 Thank you very welcome back and that was Mary Cotland with the Caffe Orchestra and Wild and Free from the album Topaz. And joining me in the studio now I have got Theresa Ryder and Mary Turley-McGrath from the Letrakeny Cathedral Quarters Literary Festival Committee. Ladies you are very welcome. Thanks very much. My dear. And well Mary you are no stranger to Highland and but Theresa this is your first time. It is. So Theresa you're involved in the Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival and give us a wee bit of a background to the to the Literary Festival. Yeah so the festival is actually in its eighth year and it's held in October each year and this year it runs over the weekend of the 20th to the 23rd of October and as usual a range of various locations and events. So very special theme this year the festival is celebrating Behan 100 which is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Brendan Behan. So we're going to bring some diversity, something for everyone, master classes, music, documentary as usual but this festival will honor this great literary talent and his association with Letrakeny. So I've done an anecdote that Brendan Behan had holidayed in Donegal and visited Letrakeny a few times. And when he came to town in 61 which would be like at the height of his his fame or infamy Behan visited the rainbow bar on the main street and his visit was reported in the local paper and it stated that he entertained the patrons with typically outspoken comments and affairs at the moment. So during that visit then he went to the Lescalas Cinema on the Port Road to see a film and he was featured in that film. In the film he sang a song and when that part came on the screen Brendan started singing along from his seat and he claimed afterwards it would be the only time in the history of Letrakeny that a duet was sung by one person. So I came on board with the festival last year and I was invited to read my work alongside Deirdre Hines and James Finnegan those great poets. I read from my work which is a memoir in progress and from my time as a personal assistant to the late author J.P. Dunleavy and of course Brendan Behan looned large in his life so I'm very excited by these Behan connections and I was also given the chance to read the Behan poem Oscar Wilde at Dr Deirdre Hines, McMahon's lecture the next day on the Sunday of the festival and that was a wonderful event with her presentations and poems and a performance of a scene from Borstled Boy by Elusive Theatre. So yeah there's a full-on festival celebrating Behan this year. Fantastic and there's a new departure this year there's a poetry competition that's live at the moment Teresa. So can you give some details maybe about that for us? We're very excited about this Mary and myself have developed this from the start and so yes it's a new venture and hopefully one that will keep going. So what we've done is we've chosen a theme associated with Brendan Behan and that theme is against the odds and in that he delivered such a contribution to the literary world despite the adversity he experienced in life. So we're inviting poets to give us their interpretation of that otherwise the rules are fairly standard we're asked we're asking people to enter up to three poems per entry 30 lines per poem max it's free to enter and thanks to our sponsors we have some great prizes and we'd like to thank Bookmark Leta Kenny and Donegal ETB our main sponsors and we have great support from the Himalayan Cafe Peter Mark Leta Kenny and Universal Books and the details of the competition you can find on our web page which also gives the program of the of the festival itself and this is linked to the Leta Kenny Cathedral Quarter Facebook page or find us with the search the information is up on various platforms including poetry island and writing.ie so all the details of entry are there but we'd welcome we're having lots of lovely entries already and the closing date is September 15th so there's still plenty of time. So when all the poems are read there'll be a few shortest then to take part in the festival. So yeah we're inviting five shortlisted poets to come along and read at a very special reading event during the festival and then we'll announce the winners. Fantastic fantastic and Mary well you are as I say no stranger to Highland and you are a very accomplished poet or poetess whatever might be the politically correct statement to say. So you've been involved a few years part you're participating a number of years and then you've been on the committee as well now. Yes I began with the Cathedral Quarter Literary Festival in 2021 and if you remember that was during the Covid era and festivals were cancelled and readings were cancelled so it was a pretty bleak time. So one day I was going through my papers and I found an old an old program for the festival and Donan Harvey's number was at the bottom of the program so I said maybe maybe this festival will run so I rang Donan and said you know would be interested in having me on the on the program and he said yes so the festival came to pass in 2021. Now the turnouts weren't all that great that year understandably enough but when the festival was over I said to Donan if you wanted any help organizing the festival the following year I would help Mauch. So last year that was 2022 I was involved in the programming of events I was contacting writers took part in the master class and so on so it was a very interesting experience for me so I've continued on with it this year. Fantastic and well you're an accomplished poet now you have four books of poetry published at the moment do you remember back whenever you started off your very first some deference in the competitions that you entered back at the very beginning of your career as a poet Mary? Yeah well probably like everything beginnings are rather shaky you're not really very sure where you're going. Writing is a very solitary occupation whether you're a poet or a novelist or a short story writer you're in a room all on your own with your own thoughts and your own imagination and at one stage you know it was necessary to have as Virginia Woolf said a room of your own nowadays it's quite different you can do your work you know on the bus or on the train or between jobs or caring for your family or whatever but eventually you have to sit down and edit what you have written and after you have it edited and worked through the next question is what to do with the masterpiece so at that stage you can either put it in the drawer and forget all about it and not tell anybody about it or you can send it out to a workshop you can go to a workshop with it or you can bring it to a writers group if you have a writers group alternately you can send it to magazines and last but not least you can send it to a poetry competition and see what happens and what kind of feedback you'll get now the value of a competition it is quite interesting because if you happen to be shortlisted you um it's a social event so you get to meet other writers and you get to listen to their work you talk to people and so on and you get ideas and if you're shortlisted you get a chance to read your own work so it's quite an interactive process and even if you're not shortlisted if you go anyway you'll see you'll see what's going on. Well you've appeared well you've been on Sunday Miscellamy and you have won many awards and been nominated for many awards is there one in particular that meant a lot to you out of all the awards Mary that you've won over the years probably um probably the first one it's like it's like everything else it's great to get a first at some stage so a couple of decades ago I came I won the inaugural Francis Ledwidge competition uh in Dublin and uh one dark october evening I got this phone call to say I won the competition and would I come to Dublin for the presentation of my prize and so on and I said oh yes I will and then uh part of the prize was to read at the National War Memorial Gardens on Ledwidge Day which is the last Sunday in July every year so I did that and subsequently I have read at the National War Memorial Gardens many times on Ledwidge Day so there's an ongoing connection there so there's always the the social and interactive part to being in a competition another competition that I really enjoyed being part of was the Trocora Portrait Ireland award and it was it was great to get first in that and the prize included two weeks in Anna McCarrig in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre which gave me a great opportunity to write and to get away from the usual wear and tear of ordinary life so that in itself was was that it that was a wonderful prize and I came I was runner-up in the same competition two years ago wonderful and from all the experience that you you've had and and all the the things that you've learned is there any advice or any pointers that you might give to anybody who's listening tonight to say oh maybe I'll try and send a poem into the competition well the few pointers I'd say is look at competitions in in in a positive light they're not really look on them as a way of getting your work together of structuring your work of getting your work together and of sending it out there and this is very valuable if you're part of a writing group or if you're not part of a a writing group because you need some validation and you need some feedback so the other thing I would say is people often think well the judge writes in such and such a way maybe they like this particular poem that doesn't necessarily work and what I would say is you know send out your best poem and the one that you've put most work into a poem that's typed clearly edited and well worked over just that that that it is precise and exact I the other thing is of course to read the submission guidelines not to exceed the line length or anything like that just to keep to the guidelines as Theresa said they're they're pretty basic in this particular in this particular competition and two when you are choosing the poems I came across a Greek word recently and it's muraki which means when you do something with soul creativity and love putting a piece of yourself into what you do so if you have a piece of work that contains all those elements send it in quickly thank you very good indeed now although you have four collections of poems yourself you've you've won to read tonight for us but it's it's not one of your own but it's it's about Brendan Behan and who's central to this year's festival yes I have one of Behan's poems he Brendan wrote quite both in Irish and in English and this poem is called Eugnes which is Loneliness and it was published in the Envoy magazine in 1950 and it's just a short poem it reminds me of a of a Haiku and this this is it Eugnes Don Eyre in Aran and the English version loneliness the tang of blackberries wet with rain on the hilltop in the silence of the prison the clear whistle of the train the happy whisperings of lovers to the lonely one lovely lovely indeed and again bilingual and a very talented man Brendan Behan so the the competition is live at the minute at Trisa and the closing date if i'm correct is the 15th of September Friday the 15th September yes and you submit your work in a word document am i right in saying that a word document to our gmail address which is you'll find that on the competition rules and of the guidelines are all on the the website that they're going to find that they're on the website so if you go to the facebook page from let a candy cathedral quarter and get the link there to the web page well ladies thank you so much for taking time out tonight and every every success with the competition and with the festival and no doubt it will be seen just before then and during the week okay thanks very much you thanks for having us on transform your home with a visit to mcgillie's furniture letter