It's the city of the scribesWITH A bit of encouragement and guidance some of the women who've attended Michael O'Loughlin's creative writing classes in Galway are now producing and publishing work which would make Jean Genet blush, writes Caroline Walsh.
So says O'Loughlin in an opinion piece in the July/August issue of Poetry Ireland News revealing the trepidation he felt getting off the train in the city of the tribes when he initially started as writer in residence with Galway City Council.
"Most of the participants were women who had already raised large families, and are now retired or living in empty nests." Initially they were reticent and hesitant, but with a little prodding that changed.
"My knowledge of the sexual and other mores of 1950s rural Ireland is now such that I am beginning to think that John McGahern was really an innocent old codger.
"The poignant aspect of it is I can see how many women, who came to adulthood in the 1950s and 1960s , were deprived, as a matter of course, of the freedom to develop their own talents, and I am glad to be able to somehow redress that balance."
Publishers will be descending on the west of Ireland - chequebooks out and advances at the ready - after this heads-up from O'Loughlin.
Honouring Roger McHugh
A PRIZE commemorating Roger McHugh (below), the founding professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, has been endowed by his family and will be given each year to an MA student of the college in that field who opts to do a doctorate in the subject.
Remembering the professor, the centenary of whose birth is next Thursday, poet and academic Maurice Harmon - who studied under him before becoming his colleague - said he had had a lasting influence on the emergence of Irish studies as an academic discipline.
"Roger McHugh stands at the head of Irish literary scholarship." During his years at UCD he mapped out the literary landscape at a time when few people had a sense of a separate and significant literary tradition in the English language written by Irish men and women.
"While he loved to lecture on the major figures, Yeats, Joyce, Synge and O'Casey, he wanted them to be seen in the context of a literary development that went back to Maria Edgeworth and William Carleton and that included 20th-century figures like Padraic Colum and TC Murray."
Harmon said McHugh welcomed the emergence of the generation of John McGahern, Edna O'Brien, Thomas Kinsella, John Montague, and others and developed a programme of postgraduate studies to which students came from Ireland and abroad. "It was part of his sense of tradition that he saw the relevance of early Irish poetry and saga, mythology, folklore, history and Hiberno-English," said Harmon, describing him as one who led by example.
The prize - which is for academic excellence - is valued at €4,000 and will be awarded each autumn.
Poetry award
A Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship worth €8,000 is being offered this year to an Irish poet in his or her middle years. Applications must be in by August 31st , the award to be made in October. Details from 3 Selskar Terrace, Ranelagh, Dublin 6.