The 2023 Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Competitions are open for entries until 22 September. Competition rules and entry forms are detailed on the Festival website www.allinghamfestival.com. The Festival will take place on 8-12 November in Ballyshannon, Co Donegal.
This year’s Allingham Poetry and Flash Fiction Awards Ceremony will feature a new award – the Francis Harvey Award for Poetry. This annual award has been created to highlight the life and legacy of Donegal poet Francis Harvey, 1925-2014. The winner of the 2023 Allingham Poetry Competition will also be declared the winner of the Francis Harvey Award. The poetry competition will be judged by poet and publisher Kate Newman.
If you’re not familiar with Francis Harvey, look into his Collected Poems. In her introduction, Moya Cannon writes that ‘…Francis Harvey’s work combines the passion for precision of a naturalist and the yearning for grace of a poet, except for the fact that a passion for precision, for naming, is also part of the bedrock of poetry. In [his] poems there is a vivid sense of how we are all moving, “free but tethered, through time’s inexorable weathers.”’
As in past years, the winner of the Allingham Flash Fiction Competition will also be declared the winner of the Keane Family Award, honouring the memory of Ballyshannon writer and arts patron James Keane. The flash ficiton competiton will be judged by Alan McMonagle
Be inspired to write poems that celebrate, challenge and lament humanity’s relationship with the natural world; and, over the course of the weekend, develop your poems from inspiration to revision toward completion.
When? Sat July 22, 10:30 – 5; Sun July 23, 10 – 4
Where? The Glens Centre, Manorhamilton, Co Leitrim
How much? €75 (with thanks to the Glens Centre for their generous support)
Early-bird? €60, if booked and paid for before July 15.
€60 PayPal – use this link to pay with a debit or credit card – no need for a PayPal account. If you’re having trouble with PayPal, email me at monicacorishwriting@gmail.com.
Travelling a distance? The Organic Centre has a list of places to stay in North Leitim
What is Ecopoetry? Why write it?
Creativity is a powerful antidote to burnout – Angela Davis
Ecopoetry is nature poetry that has designs on us, that imagines changing the ways we think, feel about, and live and act in the world.Why Ecopoetry? John Shoptaw
Even when [the nature poem] got the birds and the plants and the animals right it tended to show the beautiful bird but not so often the bulldozer off to the side that was destroying the bird’s habitat.‘Well Then There Now’, Juliana Spahr
Write about your everyday experience of what is changing in the world around you and the environmental issues you feel passionate about. Because while facts feel slippery and inaccessible and make us feel helpless, experiences can help us understand the world from our own perspective, and artists of all kinds can create experiences better than anyone else.What is Ecopoetry and why write it? Open University, Suzannah Evans
[Readers] feel they ‘know this information already, so why do they need it in a poem’. That is precisely the point. They ‘know’ it. They are not ‘feeling it’. That is what activists in the environmental movement are asking of us: help it be felt, help it be imagined. Jorie Graham, in conversation with Sharon Blackie
[Writing] is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler.Rebecca Solnit
The future belongs to those who tell the best stories. Jorge Luis Borges
Monica Corish’s Craft and CritiqueWorkshops are for writers who are working toward publication. They are an opportunity to develop writing skills through constructive critique, insightful feedback and tailored craft exercises. Monica is an Amherst-certified writing workshop leader and award-winning writer of poetry, short fiction and memoir.
Fortnightly on Tuesdays, 7 – 9:15 pm (tea and chat afterwards, for those who want).
10 sessions: January 17 & 31; February 14 & 28; March 14 & 28; April 4 & 18; May 2 & 16.
Cost €235; early-bird €200 before midday, Jan 13 (PayPal or cheque).
Shane Leavy’s Creative WritingWorkshops are open to anyone with an interest in writing. Shane is an Amherst-affiliated writing workshop facilitator and an award-winning author and poet: instagram.com/shane_leavy_writing. If interested, contact Shane directly at sligoleitrimwriters@gmail.com or 086 3525988.
Brigid threw her eyes to heaven as the priest droned his way through the gospel. It’s as if he’s telling a dirge for a death, she thought, not an anthem for a birth and the best story of the year. But he’s a good man, gentle with the novices and their small sins, and not given to fawning over the pretty ones. Her mind drifted. Was it cold there, cold as this stone church on Christmas Eve? How did that poor frightened girl manage with only her old husband to help? The innkeeper’s wife would have been too busy – the shepherds knew how to deliver a lamb, they might have known been some help – but the angels waited until after the baby was born before they sang their Hosannas. Not a lick of sense between them. Why on earth didn’t Gabriel ask a midwife to be present for the birth?
The scraping of pews broke her reverie. She wrapped her green shawl close and took her place at the back, behind the line of monks and nuns. She noticed that Mother Muireann’s limp was getting worse, that Sister Imelda needed to mend her hem. She inched her way toward the altar, her breath fogging the chill air.
“Corpus Christi.”
The host dissolved on her tongue. She bowed her head and prayed, her body suffused with the light of God incarnate. Her slave-born mother’s words flashed through her mind. You have the spirit of a nun, Brigid, and the soul of a poet, and the hands of a skilful midwife. As the choir sang the recessional hymn, she fizzed with fear and excitement. Can it be done? Could I do it?
*
When the abbey was fast asleep, Brigid rose from her bed. The Chapel of the Flame reminded her, as it always did, of a small child nestled beneath the protection of the great winter oak. She laid one hand on fissured bark, one hand on lichened stone, breathing deep, asking for courage. Then she lifted the latch and opened the door. Áine was dozing on a bench at the far side of the fire.
“Sister Áine.”
The young nun snapped awake. “Mother Brigid!”
“I will tend the flame tonight. You may go to your bed.”
*
She gazed into the leaping flames, seeing again the old woman, the one who had tended the flame before the coming of the Christ-story. They shared the same name, Brigid, woman of valour. The old Brigid had been the last of her kind, the seer-women who communed with the goddesses and gods of old Ireland. She remembered her words: This flame sits over the eye of a holy well. It is a marriage of sacred water and sacred fire. It will not burn your flesh. This flame is a doorway into the time before, and a doorway into the time that is to come. If your intention is pure, this flame will take you where you need to go. She had never, in all her years as abbess, tested the truth of the old Brigid’s story. Because, she thought, I am still wary of the pagan mysteries, I worry that their power might seduce me away from the Christ-story. But now, tonight, my intention is pure – none purer – to serve the Mother of God. She thrust her hand in, whipped it out. The small hairs on the back of her fingers had not been singed. She reached in again, felt a liquid coolness. She stared at the drops of dew in her palm.
Do it now, she told herself, before your courage fails. She cleared a level space in the centre of the fire with the poker, then closed her eyes. With her inner eye she saw where she needed to go – the stable – the ox and the ass – the young woman, her belly huge with child – the old man Joseph – the guiding star.
She stepped in.
She was standing in the middle of a forked tree, three splayed trunks fanning out, one bent low to touch the ground. Between her feet, between the sister-trunks, she found the small un-burning flame, her pathway home. She sighed with relief. A drunk sang a tuneless song, someone shouted at him to shush. She became aware of the bustle of the inn – the star – the lamp-lit stable.
She stepped out from between the tree-trunks and walked across the sandy ground. Through the open doorway she saw Mary and Joseph, the young woman’s face knotted with pain, the old man’s face racked with fear. She knocked on the lintel.
“Greetings,” she said. “I am Brigid of Ireland. I have come to be midwife at the birth of your child.”
All entries, on-line and postal, must be received by midnight on Friday September 23. Full competition rules, guidelines and entry forms are found at www.allinghamfestival.com/fiction-poetry-competitions. Please share with other writers and workshop participants. Good luck to all writers!
Interesting happenings at this year’s Allingham Festival, 3rd to 7th of November 2021, taking place both at the Abbey Centre, Ballyshannon, and online. Here’s my personal selection of writerly events – click on the links to go to the relevant page on the Allingham Festival website:
Brian Leyden will introduce readings by poet Mary Branley and novelist and filmmaker Johnny Gogan. Brian will also talk about Lepus Print, the new independent publisher of fiction, poetry and non-fiction based in the North West, dedicated to the discovery and curation of exceptional Irish and international literature.
The finalists in the Poetry and Flash Fiction competitions will be joined by the judges, Afric McGlinchy and Nuala O Connor, to read their entries before the winners are announced. This year’s record number of entries will ensure that the standard of writing will be as high as ever.
An anthology of stories and poems inspired by the River Erne. Contributors to the collection include Colin Dardis, Kate Ennals, Monica Corish, Tom Sigafoos, John McIntyre, Pat Joe Kennedy, Trish Bennett, Teresa Kane, and Jenny Brien.
Online, Friday, November 5, 2021, 18:00 – 19:00
Monica Corish 
