Galway may have a reputation as being a city of the arts but it has no writers' centre, unlike Dublin or Cork. However, it soon will if one local author and poet gets his way.
Fred Johnston is well known in Galway both as a writer and a literary worker with the Galway Centre for the Unemployed. He holds weekly workshops in creative writing and sets up writers' groups for people outside the fringes of the city's thriving arts scene.
Mr Johnston believes it is time that Galway had a writers' centre, and so he has taken it upon himself to set one up. He is starting the workshop in the Centre for the Unemployed at Canavan House in Nun's Island, but is seeking funding from Galway Corporation and the Arts Council to rent a bigger premises and equipment.
Mr Johnston's small office at the centre has been operating as an unofficial writers' centre for the past couple of years. People contact him for information on a range of publishing issues, from applying for grants or finding a publisher to advice on writing. "The Centre for the Unemployed is very much behind the creation of a writing centre and I have received a tremendous amount of encouragement and direction from them." In the past few years, Mr Johnston has been bringing writers to Galway to give readings at venues around the city such as the Westside, Mervue and Ballybane; places that would be "disenfranchised" from art and culture circles.
He says the proposed writers' centre will be "an information centre for anybody who is interested in creative writing at any level from prose and poetry to playwriting, for amateurs and professional writers.
"They can get editorial advice or direction to an agent. People can bring in their manuscripts for us to have a look at and offer advice on and we will provide information on publishers in Ireland, the UK and the States. We will also be co-ordinating with literary agents our selves."
Fred Johnston is working on a book set in Algeria, where he lived in the 1980s. He was recently named dual winner of the Prix de la Bassade, a translator's bursary for his work on the translation of the work of Parisian poet, Michel Martin.
A collection of Mr Johnston's new and selected poems is due to be published this year by Lagan Press, Belfast.
