Opinion
The West of Ireland has long been feted as a holiday destination for its scenery, Fred Johnston, Director of the Western Writers’ Centre gives ‘Culture Vultures’ some other good reasons to visit Galway this Summer - or any other time of year...
The West’s Awake
The Galway-based Western Writers’ Centre (Ionad Scríbhneoiri Chaitlin Maude) remains the only writers’ centre west of the Shannon. When it kicked off almost seven years ago, it flew that little boast as its banner and it remains true.
At that time, the city of Galway didn’t have much of a relationship with literary events. True, the annual Cúirt festival of literature, which I founded in 1986 as a strictly poetry festival, was run by Galway Arts Centre. There were isolated readings. There was the Galway Writers’ Group. But Galway was, I believed, ripe for a writers’ centre – there was, for one thing, a strong historical literary heritage, with writers such as Páraic O Conaire, Antonin Artaud, Máirtin Ó Direáin, Walter Macken, Lady Augusta Gregory, W. M. Synge, Frank Harris – a close friend of Oscar Wilde – and others having been associated with the city. The acclaimed novelist and playwright John Arden lived here with his wife, playwright and activist Margaretta D’Arcy. But it seemed to me that, in terms of literature, there was very little activism. As a writer myself, I knew one tended to act very much alone.
Dublin had its writers’ centre, Cork had the Munster Literature Centre – it seemed to me that a writers’ centre for Galway, which already described itself as a City of Culture (even when it lost the title to Cork city) was an obvious venture to undertake. Of course, it would receive the full support of the city and the arts’ world here.
It didn’t. It gradually became clear that most people didn’t know what a writers’ centre actually did, and were willing to confuse it with a writers’ group. It was all very disheartening.
In spite of this, the Centre has flourished. Considerably increased Arts Council funding has enabled us to undertake more concerted and direct programming. The Centre has already produced two winter literature festivals, both celebrating the poet, the late Caitlin Maude, a native of Connemara. In 2005, with help from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, we produced a weekend devoted to Northern Irish writing, in English, Irish and Ulster Scots, entitled ‘Invisible Silences’. Nothing like it had been attempted here before. But the Centre did it when no one else appeared willing to. The stellar line-up included Carlo Gebler, Glenn Patterson, Cathal McCabe, and others.
The degree to which the inauguration of the Western Writers’ Centre in Galway has galvanised other organisations into taking another look at their literary priorities may be gauged gently from how quickly a Hospital Arts Committee was established by Galway Arts Centre on the heels of the Western Writers’ Centre producing the very first writers’ residency at Merlin Park Hospital, Galway, whose instructor was the poet and story writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir, working with long-stay patients and producing a book. Recently, the Hospital Arts Committee ran precisely the same project with the same category of patients.
Earlier this year, the Western Writers’ Centre set up the very first literature festival at Gort, Co. Galway, entitled ‘The Forge at Gort’, and featuring poetry, plays, music and input from Gort’s Brazilian community. The festival was so well received that promises have already been made of further sponsorship for next year. The Centre has accumulated a modest but, we think, interesting library, a newsy website which also carries book reviews and new writing and, quite recently, the free newsletter, ‘The Word Tree’, which carries literary news and views all over the Western seaboard of the Republic. We organised a ‘Poetry on the Buses’ project, through which local writers had their work displayed on Galway buses, and a ‘Poetry Day’, in which free copies of poems by well-known poets were handed out on Galway streets.
A recent presentation to a cultural committee of Galway City Council outlined our future aims; we want to develop the Centre into bigger and more functional premises, to include a commemorative museum-space devoted to local writers and others from the region, as well as administrative office space and a small readings’ room. We continue to organise readings, workshops and outreach facilities, which include editorial advice. We have expanded our Board, which now includes well-known poets such as Richard Tillinghast and Frank Golden, the musician and teacher Sylvia Crawford, and our Chair is the Irish-language broadcaster, Aoife Nic Fhearghusa. Links are being established with groups as far south as Co Kerry and up to Donegal. We are also talking to a Limerick-based group who are considering establishing a writers’ centre there.
The Western Writers’ Centre has again worked to add a firm literary component to the city of Galway – but a component which works outside of Galway city and county and into the greater island. So naturally we want to talk with Northern Ireland’s literary world, its groups and organisations.
No one can confuse us with a ‘writers’ group’ any longer. Acknowledged and respected throughout the island – and, through the use of French, even in parts of Europe – the Western Writers’ Centre is here to stay. Come and see.
Fred Johnston is a novelist, critic and poet, and Director of the Western Writers’ Centre. Email westernwriters@eircom.net, twwc.ie, Tel: 00353 91 533594
