Friday, November 04, 2016

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 17th, 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.