Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Mountains to Sea book festival

This year I had the good fortune to be involved with the 4th annual dlr Mountains to Sea book festival (albeit in a very minor role) - keeping the twitter stream and facebook page for the festival up to date. It was an incredibly busy but fun week, and by dint of much dashing, ducking and diving in and out of venues, I think I managed to see about 90% of the 70+ events.

Not bad going at all.

Inevitably some of the writers/readings/poetry/performances stand out more than others so here's my personal highlights from Mountains to Sea 2012:


Sarah McIntyre & Philip Reeve at their Comic Jams workshop

The kids and family programme

The bratapult in action!
 - more specifically the sheer energy and enthusiasm put into their events by the writers and artists. I was particularly taken with Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre. This dapper duo shared the stage (and high tech magnifying drawing apparatus) while drawing both each other, characters from their books, reading from their work, using their patented bratapult to fire a small green goblin into a highly excited audience and finally got all the kids in the theatre to draw a goblin face of their own.
All of this in an hour.
Also, Sarah wrote a lovely blog post with loads of photos that make it look like Dun Laoghaire is a sun drenched Mediterranean fishing port. 

This year dlr Poetry Now was incorporated into the book festival for the first time.

I would never have been the world's biggest poetry buff but something about seeing and hearing poets speak their own works was very moving.
Michael Longley
My own emotional response took me by surprise - I was at the presentation of the Irish Times Poetry now award in County Hall (lurking in the back and tweeting surreptitiously) when it was presented to Michael Longley. After the usual speeches etc., he read a poem called The Leveret that stopped me in my tracks and left me stunned. Maybe it's the tenderness of a grandfathers poem for a new baby? - I can feel myself getting weepy even now, thinking about it.
Powerful stuff.

I was very keen to get to a talk by Sara Wingate Gray  who runs The Itinerant Poetry Library - a free travelling public library. 

She gave an inspirational talk about what a libraries are/shoud be/could be. The title of the talk was 'The Poetics of the Library' which phrase she later used to describe the beautiful serendipity you can get browsing in a library , not sure of exactly what you want or need, but knowing it as soon as you stumble across it ' that is the poetics of the library.
She also reminded me of the five laws of library science as proposed by library hero Ranganathan back in 1931 (these, unfortunately have no connection to Asimov's three laws of robotics, though I live in hope that one day some visionary writer will create a series of steampunk library based novels based on then)
                   
The Itinerant Poetry Library in Dun Laoghaire

These laws are:
  1. Books are for use.
  2. Every reader his [or her] book.
  3. Every book its reader.
  4. Save the time of the reader.
  5. The library is a growing organism.
Still relevant over eighty years later.



I'm a HUGE fan of David Mitchell's books.

Chris Binchy interviews David Mitchell & Claire Kilroy
I nearly had kittens when (purely by accident) I was the only person around in the distinctive festival staff t-shirt in the Pavilion Theatre when *gasp* David Mitchell rocked up for his reading. I managed to greet him, tell him briefly that I admired his novels and get him where he was supposed be going without anything too awful happening.

The awful thing happened later.

After the event, I was feeling a bit giddy about having met him and was giving a very loud and dramatic (with swooping gestures) retelling to a friend as we were coming out of the theatre, who should we run into coming around the corner of the theatre?
Yup - David Mitchell, Claire Kilroy, Chris Binchy and Geraldine the event manager were coming out the back way to go down to the marquee for the signing.
Just as I was quite literally hopping on one foot and declaiming my boundless admiration for Mr Mitchell.
I pretty sure they didn't actually hear but there was still that mortifying moment where you come face to face with the very person you've just been talking about and, well, it's always hard to look them in the eye.
I still go bright red even thinking aobut it.

The last event I went to in the fesival was Kevin Barry reading with Maeve Higgins

He read from his recent collection of short stories, she read from a forthcoming book of essays. they interviewed each other.
It was in equal parts awesome and hilarious.
Kevin Barry & Maeve Higgins
I'm not going to try and describe Maeve's stories, I'd only murder them painfully while being nowhere near as funny as she is - hopefully the event will be podcast and then the world will know the glory of a McMuffin marriage proposal.

If there's anything I learned over the week it's that hearing a writer read their own work is always a rewarding and sometimes surprising experience. 

Jessica

 








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