THE FIRST year I attended Listowel Writers' Week I was very impressed with the high-tech nature of the opening ceremony in the Listowel Arms Hotel, writes Denis McClean.
On a large screen, apparently direct from Hollywood, was the novelist and film director Neil Jordan, graciously accepting the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, worth €10,000 and making his excuses for not being able to join us on the banks of the River Feale.
The event was put into a certain quixotic perspective for me when I overheard a conversation between two local men on a visit to the gents. One said: "What did you think of that fella getting all that money?" The other responded: "Sure it's like rubbing butter on a fat pig's arse" - the point being that, given the author's apparent eminence in Beverly Hills, some poor divil surviving on a few scraps from Aosdána might have found the money more useful.
After a few years of attendance, I could now safely assure those two gents in the gents that Listowel, with its many awards and workshops, is very much about encouraging young and unsung talent, whatever the destination of the big fiction prize.
As Joseph O'Connor asked last year, what other country can boast that its leading literary festival recognizes on the same platform in the same evening the efforts of writers aged nine years and upwards, and those who have already achieved great distinction in their craft such as John Banville, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibin et al? What a happy commingling! This year those kids should be able to draw great inspiration from the fact that Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney will be presiding over the opening ceremony and the prizegiving for the first time.
I hope he will not be experiencing the challenges I have faced when juggling with dates and Aer Arann connections to and from Farranfore international airport, and from there occasionally hitching a lift to Listowel through the foothills of the Stacks Mountains and along the lovely boreens of Lyreacompane.
I also find myself pleading again this year with the kind-hearted women who run the festival office, such as like Eilish Wren and Norella Moriarty, to find me a bed. I remain optimistic, but at the time of writing I have first call on the trampoline in Norella's back garden.
I have never stayed in the same B&B twice in Listowel. Of course that's nothing to be proud of, but it does mean that I have slowly developed a good strategic grasp of the town's Bermuda Pentangle comprising "the small square", William Street, Church Street, Charles Street and Courthouse Road, with a pub every few doorways radiating out from the town's literary omphalos, John B. Keane's, now presided over by the wit of his son Billy, comedian and sportswriter.
I missed the unveiling of John B.'s statue on the small square last year because I was detained in the local cemetery in a break-out group from my writing workshop discussing with Gerry Stembridge when and when not to use words like omphalos, among other things.
This year I have decided to avoid that terrible pressure brought on at about one in the morning by the need to head back to the B&B in order to ensure that all two Bs are availed of before I arrive reasonably alert for the morning's writing workshop. On the other hand, I just might be persuaded to join John McAuliffe's poetry workshop, if there are any last-minute cancellations, Eilish!
Wonderful things happen in Listowel. I vaguely thought that the Russian poet Yevtushenko had shuffled off this mortal coil until I saw him waltzing into the ballroom of the Listowel Arms wearing one of Nelson Mandela's shirts and doing his best to sweep a Writers' Week luminary, the lovely Joanna Keane O'Flynn, off her feet before he swept the rest of us off ours with a performance that was more Bolshoi than Bolshevik.
After a lugubrious reading from his then unpublished Diary of a Bad Year, J.M. Coetzee peered at me as if I had asked him who would win that year's Rose of Tralee contest when I put it to him what seemed at the time a thoughtful question about his native South Africa. "I think I have already answered that," he said drily. It must have been when I was distracted by an angler below the window reeling in a fish from the Feale.
It can be a high-risk business trying to engage with the world's literati after they have finished their readings and all they want to do is repair to John B.'s for a pint or to Allos for victuals. Or perhaps to do a nixer for George Rowley's Poetry Corner in the Kingdom Bar, as Clive James memorably did two years ago.
It was in Woulfe's Horseshoe Bar, I recall, that literary bad boy D.B.C. Pierre blew the last of his Man Booker Prize money on a big round of Drambuies and that Leo Cullen came up with the suggestion of a Writers' Week prize for the best short story about horse-racing, which he would probably win himself.
On Sunday morning, coming down from the highs of the week, Billy Keane presides over a packed fringe event known as The Healing. During last year's session he revealed that his late father was already performing miracles, with numerous sightings of the new statue ambling about the Bermuda Pentangle the night before.
There's usually a last-minute appeal from the altar to the citizens of Listowel to make more beds available for the annual influx of literary pilgrims. So if it's a B&B you're looking for as the 38th edition of Writers' Week draws near (May 28th to June 1st), say a prayer to the much-loved and much-missed and most blessed John B. Keane.