Exciting announcement: appointed Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick

I am thrilled to share the news that I have been appointed Lecturer / Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick. My role will involve teaching Creative Writing, supervising postgraduate work, organising some literary events and personal creative writing projects. I cannot wait to start in the new Spring semester, 2022. I view the teaching of Creative Writing and mentorship of other writers as integral to my creative practice and literary citizenship and so this is a dream post for me. The inspirational poet-teacher, Theodore Roethke once observed that "teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world" and I completely agree with him. I am truly looking forward to working with the Creative Writing students at UL and with the sensational team at the School of English, Irish & Communication. My appointment was announced in The Irish Times today.

To read the full article, please click on this link.

Twitter thread reveals identity of a muse

Thanks to a conversation on Twitter today, which was brought to my attention since my own Twitter account is currently inactive, I now have a very good idea of the identity of my muse on the bicycle with the hula hoop that day in Salthill who inspired "Poise" from my collection, Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019)... She, la petite Francaise, it must surely be... This doesn't happen every day and I'm grateful to the wonderful Martina Callanan of Galway Cycling Campaign, for shedding light on the mystery. May those spokes keep turning!

Final places left on The Craft of Poetry Writing online course - starting Thursday

There are a couple of places left on my new 'Craft of Poetry Writing' course which begins at 7pm this Thursday, 7 October. The course delivery is online, via Zoom and each session runs until 8:30pm. To bag your place, click on the short courses Eventbrite page here. (A recent cyber attack on the NUI Galway website wreaked a bit of havoc and the previous links for registration are currently undergoing maintenance). I can't wait to embark on another creative adventure with a new group of budding and emerging poets. If you think someone you know may be interested, please spread the word.

Autumn Poetry Course at the Centre for Adult Learning at NUI Galway and Recent Poetry Projects

It's that time of year again when our thoughts turn to new opportunities for lifelong learning, developing skills or delving deeper into our favourite pastimes and activities. I'm delighted to share that I will be teaching 'The Craft of Poetry' again for the Centre for Adult Education, NUI Galway. This 8-week course starts at 7pm on Thursday, 7 October and booking will close over the next few days. There are a few final places left, so don't delay if you are thinking of registering! During the spring semester I was fortunate to facilitate this course for a really talented, vibrant group of people - a mix of beginners and improvers - and we had immense fun each week, exploring great contemporary poetry, sharing new drafts and honing our craft together. That course was a great success and it was wonderful to learn that the participants have kept the group going in their own time and are actively sending work out for publication, and even winning prizes already. Ger Duffy, I'm thinking of you - heartiest congratulations again! So to say that I am looking forward to working with a new group of emerging poets as we embark on this course is an understatement! If you would like to know more about 'The Craft of Poetry Writing', you can read the description below and view the course booklet here for more information:

At the start of the Summer, I was one of five Galway-based poets invited to participate in an exciting project on the theme of climate change; the initiative involved the creation of poetry with schoolchildren to build a 'Wall of Words' for a 'Climate of Hope.' It was a pleasure to collaborate with Miss Evans and her lively, engaged groups in third and fourth class at Castlegar National School in May and June and a privilege to inspire and empower budding poets to express their voices on this crucial topic. The pupils composed an eye-opening variety of wish poems, list poems and animal poems - both as a group and individually - that reflected on the impact of climate change on our planet and envisioned steps we can take to nurture a brighter future. Focusing on our connection to nature and on positive climate action, the project clearly aided the students in developing their understanding of how human choices can affect their environment. All of the childrens' poems were displayed in the Eyre Square Centre for Cruinniú na nÓg on Saturday, 12 June and have been up for all to view and enjoy since then. Sincere thanks to Creative Ireland Galway City, Galway Public Libraries, Clarice Evans at Castlegar National School and the children of third and fourth class for a memorable experience which enriched our understanding, through poetry and art, of the long-term causes and effects of global warming, rising sea levels, extreme weather events and the thinning ozone layer. In accordance with the project goals, our 'Climate of Hope' succeeeded in "enhancing the creative and imaginative lives of young people on a topic of vital importance for our planet and one that will make a lasting impact on the collaborators and spectators it connects with - at a time when connection is more important than ever." We had lots of great fun along the way and I was advised by some of the pupils to set myself up as 'the poetry person' on TikTok! You never know, I may well heed their suggestions yet...

Emily Cullen, poet-in-residence with Clarice Evans, teacher of 3rd and 4th class, Castlegar National School at the 'Wall of Words' in the Eyre Square Shopping Centre

Summer Poetry Course - new start date

Summer online poetry course… starting soon

“Poetry is the music of being human,” wrote Carol Ann Duffy, memorably. She also observed that “you can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what’s in your heart.” Would you like to devote more time to attuning to the music of your humanity this Summer? Would you like to uncover and shape the poetry that is latent in your everyday world? James Tate rightly observed that “poetry is everywhere, it just needs editing.” I am delighted to announce that I will be facilitating another online poetry course focused on the craft of poetry starting in mid-June and running for six weeks. While the course is aimed at emerging poets or those who have some experience writing poetry and may have recently started to publish their poems, more advanced writers will also find stimulation and encouragement.

As someone who thoroughly enjoys teaching courses on Creative Writing (I have taught undergraduate students and adult learners at the University of Melbourne, NUI Galway and online from home) during the past few years, I agree with poet, Theodore Roethke's observation that "teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world." For this online course, you will enjoy creating new work within a warm and supportive atmosphere. We will begin at 7pm on Wednesday, 9 June with duration of about an hour - 1 hour 15 mins. To find out more and book your place, please contact me now on: emilycullendavison@gmail.com.

Take 5 for poetry each day during Poetry Month!

Another gorgeous initiative from Galway Public Libraries - Take 5 for poetry - started at 11am today with Galway's own Gerry Hanberry reading his stunning poem, "On Nimmo's Pier". I'm delighted to be part of this 'Community of Reciters' and my own poem, "Through the Cracks", will be going out at 1pm on Saturday, 24 April and again as part of the feast of poetry on National Poetry day, Thursday, 29 April. Tune in on Galway Public Libraries Facebook and Instagram whenever you can to get your "espresso shot of thought", (to quote poet Daljit Nagra on what a poem is). The daily poetry slot times are 11am, 1pm and 4pm and the full schedule is below.

Thursday 22nd April 11.00am Gerry Hanberry 4.00pm Joan Finnegan Friday 23rd April 11.00am Elaine Feeney 4.00pm Danny McDonnell Saturday 24th April 11.00am Kevin Higgins 1.00pm Emily Cullen 4.00pm Bernie McGuire Sunday 25th April 11.00am Susan Miller duMars 1.00pm Luke Morgan 4.00pm Joan Hardiman Monday 26th April 11.00am Moya Roddy 4.00pm Carmel Dempsey Tuesday 27th April 11.00am Pete Mullineaux 4.00pm Mary Donoghue Wednesday 28th April 11.00am Nuala O’Connor 1.00pm Mary Mannion 4.00pm Teresa Dempsey Thursday 29th April – Poetry Ireland Day schedule 9.00am Kevin Higgins 9.30am Joan Hardiman 10.00am Emily Cullen 10.30am Jimi McDonnell 11.00am Gerry Hanberry 11.30am Mary Mannion 12.00pm Moya Roddy 12.30pm Teresa Dempsey 1.00pm Louis de Paor 1.30pm Bernie McGuire 2.00pm Elaine Feeney 2.30pm Carmel Dempsey 3.00pm Pete Mullineaux 3.30pm Joan Finnegan 4.00pm Susan Miller duMars 4.30pm Mary Donoghue 5.00pm Luke Morgan 5.30pm Nuala O’Connor. Here is my poem for Poetry Day: "Through the Cracks" from my third collection, Conditional Perfect.

Poetry news update – three new poems coming soon

Happy Poetry Month! It has certainly been a strange time of flux for the creative impulse during the past year. Like many others, I worried, during the first lockdown, that my pull towards poetry would be compromised - even suspended indefinitely. With the all-consuming pandemic anxiety, fear of the unknown and our national sense of grief for the casualties of covid-19, making new art was no longer a priority; it became something I genuinely jostled with. In the depths of the prevailing stasis, however, I found that my hunger for reading poetry had in no way subsided. And little by little, my appetite to create my own new work reawakened, so that when “Henrietta’s Confession” was published in the June 2020 issue of The Honest Ulsterman, I actually did a happy dance. Subsequently, when I was invited by Galway Contemporary Music Project to compose a poem in response to Debussy’s string quartet, I was truly excited to take up the ekphrastic challenge. I’ve written a short article about this experience elsewhere on this blog. By that stage, I was making my peace with lockdowns, recognising that, in spite of all, the seasons remained constant around me and life went on, albeit in a radically altered world. I also published a poem for a dear new friend, Cassie, whom I met immediately prior to the first lockdown, and about our friendship which flourished, in spite of the challenges of social distancing, and this poem appeared on that wonderful nurturing blog, Pendemic. Lastly, I wrote an essay on the value of literary citizenship which appeared in issue 13 of Skylight 47, a journal I greatly admire. Unsurprisingly, there were dodgy, existential covid-anxiety poems along the road too, but on the whole, I kept the pen moving, without forcing the words forth on stickier days. And so, when the year turned, and we had survived, all things poetic seemed to be looking up considerably. Since early February of this year, I’ve been teaching ‘The Craft of Poetry’ to a dedicated, vibrant group of poets for the Centre for Adult Education at NUI Galway and that conversation with a community of writers has been wholly energising. And I’m also delighted to share with you that three newly composed poems will be coming out shortly. Firstly, my poem “Ode to Blue Cheese” will feature in issue 14 of Skylight 47, due to be launched in early May. I certainly indulged my love of cheese varieties during the three consecutive lockdowns, and sometimes we just have to eulogise the little things that keep us going, don't we? Hopefully that ode supremo, Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), would have approved!

Another new poem of mine, “Adam’s Apple” features in a brand new anthology about climate change that has just come out from the wonderful Doire Press: Empty House: poems and prose on the climate crisis and which is due to be launched on Earth Day, 22 April. See invitation to this online launch below and please do join us!

This poem was inspired by the observation that creation myths in First Nation cultures tend to be much closer to the natural world, and in much greater harmony to it, than our own Western myth of origins, which positions us as masters lording it over earth and the food chain. Last but not least, I was recently commissioned by Strokestown Poetry Festival to compose a poem on the theme of ‘new beginnings’ as the country slowly starts to re-open and as more and more people are safely vacinated against covid-19. My poem, “Summering” takes inspiration from that famous quote, once uttered by Seamus Heaney, which gave solace to many through the various stages of the pandemic: “If we winter this one out, we can Summer anywhere.” But that’s about all I can divulge at this stage as a recording of the poem will be going out on the Strokestown Poetry Festival website during the festival between 1-2 May. Stay tuned for further updates soon. In the meantime, thanks so much for checking in, stay safe and enjoy Poetry Month to the full!

Nuala O'Connor is my final guest for the Women Writers of the West online book club

In the final two weeks of the 'Women Writers of the West' online book club we will be discussing Nuala O'Connor's Becoming Belle - a gorgeous novel based on the life of Isabel Bilton - the entertainer in Victorian London who lived on Garbally estate, Co. Galway after she married her Viscount of the Clancarty earls.

It's a wonderfully rich read, full of period detail and depicting a vibrant life. I got my copy in Charlie Byrnes and you should be able to get your hands on a copy from any of the book shops.

Nuala will also give us a sneak preview into her latest highly acclaimed novel, NORA - about Galway's own Nora Barnacle - in the final session too. Don't miss the chance for more book-lover's camaraderie in an atmosphere that is equal parts fun, sociable and informative! Register for your free place here. #womenwritersofthewest #galwaypubliclibraries In other, somewhat related, news all four sessions of the previous online book club I facilitated for Galway Public Librares - 'Journeys in Words - From Galway to Dublin' - exploring the short fiction of Maeve Brennan and Liam O'Flaherty are now up on the Galway Public Libraries Youtube channel and can be enjoyed at your leisure. In the final session I had the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Maurice Casey about the life, times and politics of Liam O'Flaherty as well as about the translations of his work in soviet Russia. Casey has fascinating new research on O'Flaherty and you can enjoy our discussion at the link below. Thank you to all our special guests during the course of the 'Journeys in Words' book club and to everyone who participated and contributed to the success of this immensely enjoyable textual voyage.

On International Women's Day - reflecting on the recovery of women's voices

Not only has the historical record often underestimated the contribution of women to society, but art can also be guilty of this travesty, consciously or unconsciously. The title poem of my debut poetry collection, "No Vague Utopia", is a short monologue in the voice of Eva Gore-Booth who is politely, but adroitly, addressing W.B. Yeats beyond the grave (since he was so taken with communication from the spirit world!). Eva (1870-1926) was a poet, dramatist, suffragist, committed social worker and labour activist who was especially vocal about the conditions for women workers in the cotton factories in England.

Yet, in his poem "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz" Yeats writes about Eva: "I know not what the younger dreams - / Some vague Utopia...". His wistful and understandably human nostalgia for by-gone days still glosses over Eva's achievement as she is memorialised as a vague dreamer, now wizened and gaunt.

Should Con and Eva have frozen in time by the great windows of Lissadell, eternally youthful and gazelle-like in their silk kimonos just to placate Yeats's aesthetic reverie? My poem is a gentle riposte to Yeats as Eva seeks to make the point that her life and vision did not amount to 'some vague utopia.' No Vague Utopia was published by Ainnir Publishing in 2003 and I hope you enjoy this poem. Happy International Women's Day and here's to the ongoing recovery of all those important female voices muted by history, patriarchy, art....!

Between a rock and a soft place

A bit of a magpie, I’ve always been fascinated by gemstones; by their colours, textures and especially their exotic names. Some time ago, during my years as a doctoral researcher, I found myself working in a jewellery shop; the owner knew me from coming in to hover and purchase small gifts and offered me a part-time job. I was smitten with a large slab of labradorite at the time. Set in silver, its discreet iridescent flash of blue lit up its swampy grey as if declaring: don't judge by surface appearances! Look deeper to find the energy. I took the job. Though I’ve never been fully ‘on board’ with New Age theories about the healing vibrations of crystals, I was in love with everything else about them. Carrying secret stories about how the earth evolved over millions of years, they are full of the hidden music of its DNA. It was inevitable that a poem would gradually crystalise and here it is! I’m delighted to discover that it was last Friday’s ‘Poetry Break’ on Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council’s youtube channel and you can enjoy it here

Happy Ireland Reads Day!

I was invited by Galway Public Libraries to read one of my poems for #IrelandReads Day today, and I'm delighted to share this one with you, "Envoi in Chalk". It features in my collection, Conditional Perfect, published by the wonderful Doire Press. Here is a link to the book if you'd like to get or gift a copy. Happy reading everyone! #SqueezeInARead #IrelandReads #LoveGalwayLibraries

Week 2 - Women Writers of the West online book club - a few more spots available

Due to high demand, a few extra tickets have just been made available for our second 'Women Writers of the West' online book club session tomorrow evening. The session sold out early on but some new places have been added. We got off to a great start last week with plenty of lively group discussions about Elaine Feeney's novel, AS YOU WERE and ending with an enjoyable and insightful chat with the author herself. Each session is unique so don't worry if you missed the first one. We are finishing our discussion of Elaine's book tomorrow and topping it off with another fun and informative chat with the writer, who will be sharing writing tips and talking about new work-in-progress. In weeks 3 & 4 we are moving on to Mary Costello's ACADEMY STREET. Don't miss the chance for some book-lover's camaraderie sprinkled with writing tips and insights from the author herself. See you in cyberspace tomorrow from 7 - 8! Event page is linked here.

Announcing the Women Writers of the West online book club - starting soon!

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the new online book club, 'Women Writers of the West,' organised by Galway Public Libraries with the support of Creative Ireland, will be kicking off in just under two weeks time, featuring three wonderful writers, Elaine Feeney, Mary Costello and Nuala O'Connor and facilitated by yours truly!

The 'Women Writers of the West' book club, which aims to shine a spotlight on the especially vibrant space of contemporary women’s writing in the West of Ireland, will feature special guest appearances each week from each of the authors during the second half of the book club sessions. Tickets are always free but places are limited and you can register for your spot by clicking on the event page below. We will be reading As You Were(Harvill Secker, 2020), Academy Street(Canongate Books, 2015) and Becoming Belle(Piatkus, 2019) so don't hesitate to grab your copies now and get reading!

Join us for another exciting voyage as we enter the diverse, vivid worlds of three memorable characters: Sinéad Hynes, Tess Lohan and Isabel Bilton. The event page, with full information, is linked here.

Reflection on the 'Journeys in Words' online bookclub

It’s a week since the 'Journeys in Words' online bookclub reached its final destination (ending last Tuesday night) and I’m still thinking about the two writers we explored and, specifically, about the animal world Liam O’Flaherty evokes so keenly. At the weekend, Kevin, myself and our two boys walked to Mutton Island for some fresh air and exercise. It was a cool, clear Saturday afternoon and, gazing at the ocean, I kept thinking of the conger eel’s struggle, firstly to placate his hunger by catching mackerel and secondly, to writhe free of the fishermens' net. In my mind’s eye, I could see that net lowering into the Atlantic and scaling it. This is surely the mark of a great writer; someone whose words stay with you, linger in your head, mingling vision and imagination with your present reality. A recent study, highlighted again in an article last week, has shown that crows are self-aware and I'm reminded of that seagull O'Flaherty poises on a ledge, goaded by his mother into finally taking his ‘first flight’. Jennifer Ackerman notes in The Genius of Birds, that our expression "bird brain" is long redundant. Both science and the stories of O'Flaherty remind us of the need to keep refreshing our knowledge about the animal kingdom lest we continue to underestimate our fellow earthly creatures.

While the focus of our book club was the short story form, the late Eileen Battersby aptly reminded us that it "remains too easy to confine a reading of O'Flaherty's highly cinematic art to 150 often superb, short stories - many of them fables which present him as an intense primitive, preoccupied with the brutal inevitably of nature in its dealings with animal and man, while missing out on the political and socio-cultural dimension of his vision. O'Flaherty never forgot the landscape and lifestyle of his island home but, through his travels soon became quite cosmopolitan.” And we certainly broadened our bookclub discussions beyond O'Flaherty the naturalist to consider his nomadic spirit, his political activism (the 99th anniversary of his seizure of the Rotunda on 21 January, 1922 is just a few days away) and, more generally, his entire corpus – (O’Flaherty was remarkably prolific, producing a novel per year throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s).

Having studied for the priesthood early in his life, he underwent a loss of religious certainties and ideological affiliation, and was faced with the necessity of dealing with these crises in his art. I’m struck by the fact that he was a man of action and rebel who travelled the world with an open mind, gradually losing faith in religion, communism and republicanism (roughly in that order) only to realise that what he truly wanted was to get back to that native ‘rock’ in his imagination, to that 'otherwhere' of oral storytelling which we glimpse in The Ecstacy of Angus. In the example of O’Flaherty – who was by no means a ‘saint’ – we can recognise that the journey of artistic integrity is not dictated by financial gain, a quest for fame or by what’s in vogue. Like Patrick Kavanagh, another Irish writer who protested the grand delusions of the Irish Literary Revival, and whose trajectory can be mapped in his early pastoral writings, his urban pieces, his disenchanted anti-pastoral writings (The Great Hunger) and, ultimately, his return to a celebration of the everyday in his canal bank poems, it is the honest seeker who doesn’t compromise to satisfy external tastes or stakeholders whose work will ultimately stand up to scrutiny because it is not a travesty; it derives from an authentic, questing humanity.

A famous quote of O’Flaherty’s that is all over the web and hints at the breadth of the man’s thinking can be read directly above. As well as suffering from the wrath of the censorship board, (he was one of the most censored writers in Ireland in the 1930s) O’Flaherty has, perhaps, also been unfairly disparaged by critics for his refusal to work within a completely realist mode in his novels. (He has been most widely praised for The Informer, Skerrett and Famine). I think this quotation hints at the expansiveness of his vision – something which has proven challenging for academics, who would too easily wish to pin down O’Flaherty and find that they cannot. As Dermot Heaney writes in his paper “The O’Flaherty Novel: a problem of critical approach”: “One cannot help feeling that many critics would prefer a lesser, more easily definable author, a tidier writer.” (1995, Etudes Irlandaises)

Unlike O’Flaherty, who deals with open expanses of nature and external turmoil, Maeve Brennan is a master of fraught interior spaces. In fact, the former externalises inner tumult in the great outdoors and the latter does something similar, but very much indoors, under a roof. Brennan’s detailed descriptions of confined domestic settings are often objective correlatives for the sense of claustrophobia her protagonists feel. A mixture of memoir and a study of two unhappy marriages, featuring the Derdons and the Bagots, The Springs of Affection has justly earned its classic status, finding republication in 2016 with Stinging Fly Press. Her attunement to the Ranelagh suburbs of the 1920s (her childhood home was at 48, Cherryfield Avenue) affords fascinating glimpses into the formation of the young writer’s mind and worldview and also of a unique and rarified era. Like Eilís Dillon, (the subject of our first book club at Galway Public Libraries during the month of October) Brennan was the child of Irish revolutionaries, Robert Brennan and Una Bolger. (Lucy McDiarmid has written a fascinating article that highlights the friendship between Dillon’s and Brennan’s parents). Domestic space plays a crucial role in these vignettes as her characters are increasingly marked by their perception of confinement.

There’s a highly cinematic quality in Brennan’s story cycles too - like O’Flaherty, but in a different vocabulary – compounded by the fact that certain details are repeated & small narratives retold in sharper relief as the stories progress. Brennan can capture the minutiae of interior space exceedingly well. Indeed, a special kind of gift is required to find the narrative in ‘a panel of filigreed brass that runs all around the hearth’ (“The Sofa”) to isolate it and to say to the reader: ‘this, too, is important.’ It is true to say that the 'domestic,' as a subject for fiction, is often glossed over and subtly dismissed by critics. Maeve Brennan stunningly demonstrates, however, that this sphere is often the seat of our emotional and psychological well-being.

In terms of what these two writers, O’Flaherty and Brennan, might share in common: one could argue that they were both 'outsiders' – while enjoying ‘insider’ status for brief periods, especially in the case of Maeve Brennan who was very much what we might now term an ‘influencer’. To be a staff writer at The New Yorker during the 1950s and ‘60s was to occupy one of the most influential seats in American culture and Brennan contributed book reviews, fashion notes, essays, and short stories. Between 1954 and 1981 she wrote a series of sketches about daily life in Times Square and the Village for “The Talk of the Town.” But, as her biographer, Angela Bourke and others note, as an Irish-American woman at this period, Maeve was also very much an outsider.

Liam O’Flaherty retained, and perhaps basked in, his own outsider status during his life – and was also full of contradictions: an Irish republican who fought in World War I, a Gaeilgeoir from Inis Mór who spoke with a cut glass English accent, etc. In many ways he revelled in being a liminal figure and themes of alienation and loneliness loom large in his fiction. Both writers were perceptive observers of the societies in which they lived and the contrasts between the polite milieu of suburban Ranelagh with the more rugged, elemental world conjured by O’Flaherty has made for a rewarding reading experience over the course of this book club. As noted above, both were from Republican backgrounds – O’Flaherty’s father was a Fenian - and both suffered from debilitating breakdowns at various points in their careers - more lastingly and, perhaps, tragically in Brennan's case. Arguably, both were reacting against romanticism in its many variants in their unique ways; O’Flaherty against the Literary Revivalist representation of the ‘perfect peasant’ and Brennan against the highly gendered Hollywood delusion of domestic bliss. Lastly, and in purely superficial terms, both writers were uncommonly good-looking and charismatic, and that is probably where the commonalities end and the rich contrasts take over. Juxtaposing two such varied voices made for a highly enjoyable reading experience with a piquant twist of the unpredictable. Taking this journey through words with two consummate masters of the short story form has been thrilling and I would like to sincerely thank our four guest speakers over the four sessions; experts on Brennan, O’Flaherty and the Irish short story form: Prof. Patricia Coughlan (UCC), Prof. Elke D’hoker (University of Leuven), Seamus Cashman(founder of Wolfhound Press) and Dr. Maurice Casey(historian at EPIC Museum). I also want to thank all of our participants – we had regular members in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Achill Island and even one member in Greece! And, last but not least, thank you to my colleagues at Galway Public Libraries: Josephine Vahey, Sharleen McAndrew and Niamh O'Donovan as well as Teresa Lavina and Gavin of Nova Productions. It now gives me great pleasure to announce here that Galway Public Libraries and yours truly, with the support of Creative Ireland, will be bringing you another online book club soon – commencing in mid-February – and focusing this time, on contemporary Irish writers. More information to follow soon! Watch this space!

New online course, The Craft of Poetry Writing, starting in February

February is an opportune month to awaken the senses to new sights, sounds and possibilities for your poetry practice as we leave behind the dark days of Winter in the hope of brighter, breezier and indeed, safer times just around the corner. I’m delighted to announce that I will be teaching an 8-week online course, ‘The Craft of Poetry Writing’ for the Centre for Adult Learning and Professional Development at NUI Galway throughout February and March. The course will run on Thursday evenings from 7pm to 8:30pm beginning on Thursday, 4 February. Part lecture, part workshop, we will explore a different aspect of poetry and prosody each week with themes including: voice, ekphrasis, poetic forms, line breaks and revision, among others. You will receive valuable feedback on your poems in a safe and encouraging space, as well as plenty of creative prompts to inspire new work. The course is excellent value at just €100 and you will come away with some fresh insights and a range of newly composed pieces. For full details on ‘The Craft of Poetry Writing’ and for the link to the short online courses booket visit www.nuigalway.ie/shortcourses. Places are limited so don't hesitate to book your spot as soon as possible.

Journeys in Words book club resumes - on the stories of Liam O'Flaherty

Inis Mór born writer, Liam O'Flaherty fascinates me. A man of action & rebel who travelled the world twice over, fought in WWI and on the Republican side in the Civil War, raised the red flag of revolution over the Rotunda in 1922, visited soviet Russia, produced nearly a novel per year during the 1920s and into the 1930s, ranged from romantic realist to caustic social satirist. His memoirs, especially Shame the Devil (1937), make for an electrifying read. Witness its striking opening provocation: “Man is a born liar. Otherwise he would not have invented the proverb: “Tell the truth and shame the devil.” He is truly one of our great Irish writers and I love that he and his work can't easily be 'pinned down' by the critical establishment. Over the next two Tuesdays I have the pleasure of exploring his short stories in the free online book club I'm facilitating for Galway Public Libraries, Journeys in Words - From Galway to Dublin, which resumes at 7pm on Tuesday, 5 January with our final session on Tuesday, 12 January. This Tuesday we will be joined by poet and publisher, Seamus Cashman who played an important role in the recovery of Liam's work in the 1970s and 80s at Wolfhound Press, and who was also the author's friend. There are still a few places left and this book club is for the general public - for everyone who likes reading. Click on this link to bag one of the few remaining places!