Listowel's 30th birthday - time for a makeover?

`Are you writing a poem?" inquired the man sitting beside me on the third day of Listowel Writers' Week, as I sat in the Kerry Literary and Cultural Centre taking notes, while waiting for one of the morning's events to begin. It was a fair assumption, since many people at Listowel were attending one of the nine writing workshops on offer. They included theatre and film director and screen-writer Gerry Stembridge on writing for screen, prose writer Claire Keegan on short fiction, and poet Pat Boran on simply getting started.

Writing workshops are now so widely available in this country we tend to take them for granted, but it was Listowel, now in its 30th year, which pioneered the concept, and the workshops remain an essential element of the festival.

Prior to this year, I had been to Listowel just once before, when I was 19 and attending a poetry workshop. At that time, all the workshops were held in the Listowel Arms Hotel. Then, it was hot June weather, solid blue skies. I walked in and out through the hotel doors several times a day, inhaling the scent of apricot-coloured roses, which covered the entire hotel facade like some astonishing three-dimensional poem. It's the only time I've ever attended a workshop, but the memories of it have stayed with me: the excitement of recognising good lines when you heard them read by fellow participants, and the motivation to want to try to write good lines yourself.

When I got off the bus in the square this year, just before President McAleese was due to arrive to perform the official opening in the Listowel Arms, dozens of welcoming schoolchildren were hopping around in front of the hotel, waving banners and tooting on tin whistles in happy chaos. I had forgotten the roses until I saw them again, still dipping and swaying on the wall of the hotel. They had endured over the years, just as the festival has.

This year, the winner of the main literary prize, the £5,000 Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year, was Michael Collins, for The Keepers of Truth. In addition, there are literally dozens of other literary awards, with categories for writers in prisons, to schoolchildren from under nine to 18, to poetry, fiction, and drama open to all. Listowel definitely runs Ireland's most inclusive literary competition.

However, while the competitions attract a wide range of entrants, it was noticeable throughout the week that the majority of those attending the readings, lectures, debates and workshops were middle-aged to elderly. Listowel urgently needs to address the matter of regenerating its audience if it wishes to continue into its fourth decade. Part of the problem of any long-established festival is the danger of sticking to a formula that has worked in the past, but this resistance to change inevitably results in repetitive programming and a lack of the freshness that is crucial for attracting new audiences. For instance, US crime writer Lawrence Block, who discussed his work in tandem with Irish crime writer John Connolly, was introduced as being a "festival stalwart"; he has been coming to Listowel for 30 years.

Listowel has an eclectic committee, and it depends on many people from the local community to support the festival, both for sponsorship and for volunteers who man the ticket desks at the various venues and act as ushers at the week's events. While an informal atmosphere is an integral part of the festival, an unforgivable feature of the week was members of the audience being allowed to wander unchecked in and out of lectures and discussions, sometimes up to half an hour after the event had begun. This was highly disruptive.

This year, Bruce Arnold gave the Seamus Wilmot memorial lecture, on the theme, "The End of Nationalism". As one of his examples, he took a swipe at the Abbey Theatre, declaring it "lamentable" in what he described as its ongoing time-warped efforts to discover another Play- boy of the Western World. He declared it his firm opinion that "Irish drama since then has been happening everywhere except at the Abbey". He also cited as significant that none of the three Irish novelists shortlisted for the festival's Book of the Year award - Michael Collins, Mary Morrissy and John Connolly - had chosen to set their books in Ireland. The radio producer Seamus Hosey chaired the packed writers' forum on getting published, with panel-members, writers Michael Collins and Tom Nestor, and Gaye Shortland, a writer and an editor at Poolbeg, and children's author Darren O'Shaughnessy. The forum invited many questions from the floor, with the panel in agreement that it is virtually impossible to get published now without having an agent. Michael Collins, who lives in Seattle and whose day-job is at Microsoft, told the audience that if he was starting out now as a writer, he would post some of his work on a website and email a number of agents with links back to the site, in the hope of attracting their attention this way.

Highlights of the week's schedule included a forum entitled "That Corruption is at the Core of the Irish State"; Gerry Stembridge, interviewing the novelist, Colm Toibin, and a tribute reading to the late poet, Michael Hartnett. One of the most anticipated events of the week was the appearance of American writer Michael Cunningham, winner of last year's Pulitzer Prize for The Hours, who was being interviewed by the writer and critic Mary O'Donnell. He put his profession into his national context for us by observing cheerfully: "The most famous writers in the US aren't even a tiny bit as famous to most people as the smallest bit-players on TV." He said that The Hours, which he described as "a riff on Mrs Dalloway" (by Virginia Woolf), was almost not published at all.

"My publisher hated it. He only agreed to do it because he'd liked my other books." At this event, there was the tantalising potential for some really fine contributions from Cunningham, but the interview lacked focus throughout, and this audience member came away with a sense of wasted opportunity.

Meanwhile, every day, the writing workshops were going on across town, in the Community College. In the Graphic Tech room, under a chart of prime numbers, Claire Keegan was working with her 14 participants on drafts of their stories. After everyone had read one participant's story, she declared: "If you're going to write a story about an angel who meets a woman coming out of a bookshop, this is where the cold eye of the workshop comes in useful."