Boyne Berries 6 Launched

Another Boyne Berries launch has been notched up. More info on the website including a short slideshow. The usual nervousness beforehand. Will anyone turn up apart from our own members? Will we be reading to ourselves? Will a contributor come up to me and point out the glaring typograffical mistak in his/her poem? Will noise from the debs next door drown out the readings?

In the event, as usual, everything went very well. At ten to eight it looked as if we might be lucky to have ten people, at ten past eight we had to take out more chairs. The attendance was as good as we ever had.

Our new chairperson, Paddy Smith, introduced Michael Regan who officially launched the magazine. Michael is a well known Trim ex-solicitor and Paddy pointed out that one of his claims to fame was acting (I use the word loosely) in a low budget martial arts film filmed in Trim by local enthusiasts, called Fatal Deviation. Michael features in many of the funniest out-takes here.

Michael congratulated the group on the magazine and noted the geographical spread of contributors - USA, Canada, UK and Bulgaria as well as Ireland. He also noted that for some this was their first publication. He mentioned that the youngest contributor was eleven year old Ibar Quirke from Wexford.

We had fourteen readers in all. This included a reading by Nollaig Rowan who couldn't be present but sent me a recording of her reading. I played it using my iPod and that worked very well. A great audience made up of fellow writers and friends and relations really appreciated the material and were very complimentary afterwards.

A great night. We're delighted everything went so well and delighted to meet so many of the contributors in person. From reading a contribution you get a mental picture of the writer. In most cases this is proven completely wrong when you meet face to face.

Now there's the All Ireland Poetry Day reading, the Windows launch and the resumption of our Readings and Open Mic to look forward to/worry about.