I’m delighted to have my poem Admission, on leaving the Port of Belfast, 1988 accepted for the Fall issue of Infinite Rust, Texas Southern University’s quarterly journal of Literary and Visual Arts.
The theme of the issue, due online on 28th October, is HOME: perspectives or interpretation relating to ideas such as the meaning of home, immigration, marginalization, nationalism, ownership, comfort, security, displacement, boundaries, and identity.
The literary magazine of Queen’s University, Belfast is edited by postgrads at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, launching 24th October at Bookfinders, Belfast.
I’m pleased to have 2 poems in it, especially ‘An Irish Merchant Seaman’, a sonnet about my late father who was a Belfast man.
I had a lot of fun entering the Kilmore Quay Write By The Sea Short Story Competition 2018. I was so delighted that all three of my entries were among the seven shortlisted.
Crannóg magazine of Galway are taking a Wales-set story of mine for Issue 49 due late October. I’m delighted to have a piece accepted by them.
My blog has been selected for inclusion in the UK Web Archive
“a cross section of UK Web logs containing a wealth of material which will be of value to researchers now and in the future”
A poem of mine will be included in the special Irish issue #61 of acclaimed magazine ‘The North‘ due later this year. I am particularly pleased to be represented in this edition.
It was lovely to meet novelist, Mandy Sutter (‘Bush Meat’) and Gwen Davies, editor of the New Welsh Review at our session during the Cardiff Book Festival. We were discussing Writing Psychology from Place: witness, exile and belonging.
I read my N Ireland-set short story ‘At Oirthear Maí’.
AN ULSTER PSYCHE
I was shocked by her photographs. How could she dare? As well as projected slides she had a dozen cibachromes on display whose marvellously luminous surface makes the paper itself a fresh lens. It becomes a pool of water in which everything is gently enhanced by the limpid medium. And yet, this pool is pinned to a wall.
I had to leave the room. Such things should not be shown without a warning. Continue reading AN ULSTER PSYCHE