THE ACT OF POETRY IS A REBEL ACT

Dates: February 2025 

Venue: Bere Island Writing Retreats, Bere Island, Beara, Co Cork

OUTLINE

Join poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin for a weekend retreat exploring the art and craft of writing poetry. Using as a springboard the words of Michael Hartnett who believed that ‘the act of poetry is a rebel act’, these workshops will support participants to identify resonant poetic themes, to engage deeply with language, and to gain insights into the dynamics at play in the making of a poem. The workshops will provide a space for poets writing across a broad range of themes including (but not limited to): landscape, history, family autobiography, folklore and the Otherworld. Workshop activities will include creative writing prompts, close reading of work by established poets, and group discussion in a supportive and fun environment. Poets at all levels of writing experience welcome!

BIOGRAPHY

ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her publications include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017)  and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021). She is a recipient of the Arts Council’s Next Generation Artist Award and a co-recipient of The Markievicz Award. Of her work The Yale Review has said that she “often captures a whole world of cultural and historical implications in a single, simple, but metaphorically rich image”. The Irish Times surmised that Ní Churreáin‘s poems “with their musicality and sensuousness, as well as their fearlessness, mark the welcome appearance of a fresh and vivid new voice. A former literary fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany and  The Jack Kerouac House in Florida, Ní Churreáin was the 2022 Decades of Centenaries Artist in Residence at Donegal Archives Service.

Link to The Poison Glen

https://gallerypress.com/product/the-poison-glen/

A link to the ARENA audio interview

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22037127/

Dublin Review of Books

https://drb.ie/articles/the-stendhal-of-norfolk/