Date for Your Diaries!

Upcoming Book Launch (Kathryn Crowley and Fintan McCutcheon) in the Teachers' Club, Parnell Square, Dublin

(Image by Shuttercock)

Exciting news! Nine years later, I have finally written sufficient quality pieces (I hope), that my lovely editor, Emer Cleary, of Emu Ink Publishing, is willing to take the chance on me again.

The date of my upcoming book launch is Thursday December 4th 2025 in the Teachers' Club (Club na Múinteoirí) in Parnell Square, Dublin at 6.30pm. I would be delighted if all my subscribers and readers here on my blog, who live in or around Dublin, would attend. You now perhaps understand why my blog posts here have been somewhat sparse and sporadic over the last few months, as I have been writing and, mostly, re-writing.

The really nice part is that it will be a joint book launch by Emu Ink and I will be sharing the stage on the evening with my friend and Emu 'stable-mate,' Fintan McCutcheon. It will be Fintan's second book. Read here a piece about his first novel entitled That One Child.

There will be many more details to follow, but for now, please carve out a space and time-slot in your pre-Christmas diaries. Your Christmas gifts for family and friends are now sorted!

Staying with literary events, well done to all the amazing readers and writers, both local and from further afield, who helped to make the second Knocklyon Literary Festival such a resounding success in September. So many of the events and workshops were well-attended by adults and children, where enjoyment and interaction were key. 

Open Mic evening at Knocklyon Literary Festival with Dr Vincent Kenny (judge of Poetry competition), Katy Copland, Aoife Copland, Kathryn Crowley (judge of Flash Fiction competition), Anne O'Leary, Carolann Copland (author and curator of the festival), Neil Copland, Siobhán Maher (author), Mary Minnock (author).

One of the most popular evenings was the opening event, the Open Mic evening, which took place in the Knocklyon Community Centre. I was privileged to be invited to be the judge of the flash fiction competition and was delighted to receive a wide range of highly accomplished, well-written and sometimes wonderful stories where make-believe worlds were created convincingly. As I said at the event, during the judging process, I read intriguing stories about witches who baked croissants, trains carrying tee-totalers, stories about funerals, young love, grief and loss. There was beautiful lyrical language used in a description of the beach at Sandymount, fantastic humour in an exposition of the theory of what really happened to Shergar and a piece about extraordinary kindness shown to a lady with dementia. There was emotion and poignancy in the back story of a man living in a shopping centre and an intriguing piece about a narrator’s parents attending a week of a novena.

I loved the fact that there was such variety in the forms of the stories also. There were clever stories like one devised as a letter from a convicted murderer, a story of love and marriage told in the form of a shipping forecast. There were extraordinary slices of life; the violent death of a young child that happened in a split-second while in the wrong place at the wrong time; a story of a narrator who opted for an extraordinary set of swimming lessons; a protagonist who had a horrific ordeal on holiday at the hands of a tour guide. And these were all stories that did not make the shortlist. So, it gives you some idea of the really difficult task I had in selecting first a shortlist and then an eventual winner.

It has been said that a good story should make us hum, nod, laugh, exclaim out loud, suck our teeth, shake our heads, raise our eyebrows – and there were many entries this year that I found did just that.

 If your story wasn’t in the shortlist or one of the eventual winners, please don’t be disheartened. In the past I haven’t been placed in a competition with a particular piece, only for me to then tinker around with it, polish it up and send it somewhere else and, lo and behold, this time someone likes it! Sometimes, it’s a hair’s breadth between a piece making it through and getting the dreaded ‘rejection.’ So please, everyone who entered, keep writing!

On the evening many of the winners and shortlisted writers read their prose and poetry pieces. All the winning entries can be read at https://www.knocklyonliteraryfestival.ie 

As for my own writing, I heard in the past few days that I am a finalist in the WoW! Women on Writing Summer 2025 Flash Fiction. I can't mention the name of my story as the process is continuing. My fingers are crossed as I wait and see if the American judge likes it enough to place it among the winners. If not, I am doomed to keep writing anyhow....