Planning a festival during a pandemic could be equated to swimming against a raging current. With every few strokes forward you’re beaten back, time and again, by raucous waves, until finally, exhausted, you find yourself collapsed on the very shore you started out from. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
When we applied to the Arts Council for funding in October last year, we were, to use an apt cliche, blissfully unaware of that dreaded, now ubiquitous term Covid-19 and the challenges it would pose.
On March 12th, when the Irish Government announced a national lockdown, we were 12 days into our open applications process for writers interested in appearing in BLF 2020. A month later, when the committee logged on to Zoom for our most important meeting of the year – to select our writers – our collective thinking was that “surely things would be back to normal by September.” But alas, that wasn’t to be.
Things were looking good as the collective effort to stop the spread of the virus led to the Government powering from phase one to phase two and then fast-tracking us, for good behaviour, to phase three of the roadmap, which meant that indoor events could host up to 50 people. Things could be worse – after all, it’s a successful poetry reading that attracts that number of punters! And with a plan to increase that number to 100 people attending an indoor event in phase four, you could say we were on the proverbial pig’s back. Now phase 4 sounds like some kind of utopia – as idyllic as those foreign holidays we took for granted all those years.
Instead, August saw us catapulted back to what could be termed phase 2.5 – bringing to mind that mystery floor 7.5 in the Hollywood blockbuster Being John Malkovich – and every bit as surreal. The government announcement of the latest restrictions limiting gatherings to six indoors and 15 outdoors created pandemonium and sent TDs phones a-jangling for clarification.
The arts sector was in uproar. Venues such as museums and galleries could stay open – but not a word about theatres or cinemas until those in the industry demanded clarification from a Government whose communication to date could be described as being as muddy as the stomping ground of our proverbial pig, off whose back we festival organisers were flung.
With these latest restrictions, we’ve been forced to swallow an unpalatable portion of defeat – at least when it comes to the organising of a live festival. Like many others, Bray Literary Festival will now take place digitally over the weekend of September 25th-27th. With full days of readings, panel discussions and interviews, we hope to attract a large audience to our YouTube channel.
Highlights include: Roddy Doyle and Paul Howard in a Northside/Southside Face-off; poets Eleanor Hooker, Jessica Traynor and Leanne Quinn will be Singing in the Wild Dark. I will talk art, forgery, murder and the Hollywood Walk of Fame with authors Neil Hegarty, Henrietta McKervey and Alan McMonagle, and we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of independent publisher Doire Press. For information on all events, check out: brayliteraryfestival.com
We have also managed to salvage one real live event: Christine Dwyer Hickey and Billy O'Callaghan in Conversation with Dermot Bolger, which is set to take place in the Mermaid Arts Centre this Thursday, September 17th in collaboration with Dublin's One City One Book.
So, while it is not all doom and gloom – planning a literary festival in normal times is a challenge – this year we’ve had to overcome hurdles the like of which we never expected to meet. Now, unless the Government announces restrictions on the use of Zoom (what a lifesaver that has been!) the show most certainly will go on and we hope that many Irish Times readers will join us!
