Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair Longlist!

collage, 08 by Niamh Boyce Congrats to everyone! (there were 300 entries this year) Click the centres web for more details. Author		Novel Title
Geraldine Creed		Swimmers
Áine Tierney		The Bad Eater
Jamie O’Connell		The Creator of Beautiful Things
Sally O’Brien		Operation Liberace
Julianna O’Callaghan		Plain Boring
Mary Valle		The Body of Christine
Jennifer Cullen		The Bad Detective
Sharyn Hayden		Fragments
Rosemarie Noone		Ruby Shoes
A.J. Burns		The Awakening
Ken Foxe		My Civil War
Berta De Burca		The Witch
Doreen Finn		My Buried Life
Eve Sandoval		Eleanor Reddy
Mark Nolan		Évariste
Caroline Healy		Blood: Ties
Tracey Iceton		Green Dawn at St Enda’s
Siobhán Jones		The Fire
Jeremy Doogan		Horse Power – Danny Shortt in a Rusted World
Claire Coughlan		No Comets Seen
Susan Lanigan		White Feathers
Seán Mackel		The Bee Orchid
Laura McKenna		Forfeit
Mairéad Rooney		The Ironman
Andrea Carter		Whitewater Church
Marion Reynolds		A Soldier’s Wife
Madeline B. Moran		The Fall of a Sparrow
Betty Codd		Eleanor Grace
Donal Minihane		Cliona’s Wave
Kevin Doyle		Chasing The Tiger
Sinéad O’Hart		Tider

Story?

Niamh Boyce 2009

Do you have some stories ready to go out into the world? Here are some of the many competitions you could take a chance on -

The Francis MacManus Award
21st Jan/ 1,800 -2,000 word limit


The Elizabeth Bowen/William Trevor
deadline: 5th April / 3,000 word limit


The Molly Keane Award
31st March /2,000 word limit

The Moth Short Story Award
31st March/ no word limit


And for Tania Hershmans extensive list of magazines that publish short stories click - Here

Writing From Stillness

Acrylic on board by Niamh Boyce 2009

“When you are present, the world is truly alive.”  
Natalie Goldberg

Shirley McClure is facilitating a one-day workshop of creative writing. I've attended Shirley's Writing From The Body workshop and it was a day well spent, she's such an experienced, creative and calm facilitator.

Writing from Stillness invites you to slow down and connect with your own creativity. Simple mindfulness techniques are used prior to writing.

It is suitable for beginners & people who have been writing for a while.

Group limited to 12 participants.

When : 24th February 2013 from 10.00 – 17.00

Where : Wilton Hotel, Southern Cross Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow

Ample free parking. Within walking distance of the Dart.

Cost: €55, unwaged €45

Tea/ coffee provided.  

Enquiries/ booking: shirleymcclure2@gmail.com 086-603 4481  

About Shirley:

Winner of  Cork Literary Review's Manuscript  Competition 2009, runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2009 and  shortlisted for the Strokestown International Poetry Competition 2012, Shirley McClure's début collection, Who's Counting? (Bradshaw Books) was published in 2010. A practitioner & teacher of bodywork, Shirley has been working in adult education for almost thirty years, & runs a number of creative writing classes.

Buzzing!

My novel The Herbalist has been included in The Irish Independents predictions of the next big things for 2013!  '...here is our definitive list of the future Irish success stories in the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film and television, who are tipped to be the next big thing in their field.'


For the full article: Watch out! These guys are gonna be BIG in 2013 via @independent_ie

Extract....

'Before you start wondering, no, Boyce doesn't write bonkbusters. A poet and a librarian, Niamh was awarded the Hennessy XO New Writer Award in 2012 for a poem called Kitty, and her first novel will be released through Penguin this year.
However, she is no novice, having had stories and poems published in newspapers and magazines since 2009.
The Herbalist is set in 1930s Ireland and tells the story of an Indian man who sets up in a small town selling lotions and potions to aid the villagers.
Told through the eyes of four women whose lives are changed by this mystery guy, it sounds reminiscent of Joanne Harris' 1999 novel Chocolat but Boyce's breezy, descriptive, Irish style is all her own.
Already creating buzz in the industry, this is certain to be a must-read for those who want a break from vampire fiction and S&M.' (Vicki Notaro)

The Herbalist will be published on June 6th 2013

Pass Me The Butter

I've just finished Edna O Brien's fascinating memoir Country Girl, and am left as intrigued by what was omitted as by what was included - but perhaps I'm just nosey.

Thankfully the horrific banning and burning of her first book The Country Girls (1960) was before my time, instead it was well loved and much quoted when I was young, as in -

oh lady divine, will you pass me the wine?,  
oh lady supreme, will you pass me the cream? 
You bald-headed scutter, will you pass me the butter?” 

Does anyone else remember that rhyme? Or am I alone in my ancientness?!

Paula McGrath, in her excellent review-essay 'The Influence of Edna O'Brien' writes about how O'Brien has been perceived. 'O'Brien was notorious because she was a ground breaker.' Ground breaker she was, but though Edna O'Brien won the Frank O Connor short story award in 2011, (for Saints and Sinners), there have been no other accolades - and this for a writer of whom it has been said-

"...She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman’s experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international."(Andrew O’Hagan.)

New Years Resolutions

I'm mad for resolutions, can't help myself. It helps me focus to have goals or a theme, even if its a Do- Nothing Theme, which might be January for me. I'm so sluggish after Christmas I might as well be covered in mud. I had an amazing writing year last year, an agent, a book deal for The herbalist and winning Writer Of The Year and I kept, most, of my writing resolutions. This year I'm hungry to find out more about poetry, so I'll be doing a lot of reading, and hopefully workshops if I can find the time/cash, but in the meantime, I'm adding a section to my blog posts called Some Words On Poetry.

So, this years resolutions look like this-

1.

Complete Poetry Collection

 I'm working hard on a series of poems, most seem to be inspired by characters from Irish myths and European fairy tales and some are fueled by my own life, I wonder are they two collections or one?
I'll just keep writing and see. I'm reading Strong Words, manifestos from poets on poetry, some of the manifestos are marvellous-  those from Yeats and Selima Hill, but a lot of them would do your head in.

2.
Arrange Short Story Collection
I have a collection of short stories, written over four years, from 2009-2012 and I will be putting them in order in one ms. I also have a few stories, more recent ones, that I want to rework and add to the collection. It's called The Wild Cats Buffet after one of my earliest stories, though it may change.

3.

Write Novel

I'll be working on a new novel, a fast first draft. I had begun a novel I was excited about last year but made the brutal mistake of gabbing about it too early, so its lost most of its fire for me. I'm going back nevertheless to try again on Monday, when the kids are back in school. I'll devote six weeks to getting as much down as I can, and this time I'll stay stum.

4, 5, 6...
This year I would love to travel, Paris would so nicely:) And I'm going to stop biting my nails. And launch my novel this summer. And get up earlier, and be more organised, and get haircuts and .... those kinds of normal woman things...  and, of course, tidy the bloody ramshackling house. And watch loads of silent movies in bed. And rediscover the joys of porridge.

***************************************

Some Words On Poetry

'Revision is the party'

( from Billy Collins /Paris Review Interview)

'I try to write very fast. I don’t revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It’s usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I’ll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done. Most of these poems have a kind of rhetorical momentum. If the whole thing doesn’t come out at once, it doesn’t come out at all. I just pitch it...

People say, Don’t throw anything away. This is standard workshop advice: Always save everything. You could use it in another poem. I don’t believe that. I say, Get rid of it. Because if it got into a later poem it would be Scotch-taped on. It would not be part of the organic, you know, chi, the spine that the poem has, the way it all should be one continuous movement.

What was that word you used?

Chi. I think they use that in feng shui. It’s the Chinese sense of energy that runs through things. Poems that lack that seem very mechanically put together, like a piece here and a part there. Because of the workshop and the M.F.A. phenomenon there’s much too much revision going on. Revision can grind a good impulse to dust. Of course, the distinction between revision and writing is kind of arbitrary because when I am writing I am obviously revising. And when I revise, I’m writing, aren’t I? I love William Matthews’s idea—he says that revision is not cleaning up after the party; revision is the party! That’s the fun of it, making it right, getting the best words in the best order.