In keeping with the time of year, many of our articles this issue have to do with heritage and tradition – memories and ghosts. Respect for tradition is not always inward-looking: it can lead to the most surprising connections, as in the case of how this drawing came to me.

It begins with a young Russian who was writing a story set in Ireland, and was seeking a suitable placename for the home town of her hero. The name that caught her eye was – Ballinamallard. (more…)

Early this year a sumptuously illustrated and sharply written book was published, celebrating the life of a female artist who is more famous abroad than in her native Ireland. Admirers such as John Piper noted that she was a master of colour who should be compared to Braque, Rouault, Kandinsky and Matisse. She is so highly regarded by the international community that when names of great artists were given to craters discovered on the planet Mercury, she was honoured alongside Shakespeare, Beethoven and Picasso.

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Michael Brown has been a resident of Fermanagh for twenty years, recording documentary films and interpreting landscape through paintings, photography and print making, working from his studio near Ballinamallard.

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Omagh singer-songwriter Maeve Dunphy’s debut album Scarlet, which was released in 2012, was distinguished by her exceptional songwriting, with lyrics which were arresting and often startling and music which ambitiously contained elements of blues, jazz, reggae and country.

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The Northern Irish ancestry of the Brontë sisters is now well known, with the Brontë Heritage Centre at Ballymascanlon in County Down, birthplace of their father Patrick Branty, but there is also a tenuous and intriguing link to Fermanagh. (more…)

In 2014 the Row the Erne Project began with the building of a 33ft, 10 man, traditional Irish boat called a Curach. This is the kind of boat in which Irish people traded with Britain and Western Europe for more than 3,000 years, bringing back not only goods but also new ideas, technologies and fashions.
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Of the many great events on offer at Fermanagh’s Flive festival, one spectacle in particular stood alone in the limelight. Young Stephen– an energetic, one-man dramatisation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Adapted for stage by Prin Ó Duigneáin, Paddy McEneaney stars as Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s own semi-fictional avatar.

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The Lough Erne Landscape Partnership is one of 90 such groups throughout the U.K. which have received Heritage Lottery funding to promote projects that will:

…protect, conserve, restore, raise awareness of and celebrate the built, natural and cultural heritage… 

Just over £2 million has been set aside for projects that will enhance the landscape of Lough Erne, or that have a direct connection with it.

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When Fermanagh Writers were first contacted by Owen McFadden, a BBC radio producer working in Belfast, the original brief was for some of our older members to write reflections on their past experiences for a Sunday afternoon programme on BBC Radio Ulster called The Time of our Lives.

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With the U.S elections nearing their conclusion and Brexit talks in full swing, there is no better time for some political satire, to invite conversation and perhaps lighten the mood on this troubling political climate. (more…)

For weeks all the talk had been of a public telephone coming to Enniskillen.

I claimed to have insider knowledge thanks to the two Telephone Exchange girls who lodged with my grandmother.

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A steady drizzle seeps across the island of Inishmore, soaking into an already sodden earth and choking the soil beneath. Wet fields and wet sky merge so easily together that the horizon is lost far beyond the curve of the earth.

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Participate in workshops and information sessions in the North West on writing and publishing.
Learn more about bursaries, fellowships, and other support systems for writers.

Offer your books for sale at the 2016 Allingham Festival.
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John Llewllyn James used this quote by Robert Montgomery as a prompt for our writing at a recent meeting of Fermanagh Writers and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

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