Latest news with #writingworkshops
RNZ News
11-08-2025
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
The Blokes' Book Club
Bookworms of Waikato will be frothing at the mouth as Hamilton Book Month has arrived. It runs through August with a huge range of events - writing workshops, author talks, a film premiere, and the always-fierce Lit Pub Quiz. Another event on the programme surrounds a group that's existed in Hamilton for a few years now, the Blokes' Book Club. Mark Houlahan is an avid member, he joins Jesse. Tags: To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
The Guardian
15-05-2025
- The Guardian
A jolt back to life: after years of avoiding risk, I have decided to dive in and say yes
Years ago, I travelled to Weipa on the Cape York peninsula to run a week of writing workshops at a school. We flew in as the sun set, and by the time I left the small tin shed airport with the keys to the hire car, it was pitch black. I threw my bags on to the back seat and turned on my phone, discovering that my carrier didn't work in far north Queensland. There was no GPS in the car, no street directory tucked under the seat, and the other arrivals had already fled the bush airport and disappeared into the night. I gulped down the fear that was growing in my stomach as I realised that I had absolutely no idea where I was going, and no bars of reception to tell me. I turned the key in the ignition and drove the dusty road until I reached what I assumed was the highway. I had two options. Left or right. I turned left and tried to slow my breathing. There were no streetlights. Just the glow of the moon. I opened the window and immediately closed it again. And I kept driving, hoping to find a street sign that would tell me where to go. Ten or so minutes later, I reached the town of Weipa, which was smaller than I'd expected. I took every sidestreet until I finally found the pub where I was staying. Checking in, the woman at the front counter told me not to walk too far down the back of the property because of crocodiles and then explained the phones weren't working in the rooms and the wifi was patchy at best. I told her I had no mobile reception at all. It meant I couldn't text my family to let them know I'd arrived. As I lay in bed that night, with a creaky fan moving the soupy air around, I realised how long it had been since I'd felt so free. I had an accidental adventure, one I hadn't planned on, one I hadn't even understood I needed. And it made me remember what it was to be uncontactable, where I could make choices and take risks and be unwatched. When I was younger, I lived without constantly calculating risk and without the endless loop of danger scenarios running through my head. Those fears took up residence around the time I was heavily pregnant with my first child. The scenarios were fuelled by thinking, what if I wasn't enough as a mother, or what if something happened to me or my baby, and slowly morphed into a set of more generalised concerns, ranging from car accidents to plane crashes, serial killers to illnesses. Obviously, these weren't always rational, but they did sometimes wake me up in the middle of the night or even stop me finding sleep at all. When my partner died in 2020, the what-ifs amplified in volume, and I found them debilitating at times. As a single parent to two children, I felt the risks I could take were limited. I had to be around for them, so I couldn't just jump on a plane and take off on an unplanned adventure. But having nursed my partner through the final stages of cancer, I didn't want to feel scared any more. I wanted to feel brave and connected to the world. I wanted to feel connected to myself, and I wanted a jolt of life to shock me back from where I'd been operating as a carer. Prompted by the vows at a friend's wedding where they agreed to have no nos, and instead do the things they each wanted to do, I decided that instead of saying no to invitations that sparked fear and a what-if response, I'd dive in and say yes – simply because I was asked. In the past year, I've agreed to many fear-inducing events – because they are fear-inducing. I've presented on stage to thousands of students at a writers' festival and lived to tell the tale. I've gone to parties alone when I've known virtually no one and managed to talk to more than one stranger. I've been interviewed on ice-skates when I could barely let go of the side and grinned like a fool as I attempted to skate. It's not that I was particularly eager to do any of these things, it's that surviving them, by being scared, embarrassed or even just nervous, I feel present, like I'm still here. Taking risks is often thought of as a young person's game. A sort of rite of passage period between the teen years and adulthood. But there is much to be said for diving into the uncomfortable as we age. And of course, on the days I don't feel up to strapping on ice-skates, I temper all of this activity by lying in bed and watching movies, safe in my pyjamas with my cat curled on my lap. Nova Weetman is an award-winning children's author. Her memoir, Love, Death & Other Scenes, is published by UQP
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Celebrating 10 years of Fighting Words student storytelling: ‘Not for a minute have they ceased to amaze'
As I recall it, I was just calling in for a cup of coffee. It was spring 2013 and Seán Love had texted me out of the blue. He was in Belfast – in East Belfast – a hop and a skip from me, in fact, with a couple of people I knew, in the Skainos Centre on the Lower Newtownards Road. I knew Seán through his work at Amnesty International and latterly at Fighting Words, which he and Roddy Doyle had set up in Dublin a few years before. I kept saying I was going down to do a workshop. Kept saying and never doing. So, I hopped it and skipped it to Skainos to say hello ... and walked out the door again an hour later having agreed to help set up a Fighting Words centre in Belfast. I don't know that I have spent many better hours in my life. It took a while to get everything in place, because – how do I say it? – things work a little differently here in the North. This is in no small part thanks to Young at Art/the Belfast Children's Festival, whose then director, Ali FitzGibbon, became chair of the board; the 174 Trust at the Duncairn Centre in North Belfast; and flagship grants from the Ireland Funds and Ulster Garden Villages, Fighting Words Belfast was offering its first writing workshops to school-age children in 2015. The windows of our second-floor home in Skainos took in gable-ends with loyalist paramilitary murals, the famous Harland & Wolff shipyard cranes, the brand-new Titanic Film Studio beyond, and the profile, in the further distance, of Cave Hill. Belfast's pasts and possible futures viewed from the room where, on any given day, 20 or 30 stories took shape. The opening chapter always agreed collectively, everything that came after bearing the stamp of those 20 or 30 individual imaginations. Not for a minute in the 10 years since have they ceased to amaze. READ MORE In those 10 years Fighting Words Belfast has become Fighting Words Northern Ireland. Under the directorship of Hilary Copeland we have reached 25,000 participants, working with schools and community groups from Poyntzpass to Derry, and from Carrickfergus to Enniskillen. We have published thousands of stories and many beautiful anthologies, and audiences at the Lyric in Belfast, the Abbey in Dublin and venues across NI, have listened, wide-eyed, to the plays, poems, rap songs and stories that our young writers have performed and read at live showcases. [ Fighting Words Northern Ireland launches new magazine for young writers Opens in new window ] The challenges have been enormous and still are. (If 2024 was a particularly good year for you, don't be shy to offer a bit of support .) From the outset, there has been a close relationship between Fighting Words NI and the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast . Fighting Words staff run regular training sessions for Creative Writing MA students who are interested in volunteering with them. The relationship has deepened in the past year, with the appointment of Stephen Connolly as the Seamus Heaney Centre's first outreach and engagement officer and the opening of a new Heaney Centre building, with a room large enough to host Fighting Words workshops. It didn't hurt that Stephen turned out to be a close friend of Mr Duck, the Fighting Words grumpy editor. (Though his quack is worse than his bite. Mr Duck's, that is.) It was a source of real pride to all involved in the Heaney Centre that the first writing produced in the new building, last June, was by a Primary 5 class from Botanic Primary School, a short walk from Queen's University, in the heart of the Holylands, among the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city. In fact one of the greatest endorsements I have ever heard, or read, of Fighting Words NI came from another workshop in the Heaney Centre in the opening weeks of this year. Asked how the workshop had made them feel, one young writer said simply, and with only a slight variation in spelling, 'bombarded with joy'. You would get that on a T-shirt. You would – for all that the challenges remain (again, feel free to help) – take that with you into your next 10 years. Fighting Words NI is very grateful for the support of its two principal funders, the Government of Ireland through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Reconciliation Fund, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through the National Lottery
