Molly Keane Writers Retreats

Supported by Waterford City and County Arts Office, our not for profit educational and process-based workshops and retreats are facilitated by highly accomplished, serious writers, poets, editors and authors focused on the nature of the creative process and the writing craft, supporting beginning and emerging writers to bring their writing to the high level needed for publication and professional readings. As well we supporting  professional writers with their creative process at every stage.  With our former writer in residence, Lani O' Hanlon, past facilitators include, Louis de Paor, Thomas McCarthy, Grace Wells, Nuala O' Connor, Mark Roper, Gerard Smyth, Paula Meehan, Don Share, Carlo Gébler, John MacKenna, Molly Twomey and our inspired Writer in Residence for 2020 and 2021, Alison Driscoll. 

Deepening in the Landscape with Lani O' Hanlon

DEEPENING IN THE LANDSCAPE. For this ecological writing workshop, we will rest into the sensuality of the body in relationship with the land. Lani will lead embodied reflections through voice, sound, poetry and writing to quieten the mind and soothe the nervous system so we can listen deeply and write authentically and give voice to our inner and outer landscape through the senses.

This workshop is suitable for emerging and established writers. Dates;19th - 21st of August, three mornings, 10.00 – 1.30 Fee €250.00.

Please fill out and return the booking form on the contact page.  

Lani O' Hanlon is a writer, dance artist and somatic movement therapist. She has an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University and was selected for Poetry Ireland Introductions by Vona Groarke. Her writing is published in various journals and anthologies including Poetry (Chicago) Portland Review, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, The Irish Times, Southward, The Stinging Fly, Orbis, Abridged, Mslexia, Vanguard’s 14, and A New Ulster; the anthologies, From the Plough to the Stars and Children of the Nation – Culture Matters, Staying Human – Bloodaxe, Pandemia – The Munster Literature Centre, Small Wonders – Dedalus, The Lea Green Down - Fiery Arrow, Reflection – The Irish Hospice Foundation, Washing Windows Too – Arlen House and she reads her work on RTE’s Sunday Miscellany.

She is the author of Dancing the Rainbow, (Mercier Press) The Little Theatre (Artlinks) and she facilitates creative writing and movement workshops in the South East. Awards and commendations include; Hennessy New Irish Writing, The Bridport Prize, Dromineer and Poetry on the Lake.

laniohanlon.com

Roaring Into The Twenties with Thomas McCarthy

ROARING INTO THE TWENTIES – a forward-looking poetry workshop with Thomas McCarthy Text will be everything in this two-part workshop, but a view of the future will illuminate our poems. We are not quite out of the Pandemic woods, not yet; but we will try to perfect a poetry that prepares us for a freer world, a world of idea exchange and wide travel and many literary encounters. The world will soon be re-opening despite all the dark alarms; time to dust down the suitcase of our poem, time to send our poems out into the world. The atmosphere of this workshop will be one of gratitude and preparedness. We have survived through a dark time, so let us prepare our poems for their encounters with fame. Perfecting poems to be shared with others, and in crowded rooms: this is the critical objective of this workshop in 2022. Be prepared to share, bring at least four poems, be prepared to tell us what future you see in them, what hopes you have. Limited to 8 Dates; Saturday 14th of May. And Saturday 3rd September. Time; 9.30 – 6.00 Fee; €286

Please fill out and return the booking form on the contact page.

Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, County Waterford, in 1954. Educated at the local Convent of Mercy and at University College, Cork, he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program in Iowa in 1978/79. He worked at Cork City Libraries until 2014 when he withdrew to write full-time. He has published ten collections of poetry including The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Last Geraldine Officer (2009), Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019) as well as two novels and two books of non-fiction. Awards include The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Annual Literary Award of the Ireland Funds. A member of Aosdána, he lives in Cork City. ​

Poetry, Memory and the Party Journals 1974-2014 Forty years of intimate details of Thomas McCarthy’s life lived between a modest background and the ‘Big House’ of West Waterford and his immersion in the literary life of Cork against the troubles of a changing Ireland by one of Munster’s leading poets. Though a student of John Montague and Seán Lucy at UCC, Thomas McCarthy’s weekends still belonged to West Waterford and the Victorian garden that he was replanting for its owner, Brigadier Denis FitzGerald, a grandson of the Duke of Leinster. Aware of the poverty of his own family background and conscious of the contrasting local Anglo-Irish world of the Brigadier, Molly Keane and W E D Allen, he began to keep a diary in order to make these worlds cohere. Here are the elements of survival in an everyday Fianna Fáil society. Here is a poet’s life with its travels, encounters, youthful excitements, hyperbole and frustrations. Here are detailed encounters with Terence de Vere White, Robert Graves and Seamus Heaney, with the legendary Paul Engle at Iowa, with IRA prisoners and with Harold Macmillan’s Private Secretary. Here also is the life of Ireland as it unfolds over forty years of turmoil, politics, publishing and art. Available to pre-order Publication date: 4 January 2022

Past Workshops 2020 

With Lani O' Hanlon STORIES IN THE SAND August 21st - 23rd