gorse no. 8 launch 2.0 (The City launch), Wednesday 19 April 2017, 7.30-9.30pm, The Liquor Rooms, Dublin, with readings from the issue by Sheila Armstrong, Sinéad Gleeson, Caitríona Ní Chléirchín, Colm O’Shea, and Dimitra Xidous . RSVP.
Please join us in celebrating the launch of gorse no. 7, in the The Liquor Rooms, Wednesday 11th January, with readings from the issue by Chris Beausang, Anthony McGuinness, Sheila Mannix, and Michael Naghten Shanks.
There will be drinks. RSVP via Facebook.
Join us on Monday 19 December in the Liquor Rooms for Some Christmas Lit Thing, a seasonal lit-mag shindig. Reading in Irish for gorse is Aifric Mac Aodha; Susan Tomaselli will read the translation by David Wheatley. Starting at 7.30pm, more details about the evening, and other magazines taking part, can be found here. We hope to see you there.
The fourth edition of Phonica takes place on Wednesday 19 October, with Martín Bakero, Susan Connolly, John Kearns, Neil Ó Lochlain, Elizabeth Hilliard and David Lacey for a set of performances and presentations traversing the realms of sound poetry, electronic music, visual poetry, improvisation, and more.
Phonica: Four
Wednesday 19 October 2016
Jack Nealons, 165 Capel Street, Dublin 1
8pm start, admission free
‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’
1.3 ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges contains the doubly memorable statement, from which I copy the following words: ‘All men, in the vertiginous moment of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat a line from Shakespeare are William Shakespeare […] The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous.’
1.4 ‘I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited, all my ancestors.’
There’s a line in the opening number of Merrily We Roll Along, the musical by Stephen Sondheim, that asks: ‘How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?’ I’m quite sure that I would not be where I am—which, for the record, is a flat in Clerkenwell, London, on a Sunday morning in January, before anyone else is up—if my parents had not taken me to the theatre to see Sunday in the Park With George one day in 1984. Something hit me in that play, I can trace all of my passions back to it, all of the ways I have related to the world, and understood my purpose in it. That day I fell in love with the theatre, and more specifically with musical theatre; I fell in love with art, with the nineteenth century, with Post-Impressionism, with France. I didn’t know I would go on to study theatre, or teach art history. I didn’t know I would move to France. I didn’t know you could move to France. I couldn’t foresee that one day I would live between Paris and London. I didn’t know you could live between two cities. I didn’t know I would become a writer, and understand the retreat from the outside world, hoping that the people you love understand, feeling the weight of their sadness, their disappointment. I didn’t know I couldn’t have the kind of life I wanted in New York, that the pressure would be too great to have a conventional job, to settle into a conventional life. To become a writer, I had to move to Europe. But to choose that life, I had to give up the one I was born with.