November Over The Edge: Open Reading-Penelope Shuttle, Ursula Shields-Huemer, & Gillian Hamill plus LAUNCH of Skylight 47 Latest Issue

The November Over The Edge: Open Reading takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, November 23rd, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Penelope Shuttle, Ursula Shields-Huemer, & Gillian Hamill. The centre piece of the evening will be the launch of issue nine of Skylight 47, the exciting bi-annual poetry paper from the Skylight Poets, which will be on sale on the evening. The publication will be launched by Penelope Shuttle. Skylight 47 is based in Galway and publishes poems by poets from all around the globe; all poets are welcome to submit poems for consideration for future issues. For details on how to take out a subscription to Skylight 47 see here.

Gillian Hamill

Originally from the village of Eglinton in Derry, Gillian Hamill has lived in Dublin for the past 13 years (intermingled with stints in Galway, Waterford and Nice). She has a BA in English Studies from Trinity College, Dublin and a MA in Journalism from NUI Galway. She is currently the editor of trade publication, ShelfLife magazine and has acted in a number of theatre productions. Gillian started writing poetry in late 2014.

Ursula Shields-Huemer is Austrian and has lived in Ireland for 25 years. She is a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst. Her poems have grown from a longtime engagement with language and creativity  – supported by classes with Kevin Higgins and Susan Millar DuMars. Ursula was recently invited to present poems at a conference on artist Caspar Walter Rauh. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Over the Edge New Writer’s award.

Penelope Shuttle

Penelope Shuttle has lived in Cornwall since 1970, and is the widow of the poet Peter Redgrove. Her first collection of poems, The Orchard Upstairs (1981) was followed by six other books from Oxford University Press, and then A Leaf Out of His Book (1999) from Oxford Poets/Carcanet, and Redgrove’s Wife (2006) and Sandgrain and Hourglass (2010) from Bloodaxe Books. Redgrove’s Wife was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2006. Sandgrain Her retrospective, Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012), drew on ten collections published over three decades. Her most recent collection, Will you walk a little faster?, was published by Bloodaxe in May . First published as a novelist, her fiction includes All the Usual Hours of Sleeping (1969), and Rainsplitter in the Zodiac Garden (1977).With Peter Redgrove, she is co-author of The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (1978) and Alchemy for Women: Personal Transformation Through Dreams and the Female Cycle (1995). Shuttle’s work is widely anthologised and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and her poem ‘Outgrown’ was used recently in a radio and television commercial. She is current Chair of the Falmouth Poetry Group, one of the longest-running poetry workshops in the U.K.

The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland, & The Arts Council.

November Over The Edge: Open Reading with Rececca Spicer, Fiona Place, & Helena Mulkerns

The November Over The Edge: Open Reading takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, November 17^th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Helena Mulkerns, Fiona Place, & Rebecca Spicer. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always especially welcome at the open-mic.

Helena Mulkerns

Helena Mulkerns is an Irish writer who has written for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, The Irish Times, Hot Press and The Irish Echo, among others. She worked for ten years as a Press Officer and photographer in UN peacekeeping missions in Central America, Africa and Afghanistan. Her short fiction has been internationally anthologised and shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing literary awards, America’s Pushcart Prize and Ireland’s Francis MacManus Short Story Award. She holds an MA in English Literature and Publishing from NUIG, and has edited two anthologies: Turbulence and Red Lamp Black Piano. Co-founder of the BANSHEE arts collective, she has read, performed at and hosted cultural events in the US and Ireland. Since 2009, she has hosted a popular evening of the arts, The Cáca Milis Cabaret. Her fiction debut, Ferenji, a collection of themed short fiction, was published on 1 November 2016 by Doire Press. Also see: http://www.helenamulkerns.com/

Fiona Place is a 43 year old, dynamic, intelligent, attractive single mother of an 18 year- old university student daughter. She is, of course, a superstar in the poetic firmament. Fiona has attended the Kevin Higgins Advanced Poetry Workshop for 5 years (with occasional absences due to such inconveniences as work). She now attends his online class. She has written poetry for a number of years and apart from local publications (for example in Nuacht Chláir, the Newsletter of Claregalway/Carnmore), she has been published in magazines such as Boyne Berries and Skylight 47. If you are of a sensitive disposition, be warned, her poetry is raw, real, and uncompromising. Do attend her reading, if only to say how you survived it and have been made stronger as a consequence, when you are attending psychotherapy.

Rebecca Spicer was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, the home of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, but currently lives in County Galway. She is a recent graduate of the MA in Writing at NUI Galway. Rebecca writes both poetry and fiction. She has participated in poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre and is currently talking part is Susan Millar DuMars’s Advanced Fiction Writing Class. Her blogazine Dodging The Rain (dodgingtherain.wordpress.com) will be launched in December. This blogazine is a collaborative between herself and several other writers from the MA in Writing. Also in December, Rebecca’s first published short story ‘Summer Street’ will feature in The Incubator.

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. New readers are always most welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748.

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland & The Arts Council.

November Over The Edge: Open Reading with Caroline Healy, Dagmar Drabent, & Gemma Marren

The November ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, November 19^th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Caroline Healy, Dagmar Drabent, & Gemma Marren. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. This month’s open-mic will continue our showcase of the poetry students from this year’s MA in Writing at NUI Galway. New readers are always especially welcome at the open-mic. 

Gemma Marren was raised in London by Irish parents. She was a finalist in the Irish Writers’ Centre 2015 Novel Fair competition, with the novel The Only Child. She works as a freelance academic copy-editor and when her head is not wedged in a book, she spends her time baking cakes and playing tag rugby. She lives in the wilds of Mayo with her husband and four children.

Dagmar Drabent, originally from Hamburg, Germany, lives in Galway, for nearly 30 years. At the moment she is finishing her PhD about Swiss writer Robert Walser at NUI Galway. She is also an artist and therapist and has been writing poetry and participating in poetry workshops for the past couple of years. Her poems have been published in Crannόg, Skylight 47, Orbis, and Blue Max Review.

Caroline Healy is an award winning writer and novelist. She writes literary fiction and young adult contemporary fiction. A graduate of the Seamus Heaney Centre, Belfast she divides her time between writing and teaching. Her short story collection entitled A Stitch in Time won Doire Press’s International Chapbook Short Story Competition. Her work has featured in publications such as Wordlegs, Prole, the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice and Five Stop Stories. She is a recipient of multiple awards from the Arts Council. Her work has been showcased at many literary events across Ireland, the U.K. and America. Caroline is currently editing her second short story collection, The House of Water, as well as final edits for her next novel, published with Bloomsbury Publishing.   

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. This month’s open-mic will continue our showcase of the poetry students from this year’s MA in Writing at NUI Galway. New readers are always most welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748. 

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland & The Arts Council.

November Over The Edge: Open Reading with Teresa Sweeney, Deirdre McClay & Joseph Horgan PLUS MA in Writing Students from NUI Galway

The November ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, November 20^th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Joseph Horgan, Deirdre McClay & Teresa Sweeney. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. This month’s open-mic will continue our showcase of the poetry students from this year’s MA in Writing at NUI Galway. New readers are always especially welcome at the open-mic.  

Teresa Sweeney is from county Galway. She was short listed in this year’s Over the Edge New Writer of the Year. She has been published in Roadside Fiction, Number Eleven Magazine, Wordlegs, Boyne Berries and runner up in WOW! Awards 2011. Teresa took classes with Susan Millar DuMars including the Advanced Fiction class. She is studying an MA in Writing in NUIG this year. Teresa’s stories can be read here: http://www.teresasweeney.com   

Deirdre McClay lives in Donegal and is a member of Garden Room Writers. She has published fiction in The Irish Times, Sunday Tribune, Crannóg, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs, and The Linnet’s Wings, among others. In 2005, she was nominated for a Hennessy Award. More recently, her short stories have won in The Lonely Voice Competition, and the Allingham Festival; she has also been longlisted, shortlisted, and highly commended in national competitions. 

Joseph Horgan

Joseph Horgan was born in Birmingham, England, of Irish parents. He is a past winner of The Patrick Kavanagh Award and has been awarded an Arts Council bursary for his poetry. His first collection of poetry, Slipping Letters Beneath the Sea, was published by Doghouse in 2008. His second book, The Song at Your Backdoor, a meditation on identity and place, was published by Collins Press in 2010, and was selected as an RTE Book on One.  His most recent book, The Year I Loved England, a collaborative poetry collection with English poet Antony Owen, was published in 2014 by Pighog Press. His work has been anthologised in: Off the Wall (Marino ed Niall MacMonagle), Landing Places (Dedalus ed Eva Bourke and Borbala Farago), and Sunday Miscellany 2008-2011 (New Island ed Clíodhna Ní Anluain). He has written a weekly column for the Irish Post since 1999.
 

As usual there will be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished. This month’s open-mic will continue our showcase of the poetry students from this year’s MA in Writing at NUI Galway. New readers are always most welcome. The MC for the evening will be Susan Millar DuMars. For further details phone 087-6431748. 

Over The Edge acknowledges the ongoing generous financial support of Galway City Council, Poetry Ireland & The Arts Council.