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Tuesday, December 03, 2019

Final Over The Edge: Open Reading of 2019 with Rachael Hegarty, Paul McCarrick, & Bern Butler


The December ‘Over The Edge: Open Reading’ takes place in Galway City Library on Thursday, December 19th, 6.30-8.00pm. The Featured Readers are Rachael Hegarty, Paul McCarrick, & Bern Butler. There will as usual be an open-mic after the Featured Readers have finished which this month will include, among others, poets from the MA in Writing at NUI Galway.  New readers are especially welcome. The Over The Edge end of year celebration will take place afterwards. 

Bern Butler was born and raised in Shantalla in Galway city. She is a writer of prose and poetry, has been short and long-listed in the Fish, Over the Edge and Listowel writing competitions and published in Force 10, The Grey Castle, ROPES and The Galway Review. She has an extensive background in adult education, specifically Prison Education where she co-edited the first ever Irish Anthology of Prison Writing, Another Place. She was the Co-ordinator of the Writers in Prisons Scheme for ten years, wrote, directed and produced prison dramatic productions, liaised with the Cuirt Festival of Literature, and the Arts Council of Ireland to bring writers into prisons, and was lucky enough to have worked on several major drama and publishing projects in Castlerea prison with the writer, Dermot Healy. She facilitated writing workshops in Corrundulla Community Library for several consecutive years and edited a collection of participants’ writings, Burning to Tell. In 2019 she was awarded an MA in Writing from NUIG and is now working toward a first poetry collection.

Paul McCarrick’s poetry has been published in The Blue NibCrannóg, Skylight 47The Stinging FlyPoetry Ireland Review, and elsewhere. He was selected by Martina Evans to take part in the 2019 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He has also received an Arts Bursary Grant from the Westmeath County Council Arts Office in 2019. He lives in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, where he is completing his first collection.
Rachael Hegarty
Rachael Hegarty is a Dubliner. She is 7th child of a 7th child.  She was educated by Holy Faith nuns in Finglas, the U. Mass. Bostonians, the Trinity MPhil in Creative Writing and the PhD poetry magicians at  Queens University Belfast. Her poetry is widely published and broadcast. Her kids say she uses the 3 F- words too much: Finglas, feminism and feckin’ poetry. Her debut collection, Flight Paths Over Finglas won the Shine Strong Award in 2018. Her second collection, May Day 1974, has received critical acclaim for the unique representation of 33 docu-sonnets and 33 ballads for the people who died on the single worst day the Troubles. Her next collection, Dancing on the Dementia Ward explores the adverse, and sometimes bizarrely liberating, effects of dementia on an individual and a family.

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