This fiction and poetry workshop welcomes everyone who wants to write, is trying to write, or simply thinks about writing. It aims to provide tools that will equip you to lay out your own thoughts and ideas, to develop them (i.e., redraft them), and to refine them.
What the workshop covers:
Gather to share a creative space away from the push and pull of ordinary living, and to find the adventure in words and feelings.
The morning session will be for short fiction and the afternoon for poetry. You will look at samples of published stories and poetry and discuss how these work (or not), as well as techniques, style and tone. Some ideas that arise may overlap in both sessions—questions to do with the redrafting of work, identifying your own needs as a writer and what you wish to convey.
What a participant will need to bring with them:
If wished, participants may bring two pages of a work of fiction in progress, or one poem only.
Workshop Tutor Biography:
Mary O’Donnell has been publishing novels, short stories and poetry since 1990 and her work is regarded as key in expanding the horizons of Ireland’s traditionally male-dominated literary world. The Light Makers, Mary’s debut best-selling novel, received the Sunday Tribune’s Best New Irish Novel 1992 Award, and her other published novels include The Elysium Testament and Where They Lie. Her most recent and highly praised collection of short stories, Walking Ghosts, was published in 2025. Her poetry has been translated into Hungarian, Spanish and Portuguese In 2023 she received an An Post Irish Book Award for her political poem Vectors in Kabul. Mary has taught Creative Writing at the universities of Galway, Maynooth, University College Dublin and University College Cork, as well as for the University of São Paulo.
