Belfast's newest resident, the Poetry Jukebox, was installed at Crescent Arts Centre a few months ago with a deceptively simple mission: #changingthemessage
A new curation arrives at the beginning of April marking twenty years since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and asking the question.. "What else?" And this is the type of question McGibbon O'Lynn's post-human narrative likes to interrogate and explore in The Xenophon Project. So I am vey delighted that one of my Xeno poetry fragments, 'The Signal' from our Almanac of Tomorrow piece has been selected to be part of this new curation. Words have power, language carries a resonance far beyond ourselves. A consensus could not be achieved on whether this was an explosion or an implosion. The poems in the #GFA20 curation will also become a LabeLLit intervention, part of the arts hub of the Peace & Beyond Conference which is being organised by the Centre for Peace & Democracy, Ulster University & Queen's University Belfast (10-12 April). Our poetry will be an installation of literature designed for conference delegates to take away with them - little thoughts on where the future will take us all.
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 This weekend marked the final of the three XBorders:Accord sessions, with a last seminar in Belfast. Of course we took our writerly friends around the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Queen's quad, the Naughton Gallery and last - but certainly not least - to listen to some of the inspiring voices (including our very own Adam Trodd!) on the Poetry Jukebox at Crescent Arts Centre #changingthemessage  After a very pleasant morning of meandering in a shockingly sunlit Belfast, what awaited us within was a rather more rigorous and intensive seminar on sharpening our editing skills and really honing our writing to be the best that it can be. I am a terrible editor so this was a tough session for me but I feel like I have learned a lot from it and I hope the ideas will percolate well over the nextfew weeks as I prepare my work for the last few steps of the XBorders project - a 1:1 mentoring session and a showcase at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin in May.   We had earned our wine after all that!
 jWell, there's me at last night's pretty fancy Hennessy Literary Awards. The whole evening was fabulous from beginning to end - a Hennessy cocktail bar! John Lavery art on the walls! A Hennessy swag bag to take home! People wearing beautiful dresses! Canapés! (Priorities, people...) Bernard MacLaverty there in person to be inducted into the literary hall of fame! Marina Carr up on the judging panel! The Irish literary institution that is Ciaran Carty himself who had plucked all our stories and poems to publish from a submissions pile of over 3000 entries in 2017! Roisin Ingle compering the whole thing!
It is fair to say I am beyond starstruck! Huge congratulations to the three very deserving awardees from last night: Aaron Finnegan, Louise G Cole and Manus Boyle Tobin.
Extremely delighted to be amidst some pretty exalted company on the shortlist for the Hennessy Literary Awards 2018 - and especially in the same year that the venerable New Irish Writing reaches the half century milestone. 
Got some pretty cool post into the bargain, inviting me to the awards ceremony in Dublin the week after next - can't argue with that, though it is very definitely the first time my name has been on the guestlist for a party sponsored by Hennessy. Feel like a rap star. 
And of course had to go and buy a copy of the paper today, because I'm not a rap star - I am a geek.
 Siobhan and I are very please to announce our new show, Xenophon: From the Beginning, as part of Drogheda Arts Festival, at Droichead Arts Centre.
Featuring artifacts old, new and post-human from The Xenophon Archive, we will be employing sculpture, narrative, animation and technology to explore the interstices between art and science, and the future of the human species. There will be some new text incorporated through poetry and multi-layered journal entries. Entrance is free, everyone is welcome, all are one and details are here.
Delighted to see this very cool review of Issue 5 of the fabulous Banshee Literary Journal, in which my story 'Time to Waste' appears in some very exalted literary company. Grab your own copy here or submit your own work for issue 7 before 31st March. |
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