My review of Paul Murphy’s autobiography appears in the Autumn/Winter edition of Current Affairs magazine the welsh agenda.
Baron Murphy of Torfaen is a Welshman with a particularly close connection to Northern Ireland. Continue reading the welsh agenda – Review of ‘Paul Murphy – Peacemaker’
I am thrilled to receive an award from the Support for Individual Artists Programme (SIAP) of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s Lottery funds.
This will help to fund a project on Place and Displacement. I will be working in poetry, memoir and fiction.
I appreciate this support very much in what will be a challenging undertaking.
I am delighted to have won joint Third Prize in the Almost Dancing Poetry Competition and Heather Newcombe Award. The Award honours the late Heather Newcombe, a poet who established the Let Me Take You To The Island Writing Festival on Rathlin in 1997.
Heather was a driving force in the Ballycastle Writers’ Group who run the Competition and Award. Entries were judged by poets, Joan and Kate Newmann.
The Group launched its anthology of work by the Group members, ‘An Unfinished Thought’ on 29th October.
At the BAFTA Cymru Awards in Cardiff on 13th October, Velindre, Hospital of Hope, a series following patients through treatment for cancer, won the Award for Best Factual Series.
Commissioned by ITV Wales, the series was made by Green Bay Media and was the company’s final production prior to joining forces with Wildflame Productions Continue reading BAFTA Cymru win for Green Bay Media
I’m looking forward to delivering this one-day hands-on Pitching Skills workshop. In Cardiff on Thursday, 28th November. £25 for union members. £50 non-members. It’s always a privilege to encounter the passion and inventiveness of the participants and to see how their pitches develop. Continue reading My Pitching for Creatives Workshop for CULT Cymru
Judge Rhiannon Hooson has chosen Elizabeth Wilson Davies’s poem ‘Heartland’ as the winner of this year’s poetry competition. My poem, ‘After Iconoclasm: The Jesse Tree Window’ and 19 other poems will be published in the Festival Anthology by Parthian Books.
Continue reading Finalist in PENfro Book Festival Poetry Competition
My consideration of Gwyneth Lewis’s collection of poetry, ‘Treiglo’ for the Cardiff Review. A first-rate book in content and also in design,achieving a striking coherence in all respects. Continue reading My review of ‘Treiglo’ for Cardiff Review
I’m delighted that my short story ‘The Bangle’ is on the shortlist for the Write By The Sea Festival Competition.
I had three stories shortlisted for this last year. I messed up the payment process and ended up with 3 entries. The administrator for the Festival was impressively patient with my ham-fistedness and when I saw that all three stories had made the shortlist I was initially convinced that it was because I had somehow made another mistake!
As I like the sea theme, and since the Festival seems to be such a properly human enterprise, making allowances for the likes of hames-makers such as mysef, I wrote one for this year’s round. Hence my especial delight at making the shortlist again.
I very much enjoyed writing the story.
The Festival programme looks really good, with writers such as Paula Meehan, Kit de Waal and Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.
https://writebythesea.ie/programme-2019/
The Prorogation of Parliament
That day when the wedding guests exploded;
That day when I let a wee girl ricochet
From and towards her mother’s spew of blame;
That day I didn’t shelter
A railway worker from a racist shower …
Some close at hand, some far.
Kabul or Coleraine station, the same acid rain.
That day in Coleraine station when I witnessed
The airiness its architect enticed inside;
A guard whose smile kept all our doors ajar
And, in town, a window of bottles,
Wittily displayed — such light-filled things.
These close at hand. In far
Kabul or Coleraine station, the same inherent shine?
Today, when democracy exploded,
I was tread-milling for an email thrill
When I caught the acrid taste of tipping-point.
In the rank mulch of small misdeeds
The great ones grow. Wake up, wake up, my soul.
Some close at hand, some far.
Kabul, Coleraine, the Commons, I must reach those I can.
It was an inspiring theme from Matthew C. Smith, editor – the 50th anniversary of the Moon Landing to be dealt with in no more than 10 lines in an imagistic style. I wrote Moon, Landing from the perspective of the moon coming to earth rather than humans going to the moon. See Broadside 5. Black Bough Poems
Moon, Landing 20th July 1969
I was moon-hungry, ten years old,
So I set a mirror on the beach
And lay in wait that night.
Moon landed there, looked up
And was a child! Like me, an only child,
Tentative and curious, hoping to play.
To have him as my friend, I saw
I’d have to let him go
And come at will. Chastened, I prayed
That all the astronauts would lose their appetites.
On the same theme I also wrote a poem in Ulster Scots which will be in #9 of The Bangor Literary Journal, launching August 18th and First Death of The Troubles, occurred 14th July 1969 about the context of the Moon Mission in Northern Ireland – this is on my website.