LooseLeaves: Caroline WalshWhatever it is about Ballynahinch in Connemara, Co Galway, it's had its fair share of literary visitors, including such heavyweights as Thackeray, Maria Edgeworth, and Somerville and Ross.
More recently, poet and publisher Peter Fallon has come here for a few days each bleak midwinter - either in December or January - to get some work done in a house lent by a friend.
Initially, the time all went into his translation of Virgil's Georgics, published in 2004. But when he got back to his own work, though quintessentially a midland poet writing almost exclusively about north Meath, where he has lived and worked for decades, the very different landscape of Connemara emerged in the new poems.
Here was a writer of landscape, not seascape; of plains, not mountains, responding to Ben Lettery mountain, waterfalls, rhododendrons, seaside cemeteries and fishing nets, all in a place where, as he puts it in Daylight Robbery:
You think you'll dander out
to look at the mountain
and find yourself venturing out
to look for the mountain.
The poems amassed over the years - he's been coming for six or seven - have now been brought out by Occasional Press, in collaboration with Ballynahinch Castle Hotel, in a collection called Ballynahinch Postcards, with a Basil Blackshaw illustration on the cover. Fellow poets Eamon Grennan, Conor O'Callaghan, Vona Groarke and Gerard Fanning, and writer Tim Robinson - whose own book Connemara: Listening to the Wind is just out in paperback - were among those on hand when it was launched there a few days ago. Some of the Connemara poems will be included in Fallon's next collection, The Company of Horses, due from Gallery Press next month.
There's been a lot of talk lately about tourism in Connemara facing a dilemma - how to hang onto the 21st-century visitor without compromising its essence - but official-speak about it as a product that needs to be marketed and sold jars with the nature of the place. Sending Postcards - for that's how Fallon saw them when he wrote them: short glimpses and glances, as on a postcard - out into the world to woo the visitor instead might do far more than any branding slogan.
Clogher celebrates Carleton
It couldn't be more appropriate that the late Ben Kiely, who died earlier this year, is to be the subject of a tribute by academic and poet Maurice Harmon at the William Carleton Summer School, which opens in Clogher, Co Tyrone, on Monday and runs until Friday. Kiely, the author of the seminal work on Carleton, Poor Scholar (1948), was a constant supporter of the school, which has celebrated the author of Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry in his home place since 1992.
Topics to be discussed next week include Madness in Carleton and Carleton's Illustrators. Michael Fisher will give a talk on Journalism from Carleton to Kiely and Beyond, Dr Peter Denman on Carleton and the Literary Journals, and there will be a symposium on 19th-century women writers with Barry Sloan, Tom Dunne and Clíona Ó Gallchoir. Proceedings take place in a venue mentioned in Carleton's work, the 17th-century country dwelling Corick House, which is now a hotel. There will also be tours of the local landscape. More details at
[ www.williamcarletonsummerschool.org ]
A stinging seminar
The Stinging Fly periodical is inaugurating a fiction-writing workshop, the first one of which will be led by novelist and short-story writer Sean O'Reilly (left). Between eight and 10 participants will be selected for the free workshop on the basis of work submitted to the magazine before September 14th. Those selected will discuss and review one another's work at an intensive one-day session in Dublin on Saturday, October 27th. More details at www.stingingfly.org/fiction_workshop.html
New women writers unite
The Women Writers in Migrant and New Communities Network (WINCC) is a new initiative that aims to facilitate the creative work of women writers in such groups in Ireland. The organisers will act as an information network for the writers, will organise seminars, readings and other events devoted to their experience, and will offer a forum for dialogue between members of the network and other women writers in Ireland.
More details from poet Nessa O'Mahony and journalist and writer Pamela Akinjobi at wwfinc@gmail.com