Guests (97) Jun/Jul 2023

June and July

12th June

for the Cork Harbour Festival

Sarah Hymas and John O’Donnell
(via Zoom) (in-person)

You can listen to Sarah’s reading here.

Sarah Hymas is a writer and artist living on Morecambe Bay. Her writing appears in print, exhibitions, videos, installations, lyrics, on stage, and radio. She also makes text-based artwork, including site-specific audio walks, artistbooks and performative soundscapes. Her poetry publications include Host (Waterloo Press, 2010), melt (Waterloo, 2020), and the hispering (Black Sunflowers, 2021).

Her artistbooks sell widely and are held in the National Poetry Library, London. On and off the page she collaborates with other writers, artists, musicians, and marine scientists. Her current writing, in all its forms, focuses on the ocean, its ecosystems and our relationships with it, specifically regarding the impact of climate change and other forms of pollution. She works as a coach, mentor and freelance writer, facilitating workshops in schools, HMPs, libraries, museums, for undergraduates, adult education, adult basic education, community colleges, mental health drop-in centres, in retreats, and most recently in The Writer’s Imaginarium.

You can listen to John’s reading here.

John O’Donnell’s work has been published and broadcast widely in Ireland and abroad. Awards include the Irish National Poetry Prize, the Ireland Funds Poetry Prize and Hennessy Awards for Poetry and Fiction. He has published five poetry collections, including On Water (Dedalus Press, 2014) and Sunlight: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus, 2018).

His collection of short stories Almost the Same Blue (Doire Press, 2020) was nominated in the Irish Times as one of the Best Fiction Debuts of 2020, and one of the Books of the Year in the Sunday Independent. His play Rainbow Baby was recently broadcast on RTE Radio’s Drama On One. He lives in Dublin.

You can watch a video of the event here

Hybrid Ó Bhéal Session

This event will be both in-person, hosted in the Hayloft bar, upstairs in Long Valley, Winthrop St Cork, as well as on Zoom (which is limited to 100 people). Participation in the open-mic session and five word challenge is open to both in-person and virtual attendees. The session will be live-streamed at obheal.ie/live and via Ó Bhéal’s Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube channels. Note to Participants: Our hybrid events are recorded and remain viewable on video via these same channels.

We are no longer posting the zoom link via our social media channels. Upon written request to info@obheal.ie with a sentence outlining your reason for participation, a link to join the session will be emailed to you on the evening of the event, which is expected to run for between 2-3 hours.

The evening will feature four parts:

7-7.45pm: Poetry-Films (random play from Ó Bhéal’s Poetry-Film comp archives – NOT STREAMED);
8.30pm: Five Word Challenge (max 30 – after the allotted 15 minutes writing time);
9.30pm: Featured Guest Poets (20 minutes each);
10:20pm: Open-Mic Session for original poetry (max 30).

(Entering a Zoom meeting is all explained here >>>. This link provides you with a step-by-step guide and YouTube tutorial if necessary. You should check this out if you’re unfamiliar with the Zoom platform – it also shows you where to download the zoom client/app for your computer/phone. Please Make sure to know where the chat box is and how to mute yourself to reduce background sound.)

10th July

Gail McConnell and Gerry Boland
(via Zoom) (in-person)

You can listen to Gail’s reading here.

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. She is interested in living with the dead, violence, creatureliness, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize.

She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology and two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press, 2018). Gail has made two arts features based on her poetry for BBC Radio 4: Fothermather and The Open Box. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.

For more about Gail please visit her page at Queen’s University Belfast.

You can listen to Gerry’s reading here.

Gerry Boland is a Dublin-born author and poet. He writes for adults and for children and has published ten books to date, his latest being his third poetry collection, All That Jazz, published in 2022 by Arlen House. His debut collection of short stories, The Far Side of Happiness (Arlen House) was published in 2018.

His other poetry books are Watching Clouds (Doghouse, 2011) and In the Space Between (Arlen House, 2016). He was Writer-in-Residence for Roscommon County Council in 2013 and 2014 and he continues to work in an advisory capacity on the county’s annual Literary Development Programmes. He runs regular creative writing workshops, both in-person and online. He lives in rural north Roscommon.