SNEAK PREVIEW FOR TONIGHT'S GROUP 8 OPENING

Group 8 launch their fifth annual exhibition of art and writing, After Garbally, TONIGHT Friday the 14th March at 7pm in The Regency Room in Hayden’s Hotel, Ballinasloe. The exhibition continues until the 17th of March, daily from 11am to 6pm, including Saint Patrick’s Day.

Fr Dan O'Donovan of Garbally will open the exhibition tonight and all are welcome to enjoy wine, food, art, readings, and music from Johnny Johnston and Liam Loughrey.

We set up the exhib yesterday so here are a few preview pics. See you at 7pm!

Joyce Little preparing her blackboards for her installation

Tommy Campbell, up a ladder as usual

Walter Coughlan figuring out how best to hang his ceramics

Detail from Joyce Litte's school-themed installation

Group cake break: it was Tommy's birthday yesterday

Brendan Grealy and Úna Spain, contemplating walls

John Soden and Grellan Ganly, taking a break

Tommy hanging John's work

WRITER AS GERBIL

I feel like a gerbil running on a wheel. A rather large gerbil, mind...

I am finished final edits on Novel 2, The Closet of Savage Mementos and am just awaiting final proofs before it goes on its merry way to the printer. Whoop! There will be launches in Dublin and Galway in April. In the course of this last edit I discovered (thanks to Deirdre O'Neill, my lovely editor) that my obssesion-words while writing it were hover, grunt and manic. Ahem.

It's weird the way your relationship with a manuscript changes the closer it becomes to being a book. Doubly odd on this one, maybe, because it was inspired by very personal events in my life when I was a mere 22 year old. So I love the novel, then I don't, then I want to bury it, then I want to tell people about it constantly because I feel so affectionate towards it. Mostly, I want to see the final cover and, then, the final book. Maybe then I can start to 'own' it.

Meantime I am rewriting Novel 3, Miss Emily, using a list of suggestions from my editors in Penguin USA and Penguin Canada. It is close work and enormously rewarding. I am plunged back into Emily Dickinson's world and it is a place I am very happy to go. I heart research.

In the midst of all this I am enjoying the buzz around the spring issue of The Stinging Fly (I edited the fiction section) which came out this week and will be launched in March. And I'm looking forward to taking part in the Publishing Day at the IWC next Saturday, the 8th March. It promises to be a great event. The Penguin Irl Director will be there as well as a UK literay agent, poetry experts and there will be a writers' panel, which I am taking part in.

I'll be on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 on Monday night reviewing Bark, the new story collection from wonder-writer Lorrie Moore. Oh, Lorrie, please be my BFF. (Does anyone else become convinced they would get along brilliantly with all their favourite writers?)

Also I am busy prepping for the launch of After Garbally, by Group 8, the exhibition by my artist collective here in Ballinasloe on the 14th March. It's full steam ahead with preps for that at the moment.

There are a hundred other things waving flags in my general direction and I'll get to them anon, so if you are waiting for something from me (a blurb, an edit, a hello) hang in there, I'll be with you soon!

*OF DUBLIN* GALWAY LAUNCH PICS

Thanks to everyone who turned up on Saturday at Tosnú Art Gallery for the launch of Of Dublin and Other Fictions - it was a blast. In nice timing, my piece about the beauty of chapbooks appeared in The Irish Times on Saturday. You can read it here.

Special thanks goes to Group 8 and the gallery for hosting; to Maureen Gallagher for doing such a fine job of launching the chapbook; thanks to the cake and crumble, salad and sandwich makers. Thanks for the cards, the pressies, the flowers. Thanks to my sis Úna for taking pics. And thanks to Lucy for selling the book on the night. Thanks to Tommy who, Jesus-style, produced more wine when all the launch wine was guzzled.

It looks like we'll be doing it all again in Dublin in December...watch this space! In the meantime, a few pics from Saturday's do:

Signing

Writers Tony O'Dwyer, Sara Mullen, Shauna Gilligan and Alan McMonagle

John Dillon and Finn Dillon - with John Walsh of Doire Press lurking behind :)

Writer Maureen Gallagher launching the book

Lyra and Juno enjoying tortilla chips

Nuala and gallery owner, Joyce Little

LAUNCH TONIGHT!!

Group 8 presents the launch of my chapbook of flash fiction from Tower Press, Of Dublin and Other Fictions, by writer Maureen Gallagher.

Saturday 9th November, 6pm, Tosnú Art Gallery, Brackernagh

I will read. Food and wine will be served. The chapbook will be for sale and I will sign.

Facebook event page here.

All welcome - free admission!

GROUP 8 - EXHIBITION LAUNCH

The artist collective I'm a member of here in Ballinasloe launches its 2012 exhibition tomorrow night, March 10th, at 7pm, in Hayden's Hotel in the town. There will be wine, poetry, prose, song and art. Everyone is welcome! The exhibition runs until March 18th, daily from 11am to 6pm.

I collaborated with fellow member Úna Spain to creat a video poem. I'll pop it up onto YouTube shortly and link to here. The theme of our exhibition is 'Made in Ballinasloe' and my work features poems about Juno, my daughter, who was made in Ballinasloe. Úna shot stills and video to match the poems and I read the poems over the images; think rag trees, peacocks and pomegranates :)

See The Group 8 blog here for more.

OPENING NIGHT PICS & NOVEL RECOMMENDATIONS

I'm under the weather with flu this week. Big advantage: reading lots. Big disadvantage: not writing.

The opening of Ten Square Miles - my artist collective's exhibition - took place on Saturday evening and it was a blast. See here for pics. We took the Battle of Aughrim as our jumping off point so there was lots of fodder in that.

I wrote prose this year - an imagined monologue by the wife of a farmer who was co-opted into fighting on the Jacobite side. I had to make it up from scratch as I couldn't find any testimonials from women.

Speaking of women, can you all please recommend some well-written recent novels by women to me? I am hungry for good, contemporary novels and I am especially interested in what women are writing. I'd be grateful. I flicked through a load of uninspired first pages of novels in the library the other day and came away with a book of short stories. Which is grand except I really want to be reading novels just now. HELP!?!

EDIT: ORANGE PRIZE LONGLIST ANNOUNCED TODAY (maybe I should start here):

• Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Sudanese; 3rd Novel
• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate) - British; 10th Novel
• Room by Emma Donoghue (Picador) - Irish; 7th Novel
• The Pleasure Seekers by Tishani Doshi (Bloomsbury) - Indian; 1st Novel
• Whatever You Love by Louise Doughty (Faber and Faber) - British; 6th Novel
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Corsair) - American; 4th Novel
• The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna (Bloomsbury) - British/Sierra Leonean; 2nd Novel
• The London Train by Tessa Hadley (Jonathan Cape) - British; 4th Novel
• Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson (Sceptre) - British; 1st Novel
• The Seas by Samantha Hunt (Corsair) - American; 1st Novel
• The Birth of Love by Joanna Kavenna (Faber and Faber) - British; 2nd Novel
• Great House by Nicole Krauss (Viking) - American; 3rd Novel
• The Road to Wanting by Wendy Law-Yone (Chatto & Windus) - American; 3rd Novel
• The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) - Serbian/American; 1st Novel
• The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (Viking) - American; 1st Novel
• Repeat it Today with Tears by Anne Peile (Serpent's Tail) - British; 1st Novel
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Chatto & Windus) - American; 1st Novel
• The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives by Lola Shoneyin (Serpent's Tail) - British/Nigerian; 1st Novel
• The Swimmer by Roma Tearne (Harper Press) - British; 4th Novel
• Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Jonathan Cape) - Canadian; 1st Novel

BITS 'n' BOBS OF GOOD NEWSY STUFF

Great fun this week. Apart from the sick Man and the sick Baby, all goes well.

First exhibition of my artist's collective Group 8 on Saturday - excitement. My baby sis is coming down to it. And there'll be poetry and wine. Little poetry, lotsa wine.

My blog is on the shortlist for the Irish Blog Awards. More shortlisting to follow. Fingers crossed.

I've been offered a CRAZY amount of money (IMO) for a short story by a prestigious publication. I feel like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Kind of. Not really. He lived on the income from his short fiction. I have earned more than This Special Amount for a single story before but only by winning comps. This feels good.

I was told a secret piece of info, that I'm not allowed share ever, about my writing - it warmed my heart.

I've got a gig teaching short fiction for a week-end at the Irish Writers' Centre in May.

I didn't get an agent. Again. (I need an agent - interested parties mail me at nuala AT nualanichonchuir DOT com...) And, no, I have nothing new to sell. Just myself and the foreign rights for my novel. And everything else I ever write...

The launch of my novel You at the Cúirt Festival has been confirmed for Saturday the 24th April, at 5pm in the Dáil Bar on Cross Street, Galway. YEEESSS!!!! I ♥ Cúirt!


I heard today that I've been awarded a 2 week residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre from Galway County Council. I will have quiet time to write some time this year. Yipee!!! Note to self: wean Baby.


I'll be reading from my novel (have I mentioned my novel?) at one of my favourite bookshops ever on Thursday the 29th April at 8pm: The Winding Stair in Dublin.


What a week. And you know, I credit my Lit Death Match win with it all - that medal is swinging over my desk like a big old lucky charm.

EXHIBITION LAUNCH & READING, BALLINASLOE

I'm a remember of Group 8 which is a professional artists collective based in Ballinasloe, County Galway that came together in August 2009 in order to add to the cultural interest of Ballinasloe. We decided the best way to do that was to organise a joint exhibition of our work in the town. Our mission statement sets out what we hoped to achieve in the short term:

‘Group 8 is a non-profit, professional arts group, united in the belief that art worthy of exposure can express the vitality of a community, and foster awareness, imagination and co-operative learning between the artist and their community.’

The group is comprised of five visual artists, two writers and one singer: Joyce Little - visual and multimedia artist; Tommy Campbell – sculptor; Grellan Ganly - visual artist; Úna Spain – visual artist; Brendan Grealy - visual artist; Nuala Ní Chonchúir – writer; Zara Little-Campbell – writer; and Lee Ní Chinnéide – singer.

Junction 14.5 – Group 8’s first exhibition – will take place between the 13th and the 20th of March 2010 in The Regency Room in Hayden’s Hotel, from 12pm to 6pm each day. All the art works have taken Ballinasloe as their starting point; some of the poems and the paintings have inspired each other. The resulting work has been a true collaborative process by and about artists in Ballinasloe.

The exhibition, and accompanying catalogue, will be launched by John Boland on Saturday the 13th March at 7pm. All are welcome to come and see sculpture, photography and paintings; listen to live poetry and music, and enjoy a glass of wine. The exhibition will be open throughout the week including Saint Patrick’s Day.

Blog here.