McGahern's reels on wheels: Publication of John McGahern's autobiography, Memoir, isn't the only McGahern event taking place in September. Leitrim Cinemobile and the Irish Film Archive have teamed up to present a weekend of screenings of his work from 23rd-25th of that month.
The Cinemobile venue will be Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim, in the heart of the writer's native county.
The screenings will kick off with Cathal Black's award-winning feature film adaptation of the short story Korea (1996). Black was responsible for one of the earliest screen adaptations of the writer's work with the completion of his debut short film Wheels (1976). In addition to the more recent four-part BBC/RTÉ serial adaptation of Amongst Women (1998), there will be the TV drama The Rockingham Shoot (1987), directed by Kieran Hickey and produced by Trainspotting director Danny Boyle. There are also the 1982/83 RTÉ TV play treatments by Carlo Gebler: The Lost Hour (from The Leavetaking) and The Key (from The Bomb Box), as well as two adaptations of Swallow.
Made over a period of 25 years, the films feature the work of some of the most talented actors and directors of those decades including the late Donal McCann. The RTÉ documentary Private World, directed by Pat Collins about the writer's life and work, will also be shown.
Details from www.leitrimcinema.ie or Bandit Films 071-9134900 bandito@eircom.net
Paris Match
Life is busy for poet John Montague this weather. On the 8th of July he married his partner, novelist Elizabeth Wassell, in Nice, where they have a home which they live in for part of the year, before zooming to Paris for a honeymoon. The honeymoon combined with the opening of an exhibition of drawings by Marco Del Re inspired by Montague's The Rough Field (1972) at the Centre Culturel Irlandais which continues until the 20th of next month.
The illustrations are also being published in a limited edition book by Del Re's gallery, the Gallerie Maeght. Meanwhile Montague is looking forward to the publication of the second volume of his memoirs. The sequel to the first volume Company will be called The Pear is Ripe, the title taken from a line of Flaubert's. This volume will deal with his time at the University of California at Berkeley and the volatile student riots in Paris in 1968 when Montague was living there. Elizabeth Wassell, meanwhile, is working on a novel set in Nice.
Rewriting the map
Immigration is set to make changes to the Irish literary canon. That's the thrust of writer Fred Johnston's polemical introduction to volume 11 of the Cork Literary Review, which he has edited. While it may not happen in the first wave, immigration will bring with it, through a new, Irish-born generation, a regenerated Irish literature from writers whose culture and traditional history will have nothing to do with Yeats, Clarke, Kavanagh or Heaney. "Out of a cultural conjunction of Ireland with Middle Europe, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere will these imaginative spirits be born; the next truly important Irish collection of poems to receive international recognition, the next Irish Booker winner, the next internationally acclaimed Irish playwright may not have our rural and pseudo-urban heartlands (left over from the wreckage of the Civil War or the bowels of the GAA) in his ink or blood, but in heart-acres far from any we have tilled." And then of course he might also be a she.
"Gone at last will be books and memoirs glorifying a drunken literary mob-mayhem in long-dead Dublin," says Johnston, going on to to suggest that the Irish publishing scene isn't ready for the nouvelle vague to come.
This issue of the Cork Literary Review includes work by Desmond O'Grady, Alannah Hopkin, Tommy Frank O'Connor, Geraldine O'Reilly, Greagóir Ó'Duill, Milan Richter and Sheila O'Hagan. In an essay Norfolk Broad - a Year at the University of East Anglia Nessa O'Mahony writes about the academic year 2002-2003 when she studied creative writing there in a department draped in an air of gloom and despondency after the deaths of teacher writers WG Sebald in a car accident and Lorna Sage from cancer. Though finding it very odd to have your creative endeavours graded, O'Mahony would recommend the course to fellow writers. Her second poetry collection Trapping a Ghost will be published this year. The recent recipient of an Arts Council literature bursary, she edits the online literary magazine Electric Acorn and is doing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Wales, Bangor.
Cork Literary Review Vol 11 is published by Bradshaw Books, €15