dublin Readers Festival as there is nothing for writers in the audience)
anyway, as I was saying, they have Salman Rushdie reading at the Gate. Tickets 18 Euro (quite dear I think)

April 20th. That's next Sunday at 8pm

What better way to anticipate this year's Dublin Writers Festival than a special 'in conversation' with the 'Booker of Booker's' winner Salman Rushdie on the eve of his new novel The Enchantress of Florence.

"Rushdie is still our most exhilaratingly inventive prose stylist, a writer of breathtaking originality." - Financial Times

For how many authors does the publication of a new work constitute a true 'literary event'? Marquez? Coetzee? Roth? Rushdie.? The list is short, the names iconic, the company exclusive.
Rushdie made his name in 1981 with the Booker-winning postcolonial epic Midnight's Children. Its vast historical sweep and provocative mix of myth, politics and magic marked what Malcolm Bradbury called "a new start for the late 20th-century novel". Rushdie is the author of eight further novels including the Whitbread-winning The Moor's Last Sigh. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, and a board member of American PEN.
His latest novel - The Enchantress of Florence - is vintage Rushdie; a sprawling 16th-century saga of Mughal princesses and Ottoman sultans that traces the connections and disruptions between East and West, nationhood and identity.
An eagerly anticipated new novel. A rare Dublin visit. A must see literary event.

Reading Poems

OK, so back to my premise, there are reading out loud poems and reading on the page poems and, surtitles excluded, they usually aren't found in the same poem. Although in saying that, there can be poems that are one type of poem if you just hear them and when you read them on paper, you get a whole new interpretation or slant to them.

Anyway, I just didn't get Sinead Morrisey's poem "Through the Square" window which was judged the window of the highly prestigious and rich National Poetry Prize. I thought it was just me. I can be quite thick on poems. And stories, sometimes. And films too. I got all the way to the end of The Sixth Sense without twigging. She read it at the Poetry Now festival (not a reading out loud poem, I suggest) but that was the right thing to do although, if she mentioned it won the competition, I missed that bit. I didn't get it/ Was it about Playschool ("Through the round window, the arched window or the square window, children?")

And I read it too online and I still didn't get what quality made it the winner. And then it turns out, I was not alone. Carol Rumens in the Guardian agreed with me. If she had been judging, it wouldn't have won.

And the lesson here, apart from that there are reading out loud poems etc..., is that just because your poem/story/novel/screenplay doesn't win or get shortlisted in a competition, or accepted in a magazine or by an agent or staged or whatever, doesn't mean there isn't someone else out there who will recognise the quality that makes it uniquely yours and a winner.

Residencies

I've become interested in residencies. I have just been awarded one in Europe (OK Germany) for two weeks in the summer, which is very exciting, and I was looking at other possibilities. Of course, you can always just rent a room or a cottage somewhere that doesn't specifically cater for writers too or go on a retreat - they're not all religious.

This one you have to pay and I'm not sure that it's a good deal. How much would a self catering cottage cost over the winter in Galway anyway?

CAVE COTTAGE WRITERS RESIDENCY: CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

Cave Cottage residency is a new programme for writers providing one week terms at a 300 year old thatched cottage on the sea near Clarenbridge, Co. Galway. The programme provides for accommodation for 1 person for 1 week or more. Open to all Writers local and foreign. Selected readings of work will be showcased at an event in the cottage.
The first application deadline is 15 May 2008 and the residency is for weekly periods ranging from November 1 2008 to March 7th 2009.
As we are a new programme and not fully funded, the price per week will be €200. Included is the entire cottage, fully furnished with linens, kitchenware and cost of utilities. Accompanying family/partners permitted at small extra fee. Travel, food and all other expenses is the responsibility of the writer.
Cave Cottage looks out to Dunbulcawn Bay, oyster catchers in their boats and the ruins of an ancient castle across the water. Over 300 years old and one of the last genuine thatched cottages of its kind in the west of Ireland. Twenty minutes from Galway city but secluded in a working farming area just 10 feet from the water, providing the opportunity for undisturbed work . A turf fire, hand crafted kitchen, large bedroom and lots of nooks and cranny's make the cottage an idyllic setting.
Send your CV and work sample to Residency@CaveCottage.com before 15th May 2008.

Paris Irish College. This one sounds lovely but you're competing with people from other art forms.

Artists-in-Residence at the Irish College in Paris

Recent and upcoming artists-in-residence at the Irish College in Paris include visual and performance artist Aoife Desmond, poet Paul Durcan and bowmaker Gary Leahy (one of only two full-time bowmakers in Ireland).

To apply for a residency between September 2008 and July 2009, or for further information, write to Sheila Pratschke, Director, Centre Culturel Irlandais, 5 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris or by email spratschke@centreculturelirlandais.com

Again this one sounds like any old cottage marketed at writers. Do think the finances through before you apply. Anyone can buy a desk and aim their holiday home at writers.

Writers Retreat | Coney Island

Inish Mulclohy Lodge "is situated on the beautiful unspoilt Coney Island in Sligo Bay. The Lodge is a converted barn and has stunning sea and mountain views."
"The lodge has all mod cons and oil central heating and is is available to writers between the months of February - April for €400 per week and May and June for €450."
For further information contact eileenfneal@eircom.net.

India - Writers’ Retreat in Kerala, India. This one has massage and monsoon.

Raheem Residency, www.raheemresidency.com a heritage hotel at Alleppey Beach, Kerala, south India, transforms itself into a Writers’ Retreat at certain times of the year. It’s because of a private passion for books and for writing that we want to share this place with writers. I am the Irish owner, a former TV presenter and a scribbler of sorts. Raheem Residency is an old (1868) colonial villa and the home of the Raheem’s for one hundred years until we bought and restored it in 2003. Our facilities - 7 rooms, 15 metre-pool, Ayurvedic Massage centre, Yoga etc are classified by the Tourism Dept as 4-star. We are in a quiet location opposite a beach, 1 hr 40 mins south from Cochin International airport. The town of Alleppey is 10 mins away by rickshaw and still retains a truly Indian character – undeveloped for tourists and therefore still friendly and simple while having all the chaos of any Indian affair. We are classified by the government of India as a genuine Heritage Hotel. The special tariff for writers is about half the normal price of staying with us in the tourist season.
Room, Breakfast & Dinner per night: €75 for single occupancy but you may bring a non-writing partner to share your room for an additional charge of €30 per day to include Breakfast and Dinner for her/him too (please note, we have just two Twin-bedded rooms; all others are big old-style Kerala beds, including a few 4-posters). Minimum Stay: 14 days. Total Number of Rooms: 5 Doubles; 2 Twin (so please book as soon as you can).

Next Available Dates:
June and July are the monsoon season in Kerala, a perfect time to be quiet, still and to knuckle down to your writing project. But a word of clarification: many people who have not been in monsoon climates think that cold rail pelts down all day long. It doesn’t. Contact: www.raheemresidency.com

Writing retreats don't suit everyone but they suit me. I get way from the washing and the Tesco run and concentrate/knuckle down. I can't wait!