Yeats Day - The Sisters

This year Yeats Day included the launch of a 10-day rescheduled and re-branded Craftfest Northwest festival honouring WB's sisters Susan and Elizabeth - affectionately named Lily and Lolly by her siblings.

Susan (Lily) was a keen embroiderist.  Elizabeth (Lolly) trained under the renowned artist and textile designer William Morris in London. She was an artist and the main inspiration for the Cuala Press which she ran with her sister. They printed the work of WB Yeats and many other well-known writers including Ezra Pound, Douglas Hyde, Rabindranath Tagore and Elizabeth Bowen.

The LilyLolly Craftfest will build on the success in recent years of the Northwest Craftfest. The rebranded and rescheduled festival - promoted by Made in Sligo craft workers group - will now be launched on Yeats day every year.

I went along to see the exhibition of quilts suitable titled The Fascination of What's Difficult by the Yeats County Quilters. Wonderful work. The top, smaller quilt, is a Sligo Heritage quilt of theirs.

Sligo, The Irish Revolution 1912-1923 Launch

The launch will take place in Liber Bookshop, O'Connell St., Sligo this Friday evening, 23 November at 6.30 pm. Larry Mullin of Sligo Field club will do the honours. Thanks to Larry and the bookshop for their co-operation.

What to say at the launch?
So many people to thank of course for so much help and encouragement over what really was thirty years of work;
delight at the publication which looks so well, some comments on the process of writing it, the editing, the cutting, the shaping;
an idea of the enjoyment of dealing with primary materials, reading the newspapers of the times, reading the police reports marked secret and finding the account written by an officer in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment of their activities in Sligo and surrounding counties; and finding the photographs he or another army member took. (Including the one above)

See, it's written itself!

If you are in or near Sligo town on Friday evening do come along!

Another Doghouse Poetry Launch

 

Outward and Return, the new poetry collection by Greagoir O'Duill (above) was launched by Jack Harte, writer, at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin on Wednesday evening. Jack Harte (below), a Sligo native, praised the collection highly and noted that the author was a bilingual poet, writing with equal facility in Irish and English without any great fuss or drama.

Greagoir read from the collection. His poems range from Dublin to Donegal and further afield to Chicago, Venice and Monaco. He read his wonderfully titled A Ford Anglia Dumped on a High Bog Road after Derek Mahon, influenced he said, by Mahon's disused shed in Wexford poem.

 

And on Friday 22 June Doghouse Books invite you to the launch of Slow Mysteries by Monica Corish to be launched by Brian Leyden, author. The venue is the Yeats Building, Sligo and the time 7.30pm. Admission: free. All are welcome.

This is one I am very sorry to miss. I was in the Yeats Building on Yeats Day this year and Brian Leyden read at the official launch in Drumcliff.

Boyne Berries 10

Battle of the Books done and dusted, Swift Festival finished and filed. Second draft of Irish Revolution Sligo book done - only 3,467 words too many- and first draft of talk and presentation at Ballymote Heritage Weekend done.

So a gap to have a quick look at how preparations for Boyne Berries 10 are going. Submissions, prose and poetry, coming in with a remarkable number of writers obeying the rules - maximum of three poems, attachment and in body of email, bio and postal address included.

We hope to make this 10th issue and its launch special. We haven't finalised plans yet but we are hoping for a larger format page, a colour cover and some colour and black and white pictures, images, illustrations inside.

There's still time to submit. Deadline 31 July. Check out the guidelines here and please follow them!