Sadbh popped over to San Francisco last week during the Finnegans Awake Festival attended by a wide range of folk from Chelsea Clinton, flanked by bodyguards, to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of Beat and City Lights Bookstore fame. Finnegans Awake, a Festival of Irish Writers, ran from May 4th for four days and 22 Irish writers descended on the city for the event, which was jointly organised by Kevin Conmy, Consul General of Ireland in San Francisco, and the Irish Arts Foundation. Supping on sushi, jogging on Fisherman's Wharf or shopping in Macy's between a packed programme, the Irish contingent included Medbh McGuckian, Mary Morrissy, Paul Durcan, Michael Longley, Jennifer Johnston, Colum McCann (who lives mostly in New York), Katie Donovan and Dermot Healy.
The festival, which was supported by a variety of sponsors, including the American Ireland Fund and Aer Lingus, kicked off at Stanford University, in nearby Palo Alto (where Chelsea is a student), and where Irish poet Eavan Boland, a major player in the festival, directs the Stanford Creative Writing programme. The bulk of the festival - the largest of its kind to have occurred on the West Coast of the US - took place at Golden Gate University in downtown San Francisco, where every event was packed out and the general consensus among the visiting Irish writers - notoriously touchy and hard-to-please creatures at the best of times - was that this was one to remember.
A letter from Seattle has arrived from PublishingOnline to tell Sadbh about a new type of poetry competition, the first annual POL Poetry Awards. The competition is sponsored by PublishingOnline, in collaboration with America's well-known poetry journal, Verse. They are looking for poems to be submitted before September 15, which can be posted by ordinary mail or submitted electronically. First prize is $3,000, publication on the web with PublishingOnline, and in Verse. More details from www.publishingonline.com
The full programme for the upcoming Dublin Writers's Festival, which will run June 15th-18th, is now out. Among the writers who will be in town are IMPAC winner, Nicola Barker, Pat Barker (no relation), Doris Lessing, Bernard MacLaverty, and A.S. Byatt. The nice thing about the programme is the range of venues. Irish language poets Aifric Mac Aodha and Aine Ni Ghlinn read in the Sugar Club; Andrew's Lane Theatre is where you'll hear A.L. Kennedy, Andrew Miller, and Colm Toibin; at the River Club, creepy stories from crime writers John Connolly, Colin Bateman, and Julie Parsons; while in St Anne's Church, Bernard MacLaverty, Colum McCann, Anne Enright, and Macdara Woods read on Bloomsday. The full programme is posted at www.dublinwritersfestival.com and callers can get information from 01-8783877.
The 10th Children's Literature Summer School opened yesterday at the Marino Institute of Education in Dublin and runs until tomorrow. Sadbh got very excited when she saw J.K. Rowling's name on the programme, and had visions of flying round Dublin on a broomstick with a stack of signed copies, but alas, Harry Potter's creator will be present only in spirit. Tomorrow's talk by Dr C.W.Sullivan, who is a Professor of English at East Carolina University, is entitled "J.K.Rowling and Ursula LeGuin: Creating the series-book fantasy world," and is bound to be well attended.
Among those putting on the academic robes this week at NUI Maynooth were the distinguished critic William Hugh Kenner and poet Cathal O Searcaigh. Kenner, who is based in Atlanta, made the trip over specially to receive the doctorate. Mind you, it probably took O Searcaigh almost as long to travel down from Donegal.
The whacking £75,000 Tom Paulin has just been awarded - in sterling incidentally - will be meted out to him over three years. The money did not come as a result of winning first prize in some extraordinarily lucrative poetry competition: it's been awarded to him by Britain's National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts (NESTA). The money came from their Lottery Fund. Paulin is literally being "paid to think", as NESTA puts it, and to write his projected epic poem about the second World War. The money will allow him to take some time off from his teaching work at Oxford. Sadbh thinks using Lottery money in this way to give what are essentially literary bursaries or fellowships, is a great idea. Why not divert Lottery money to artists here, instead of letting them all knock on the one door in Merrion Square.
Sadbh, well travelled this weather, was in London recently and visited Waterstone's new flagship outlet in Picadilly, where the old department store, Simpson's used to be. It's a beautiful, airy bookshop, with no less than five floors crammed with books and audio tapes, and lots of innovative ways of displaying the books. The gardening section, for instance, was thick with wheelbarrows full of fresh flowers. The top floor has a smart bar and cafe with views out over the diverse rooftops of central London, where you can start reading your loot, and there is also a 1960s decor juice bar on another floor. The original windows and stairwells survive, so an aura of the past graciousness of Simpson's - the Clery's of London - endures.
Sadbh