Launch of Mary Lavin Season Young Writers Project

As part of the 2016 Mary Lavin Season, Meath County Council’s Arts Office and the Meath Chronicle are collaborating on a young writers project, along with award-winning writer, Dermot Bolger. Dermot has been working with transition year students from Eureka Secondary School, Kells, St Joseph’s Mercy Secondary School, Navan, and Scoil Mhuire, Trim. He delivered a comprehensive series of creative writing workshops and a mentorship programme in the schools, and at an event in the Phoenix Theatre in Scoil Mhuire last week, the project was launched with readings by the participating students. The project was launched by the cathaoirleach, of Meath County Council, Cllr Brian Fitzgerald. The students’ workis being published in the Meath Chronicle.

 

Speech of Brian Fitzgerald at launch of project

At a time when everything seems to be done at a click of a button or by navigating a screen, it is encouraging and refreshing to see young people spend time reflecting, composing and editing their works. It is not an easy task to put words to paper and that blank page can seem very daunting. It takes courage to put your own thoughts or imagination on paper and then submit to someone for critique. It takes courage to allow those words into the public domain and to actually stand up and read them here tonight . We will only hear a sample of the work produced here at tonight’s event and I commend all the pupils for their contributions. We can look forward to reading many of the works in the coming months in the Meath Chronicle.

I’d also like to thank John Donohoe and the Meath Chronicle for their support of this project, support which recognises the value of creativity and the encouragement of creativity in our young people. The Meath Chronicle have been strong supporters of the Mary Lavin Season since its beginnings in 2012 and we look forward to working with them on future seasons.

This evening can be seen as a celebration of the work and legacy of Mary Lavin. A legacy which has, through esteemed writers such as Dermot Bolger, with us here this evening, been given a new lease of life. Most of you here this evening will be familiar with her work -Lavin’s début collection of stories, Tales from Bective Bridge – just out the road - won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and marked her out as a short-story writer of brilliance who brought a new and piercing female perspective to that form. The subject matter of her work was often controversial and she is considered to have been an author very far ahead of her time.

Her work also received numerous international awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize. Many of her stories were first published in the prestigious New Yorker. And Joyce Carol Oates called her one of the finest short-story writers of the twentieth century.

Under the guidance of Dermot Bolger, many of the pupils here this evening may have begun their own path to a literary career. Dermot Bolger is one of Irelands leading figures in literature. His novels for adults include ‘ The Woman’s Daughter’, ‘The Journey Home’, ‘The Valparaiso Voyage’ ‘The Family on Paradise Pier’ and most recently ‘Tanglewood’ and his poetry collection ‘That Which is Suddenly Precious’. He is the author of over a dozen stage plays including ‘The Lament for Arthur Cleary’ which received the Samuel Beckett Award. His eight volumes of poetry include, ‘External Affairs’, and he devised and edited the best selling collaborative novels ‘ Finbar’s Hotel’ and ‘Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel’ which were published in a dozen countries. The editor of numerous anthologies including the Picador book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, he has been Writer Fellow in Trinity College, Dublin and Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre.

His first book for young adults ‘New Town Soul’ has recently been placed on the Leaving Cert English syllabus. As well as working with students and teachers Dermot has written a new piece as part of this project which he will read for us later on this evening. Once again I would like to thank most sincerely all those involved in this project and wish all every success and best wishes in their current and future creative careers.

 

Launch of Mary Lavin Young Writers Project with Dermot Bolger

 - John Donohoe

The idea of a young writers project being associated with the name Mary Lavin is one that I have to admit, strikes a huge resonance with me. I want to commend Meath County Council and its arts office for continuing to celebrate and create awareness of Mary Lavin, who over the past couple of decades, had been largely forgotten about as were celebrating all the great writers that this country has produced.

As a child, unaware of the important literary figure that lived across the fields in the Abbey Farm, myself and my sisters and cousins spent every other Sunday playing around Bective Abbey and the river Boyne on the farm of Mary Lavin and Michael McDonald Scott, her second husband. Her first husband, William Walsh, the father of her three girls, had passed away in the 1950s.

This trip to our cousins in Bective was made from our home in Dunsany, and I was later to discover that Mary Lavin had made that trip many times herself, in reverse, travelling to her mentor, Lord Dunsany, the well-known writer.

It was when I went to secondary school and sat the Inter Cert that I truly realised the significance of Mary Lavin, as two of her short stories, Brother Boniface and The Widow’s Son, were in our textbook, Exploring English, and I learned that she was indeed one of Ireland’s great writers.

That Inter Cert exam was one of the last of its kind, the Junior Cert was already being phased in by the time we did the Inter, and Mary Lavin gradually fell out of favour in the educational system.

But that home in Bective, sadly now demolished, was a magnet for figures from the literary, cultural and political worlds. If there was a guestbook, it would have been signed by Eudora Welty, Garrett and Joan Fitzgerald, JP Donleavy, Austin Clarke, Cyril Cusack, Brinsley Sheridan, Padraic Colum, Rock Hudson, John Bruton, and John Kerry.

Just a month ago, when Brian Friel passed away, playwright Tom Kilroy wrote how he first met Friel at a dinner in Bective organised by Mary so that the two writers could get together.

Sadly, Mary passed away a short few years after I had left school. She had been living in old age in her mews in Dublin at the time, and I never got to know her. But I did get to know her three Walsh daughters very well, Caroline, Valdi and in recent years, Elizabeth, all now gone before their time.

The reason why the Mary Lavin Young Writers Project, which is being run in collaboration with the Meath Chronicle, creates a certain stir in me, is because Caroline Walsh was a huge influence and help to me when I was studying journalism, allowing me the run of the Irish Times office where she worked, which I believe she did for many aspiring young writers. Caroline, Valdi and Elizabeth were always very supportive of any books or history projects we were publishing in the community around Bective and Kilmessan.

If this project encourages any of our young writers here tonight to continue writing, then it will be a tribute to Mary Lavin, Dermot Bolger and all involved.

 - John Donohoe, Meath Chronicle, 22nd October 2015