2007 Frank O'Connor Short Story award winner

Miranda July has won the 2007 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, presented in Cork and sponsored by Cork City Council and the Munster Literature Centre in association with the Irish Times . She is the third winner of the richest short story prize.

Her collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You (Canongate) was praised as "a book of original genius", "a book which we believe will endure for a long time."

In this debut collection of short stories, July introduces the possibility of a moment that can change everything. July's characters are awkward and often remote, yet they are also profoundly sympathetic. With great compassion and generosity she reveals the idiosyncrasies, vulnerability, longing, and odd logic that govern our lives.

Previous winners of this prestigious award were Yiyun Li for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) and Haruki Marukami for Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (2006).

MIRANDA JULY grew up in Berkeley, California, where she began her career performing her plays at the local punk club. She is now an internationally acclaimed filmmaker and performing artist. She wrote, directed, and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d'Or at Cannes, among others. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Ballybane Library photographic exhibition celebrating Traveller culture and way of life

Anne-Marie Stokes of the Galway Traveller Movement speaking in Ballybane Library at the opening of a photographic exhibition celebrating the culture and joy of life of the traveller community.

'The history behind each photograph tells its own story. There is a very close family bond within each family and I think Derek Spiers has really captured this in these photographs.

Religion is a big part of Traveller culture. Our faith and our belief in God has kept us strong in spite of all we have come up against in the past.

We are very proud of old customs and traditions, but now some of our traditions are dying out. Travellers no longer seem to travel as they did in bygone days; we now look forward to meeting up with old friends and relatives during the summer.

Travellers have many skills; they are creative people. Poetry, drawing and story telling are just some of the skills that Travellers possess.

These photographs show many aspects of Traveller life - happiness, sadness, faith. We are very proud of our identity and culture and I think these pictures capture this. I hope you will enjoy the exhibition and hopefully we answer any questions you may have.'

The Books Dylan read

Bob Dylan's memoir, Chronicles, offers a way to understand the mind and art of its author at a crucial juncture, when Dylan is finding the voice that speaks to and for a generation. Over several pages of the volume, Bob Dylan discusses all the books which influenced him as a very young man. The list of books which he read is astonishing: Rousseau, Ovid and Poe; the Greek classics, Lord Byron, Shelley and Balzac; Dostoevsky and Dickens; the Inferno.
"The books were something," Dylan writes. "They were really something." One can see how his early saturated lyrics must have come out of this intense period
of reading.
On Tuesday evening October 9th Galway City Writer in Residence, the poet Michael O'Loughlin, will be present in the City Library to introduce and talk about Dylan's favourite books and their possible influence on his lyrics and music.

Gerry Hanberry, poet and musician, will be present to sing a few Bob Dylan songs and will examine some of Dylan's references to Tacitus, Gogol, Dickens, Machiavelli, Dante, Ovid and Howl.

Galway City Library
Tuesday 9th October 2007
7.00pm

Adventures in Reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:


A Sultan in Palermo, by Tariq Ali; Verso
Ali's characters are masters at negotiating their complex society whether as Muslims in a Christian regime, peasants in a feudal system, or women in a patriarchal world. Their power, though contingent and temporary, comes from solidarity - it is by banding together and considering the common good that Ali's characters are able to effect meaningful, if short-lived, change. In the end, this novel speaks to the power of human ingenuity to find non-violent means to subvert the hegemonic order. -Liz Winer




Landscapes of War, by Juan Goytisolo; City Lights
For over three decades now, Juan Goytisolo's war against conformity has been a beautiful and courageous thing to behold. Whereas Spanish readers can read Goytisolo regularly, the provincial character of contemporary Anglophone culture deprives us of his observations on Islamic culture and society. Goytisolo's reflections make disturbing reading. They could not be further removed from the banal homilies on the plight of particular peoples that grace the Western media in times of crisis and are forgotten. (Intro.)





Storms: My Life with Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac, by Carol Ann Harris; Chicago Review Press
This is a fascinating look at the mega-success of Fleetwood Mac in the mid-1970s, after the former British blues band recorded the laid-back rock songs of guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks that made the album Rumours one of the most popular of its era. Buckingham was arguably the most talented member of the group, as well as its most unstable. At once arrogant and insecure, he was lost in a haze of substance abuse and ego in 1977 when the band's magnum opus, Rumours, made them international megastars.

Books which help define the dignity of a working life.

The writer Harriet Rubin in a wonderful piece in the New York Times on July 21st 2007 quoted the chairman of an international company as saying

“Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand.”

Harriet Rubin is a great believer in the power of words and language. On her website she tells us that her favourite sources of information are not business books at all but histories, biographies, works of fiction and poetry. “The reason is that the language is richer, more evocative. When language is richer, I believe, one’s mind opens in new ways.”

The chairman of an international company she is writing about is Dr. Sidney Harman, Executive Chairman of Harman International Industries.

Harriet Rubin reports that Dr. Harman could never could find a poet who was willing to be a manager. So Mr. Harman became his own de facto poet, quoting from his volumes of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and the poetry he found in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Camus’ Stranger to help him define the dignity of working life — a poetry he made real in his worker-friendly factories.

“Mr. Harman reads books the way writers write books, methodically over time. For two years Mr. Harman would take down from the shelf The City of God by E. L. Doctorow read the novel slowly, return it to the shelves, and then take it down again for his next trip. ‘Almost everything I have read has been useful to me — science, poetry, politics, novels. I have a lifelong interest in epistemology and learning. My books have helped me develop a way of thinking critically in business and in golf — a fabulous metaphor for the most interesting stuff in life. My library is full of things I might go back to.’ ”

Harriet Rubin’s most recent book is Dante in Love. She tells us that the journey through The Divine Comedy may seem daunting, but the rewards are well-worth the struggle. The goal is to become a writer and poet, with Dante as our guide. He has already made the journey, and he's left behind is his guidebook, The Divine Comedy.

Adventures in reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

An Iliad, by Alessandro Baricco, Vintage
One of the greatest stories of all time is briskly retold. Baricco tells of his realization that the poem "as it has come down to us was unreadable." Well, yes and no. But there's much to be said for Baricco's skilful distillation of Homer into a trim narrative. The story is told as a kind of oral history spoken (from beyond the grave) by the combatants, and by their sorrowing women. Both celebration and condemnation of war, this Iliad manages to speak to yet another generation that needs desperately to hear its message. (Kirkus Reviews).

Three Trios: Poems, by Judith Hall, Northwestern U.P
Brings together, for the first time, translations of two ancient texts. The Apocryphal Book of Judith may be the more familiar one. Less familiar may be the possibility that hidden within this narrative is another older sequence, a pagan one. It is possible that the Book of Judith was such a disguised book of common pagan prayer. Three Trios is composed out of this audacious possibility. "Each book of Judith Hall's has been astonishing, the writing like that of no one else; elegant, resonant, a bright surfacing from the depths of language, experience, and imagination, all conveyed with a sure, original artistry." --W. S. Merwin

Always Astonished: selected prose by Fernando Pessoa, City Lights
"The awakening of a city, whether in fog or otherwise, is always for me more appealing than the radiant dawn over country meadows. A sunrise in the country makes me feel good: a sunrise in the city makes me feel better than good. Yes, because the great hope it possesses brings me, like all hopes, that faraway and bitterly-longed-for taste of not being reality. Morning in the country exists; morning in the city promises. One makes for life; the other makes for thought. And I will always feel, like those great damned souls, that thinking is worth more than living." (Extract)

Books and Reading and Empowerment and the rock star Nick Cave

"As I grew older and entered my teens, my now-deceased father decided it was time to pass on to his son certain information. Here I was thirteen years old and he would usher me into his study, lock the door and begin reciting great bloody slabs of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, or the murder scene from Crime and Punishment, or whole chapters form Nabokov’s Lolita. My father would wave his arms about, and I could tell by the way it empowered him that he felt he was passing on forbidden knowledge. I would sit and listen to all these mad words pouring from his mouth, happy to be invited into his strange, anomalous world. I would watch my father lose himself in the outpourings of his own creative energy and although he would have laughed at this notion, what my father was finding in his beloved literature was God. Literature elevated him, tore him from normality, lifted him out of the mediocre, and brought him closer to the divine essence of things. I had no notion of that then, but I did see somewhere that art had the power to insulate me form the mundanity of the world, to protect me. So I set about writing some really bad poems."
(The Flesh Made Word, by Nick Cave for BBC Radio 3, July 1996)

Adventures in Reading

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

Good Blonde and Others, by Jack Kerouac
Beat doesn't mean tired, or bushed, so much as it means 'beato' the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St. Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart. How can this be done in our mad modern world of multiplicities and millions? By practising a little solitude, going off by oneself once in a while to store up that most precious of golds: the vibrations of sincerity. ( Jack Kerouac, who coined the phrase 'the beat generation.')

The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories, by Ilan Stavans
These provocative stories read almost like newspaper dispatches, conveying facts and stopping short of analysis. Stavans believes that "writing isn't about finding any words to express myself but about finding the right words. There is a plethora of examples to be found in the local bookstore - good ideas that have been poorly articulated. I'm allergic to verbal excess. What can be said at all can be said clearly. Complex ideas can be expressed with simplicity. This conviction of mine may be the result of my love affair with dictionaries. It may be a reaction to the obtuseness of academia, where language conceals rather than reveals meaning."

Dreams of Dreams and the Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, by Antonio Tabucchi
Tabucchi has imagined the dreams of twenty artists whom he loved from Pessoa to Caravaggio, from Goya to Garcia Lorca. Elaborately imagined, this book is a mini-catalogue of great artists' dreams and also the author's interpretation of the last three days in the life of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Tabucchi's rich language and his magical-realist charm tinge the volume with a visionary glow. A lovely little book that keeps ringing in your head long after you've finished it.

Man Booker Prize for Fiction shortlist

Nicola Barker, Anne Enright, Mohsin Hamid, Lloyd Jones, Ian McEwan and Indra Sinha are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2007.

The six shortlisted books were chosen from a longlist of 13 and are:

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker (4th Estate)
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape)
• Animal’s People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

The Man Booker Prize for Fiction panel commented on each of the titles as follows:

Darkmans – an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story with a vibrant cast of characters, set in modern day Ashford.
The Gathering – a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown in Ireland and England.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – this is a subtle and thoughtful examination of the raw meat of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, and one man’s personal response to working within it.
Mister Pip – Mr Pip is well-rooted in dramatic and frightening events in Papua New Guinea, with vivid characters and a fascinating literary frame of reference.
On Chesil Beach – a tight and beautifully written narrative which sustains high emotional tension throughout.
Animal’s People – Indra Sinha is an engaged campaigning novelist. The book clearly draws from real life events in Bhopal, but is a sustained imaginative creation in its own right, with intriguing parallel use of new media.

The winner of The Man Booker Prize 2007 will be announced on 16 October 2007

Clifden Arts Week 30th Anniversary

The 30th Clifden Community Arts Week takes place from 20 - 30 September. As part of the festival the following events will be taking place in Clifden Library.

On the 20th of September a Reading by poets Kevin Higgins and John Walsh.
Kevin’s first collection ‘The Boy With No Face’ was published by Salmon in 2005 -‘a master of the grin and bearing it’. John’s collection, ‘Johnny Tell Them’ (Guildhall Press) ‘gives us an insight into the twists and turns of his personal journey’. They are joint organisers of the successful North Beach Poetry nights. Admission €5. Clifden Library, 1:00pm

21 September
Reading by poet Enda Coyle-Greene
Enda Coyle-Greene lives in County Dublin. Published widely in journals and anthologies, her work has also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and Lyric FM. Her first collection, Snow Negatives, received the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2006 and is forthcoming in 2007 from Daedalus Press.
Clifden Library, 1:00pm

Reading by poets Gerardo Gambolini & Jorge Fondebrider
Poetry reading by two visiting Argentinian poets Gerardo Gambolini and Jorge Fondebrider. Gerardo has published three collections of poetry and is currently translating the stories of John Mc Gahern while Jorge has published many collections and, also with Gerardo, the first bilingual anthology of contemporary Irish poetry published in a Spanish speaking country. The reading will be chaired by Joseph Woods, director Poetry Ireland. Arts Week would like to thank Joe and Poetry Ireland for their help over many years.Admission €5
Clifden Library, 4:00pm

22nd September
Children’s Workshop: Members of the highly acclaimed Fidget Feet Company will conduct this year’s Children’s Workshop.
Clifden Library, 12:00pm

24th September
Reading with poets Eamon Grennan & Sean Lysaght
Eamon’s latest book is ‘The Quick of it’ and a new collection, ‘Out of Breath’ is forthcoming. Sean Lysaght, whose latest collection ‘The Mouth of a River’ was published in 2007 will also read. The readings will be introduced by Michael Coady. Admission: €5. Clifden Library, 1:00pm

25th September
Honouring the centenary of the birth of sculptor Seamus Murphy (1907-1975): Padraig Trehy gives a talk on the making of his acclaimed documentary ‘Words into Stones’ about the artist. Sponsored by Chris Shannahan. Admission: €5.Clifden Library, 1:00pm

Talk by Kathleen Villiers-Tuthill
Marking the centenary of Marconi’s wireless station at Derrygimla - a talk by writer and local historian Kathlenn Villiers-Tuthill. Admission: €5.Clifden Library, 4:00pm

26th of September
Reading with poets Nessa O’Mahoney, Michael Coady and Tony Curtis
Nessa has just completed her Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Wales, Bangor. Her collection ‘Trapping a Ghost’ was published in 2005. Tony is a popular Irish poet. He has published seven collections and his latest book is ‘The Well in the Rain’. He is a member of Aosdana. Michael Coady is a long time associate of Arts Week and also a member of Aosdana. He has received a number of awards in Ireland and the U.S.A. His most recent book of poetry, photographs and prose is ‘One Another’. Sponsored by Mary Downe. Admission: €5.
Clifden Library, 1:00pm

Talk by Jim Carney
To mark the centenary of his birth: Louis MacNeice and his Connemara roots, a talk by journalist and broadcaster Jim Carney. Admission: €5.
Clifden Library, 4:30pm

27th of September
Reading with Letterfrack Writers’ Group
Clifden Library, 1:00pm

The Public Library and the Common Man

The Public library must always be a place for the beating heart…a place where man can come to terms with all of his visions, wishes, dreams and experiences. Many of our expectations and how we deal with them are well-expressed in the writings of Albert Camus. His origin in Algeria and his experiences there in the thirties were dominating influences in his thought and work. He was of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectual circles of strongly revolutionary tendencies, and with a deep interest in philosophy.

The speech he made on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature might be called a fanfare for the common man. He said: "That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche's great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual."

Albert Camus and the Public Library, extracted form his work The First Man.
"At about the same time they started at the lycée, a public library was opened in the area, halfway between the street where Jacques live and the heights where the more refined districts began. The public library was built on the border between these areas.
It was open three times a week, including Thursday, in the evening after work, and all morning Thursday. The room was square, the walls entirely filled with white wood bookcases and black clothbound books. There was also a small table with a few chairs around it for those who wanted quickly to refer to a dictionary.
To be entitled to borrow books, you just had to show a rent receipt, and then you received a folding card where borrowed books were noted.
Devouring everything indiscriminately, Jacques and his friend swallowed the best books at the same time as the worst, not caring in any event whether they remembered anything, and in fact retaining just about nothing, except a strange and powerful emotion that, over the weeks, the months and the years, would give birth to and nurture a whole universe of images and memories that never yielded to the reality of their daily lives , and that surely was no less immediate to these eager children who lived their dreams as intensely as they did their lives.

Actually the contents of these books mattered little. What did matter was what they first felt when they went into the library, where they would not see the walls of black books but multiplying horizons and expanses that, as soon as they crossed the doorstep, would take them away from the cramped life of the neighbourhood.
Then came the moment when - each of them provided with the two books they were allowed - they slipped out on to the boulevard. They would part quickly and dash to the dining room to open the book on the oilcloth by the light of the paraffin lamp.
Each book had its own smell according to the paper on which it was printed, always delicate and discreet. And each of these odours, even before he had begun reading, would transport Jacques to another world full of promises kept, that was beginning now to obscure the room where he was, to blot out the neighbourhood itself and its noises, the city, and the whole world, which would completely vanish as soon as he began reading with a wild exalted intensity that would transport the child into an ecstasy so total that even repeated commands could not extract him: ‘Jacques, for the third time, set the table.’

As a Goalkeeper for Algeria, Camus found the missing link between football and existentialism..."All I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football".

Heritage Week in Galway Libraries

Heritage Week will run from 25th August – 2nd September 2007. In Ireland Heritage Week is co-ordinated by the Heritage Council with support from the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government.
Each year many national and hundreds of local community organisations participate by organising events throughout the country. There is something to appeal to almost everyone and the main aim is to build awareness of our built, natural and cultural heritage thereby encouraging its conservation and preservation. The following events are taking place in Galway Libraries:

Heritage Morning at Gort Library, St. Colman’s Old Church of Ireland
at 11.30am Sat. 1st Sept.
"Reflections on Gort Past & Present"
Exhibition of Old Photographs
Guest Speaker: Tom Hannon, followed by an opportunity to mingle and share memories of Gort.

An exhibition of drawings and photographs of various houses,streets and people from the 1800's to the present,which are relevant to this area.
Organised by the Archaeological and Historical Society of Uí-Mháine and Ballinasloe Public Library and taking place in the Ballinasloe Library from the 25/08/2007 - 02/09/2007

50th anniversary of the publication of Kerouac's book On the Road.

Few novels have had as profound an impact on Western culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America and promise of the open road, Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free." This year is the 50th anniversary of Kerouac's classic novel that defined a generation. Below are three of Kerouac's other books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library in Augustine Street.

Old Angel Midnight, by Jack Kerouac
Old Angel Midnight (1959) was one result of Kerouac's automatic writing experiments in which he would spill his chemically inspired thoughts onto paper to see what came out. Though Kerouac was initially denounced by literary critics as an oddball, his spontaneous twistings and turnings of language rate well with those of Joyce and Stein, and time has proven him to be an important and enduringly popular American writer.

Heaven and Other Poems, by Jack Kerouac
Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press first met Jack Kerouac in 1956. At the time, Allen was working on the "San Francisco Scene" issue of the Evergreen Review, and Ginsberg and Kerouac brought him manuscripts and news of developments on the West Coast. Over the next three years, Kerouac would send Allen poems for various projects, along with letters in which he discussed his poetry, his life, and the work of his young contemporaries. The unpublished poems are collected here, as are the letters.

Pomes All Sizes, by Jack Kerouac
This book, which Kerouac prepared for publication before his death in 1969, collects poems written between 1954 and 1965. Most are playful--comments about friends, variations on the sounds of words. Yet a few extremely sensitive longer pieces appear, including "Caritas," in which the poet runs after a barefoot beggar boy to give him money for shoes and then begins to doubt the boy's veracity. Other intriguing poems reflect the poet's religious concerns of the moment, running the gamut of Eastern and Western religions.

INDICATORS SHOW PUBLIC LIBRARY SERVICES ARE ON THE UP

The annual Service Indicators in Local Authorities for 2006 has just been published by the Local Government Management Services Board (LGSMB). The 60 indicators across 42 headings were first published in 2004.The 4 indicators which are applied to the public library service are:

• Opening hours: the average opening hours per week for full-time libraries appears to have fallen slightly, from an average of 38.7 to 38 between 2004 and 2006 although this is, at least partially, due to a change in definition. Average weekly opening hours for part-time libraries rose slightly from 15 to 16.7 over the same period;
  
• Registered members: according to the data collated by the LGMSB, the number of registered members of public libraries has risen as a proportion of the local resident population from an average of 17.3% in 2004 to 21% in 2006;

• Items issued: the number of books issued per head of population rose slightly from 3.1 to 3.4. Other issues remain constant at 0.2 items per head;
  
• Availability and use of public Internet access points in libraries: overall this has not changed significantly since 2004 as continued investment in library services means that the vast majority of libraries now provide internet access for public use; usage, however shows a significant increase. Based on figures supplied, the libraries facilitated over 1.7 million internet sessions in 2006, an increase of over 18% on similar figures for 2004.

Service indicators in local authorities 2006: report to the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government by the Local Government Management Services Board. – Dublin: LGMSB, 2007.

The report can be downloaded from:
http://www.lgmsb.ie/upload/documents/Service%20Indicators%20in%20Local%20Authorities%202006.pdf

Summer events in Oranmore Public Library

Here are some of the events taking place In Oranmore Public Library during August.

Wednesday August 8th: Juggling Workshop 2.30-4pm. Suitable for childrena aged 7-12. No experience or equipment needed. Everything provided. Booking essential.

Thursday August 9th: Arts & Crafts workshop 2.30pm-4pm. suitable for children aged 6-10. Booking essential.

Friday August 10th: Storytelling for children 12-1pm. with Clare Murphy. Active animated stories suitable for children agend between 4-6 years.

Conact the library on 091-792117 or email

Additions to Galway City Library

Readers may be interested in the following books which have been added to stock at Galway City Library:

Insatiability, by Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz
This novel, the author's masterpiece, is one of the greatest expressions ever of the tortured intersection of political and personal destinies in Eastern Europe. Witkiewicz was a gifted painter, poet, philosopher, dramatist, novelist, and wit. Here he creates a unique and fascinating hybrid: a novel of education grafted onto a stinging sociopolitical satire. The protagonist, Genezip Kapen, moves from youthful innocence and promise through the formative and transformative crucibles of sexual initiation (and confusion), drug addiction, madness, and murder. His own psychic and moral fragmentation evinces what his author perceived as the larger decline of his country.

Appointment, by Herta Muller
Romanian-born Müller offers a grim portrait of totalitarian life's squalor and pain. The sharp generational divide following the war and the dreadful ways in which people learn to cope with the Communist regime are threaded throughout—as are some lighter moments, shaky though they may be. Appropriately disorienting and tightly wound, this perfectly controlled narrative offers a chilling picture of human adaptation and survival under oppression. Sensitive, observant, unrelenting-and compelling, this book confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, by Karl Iagnemma
Iagnemma would seem to be a paradox: he's a notable author of short stories whose works have won a Pushcart Prize and a Paris Review Discovery Prize as well as a research scientist in the mechanical engineering department at MIT. In fact, these disparate aspects of his personality work together; he seamlessly blends the lyrical and the precise to create gemlike little portraits of individuals who seem suddenly to have caught their "reflections in a cloudy mirror." Iagnemma is pointed, but he isn't merciless; his empathy makes these characters live. A beautifully crafted collection.

Tuam Library news

Nowo Otwarty Dzial Polskiej Ksiazki! (Polish books Now Available)

Goraco zapraszamy Wszystkich czytelikow pragnacycfh czytac ksiazki jezyku polskim do wypozyczania ksiazek w publicznej bibliotece – Tuam Library.

(A selection of Polish books are available for borrowing from the Tuam Library)


Tuam Arts Festival runs from 17th – 26th August: A mixed media exhibition will take place in the Tuam Library. This exhibition is entitled ‘Snap!’ and will be broken into two parts, each running for a week. The first will feature artists Kevin Flanagan, Sinead Ni Bhaoil, Ben Geoghegan and Johnny Salmon who will exhibit ceramics, photography, film and drawings. The launch of this exhibit will take place on Wednesday 15th at 7.00 pm.
The second part of this exhibition will include the work of Sharon O’Grady, Mark Kelly, Joanne Hynes and Tom Flanagan who will exhibit paintings, prints and film installation. This part of the exhibition will be launched on Wednesday 22nd at 7.00.
Writing workshops and other events for children will also take place in the Library in association with the Tuam Arts Festival


Summer Events:
On Tuesday 10th July, a large crowd of children gathered to hear the magical stories from Galway based Storyteller Clare Murphy. Clare enthralled the children with tales from lands, far and wide. Clare amazed the children further with her juggling workshop. Over 20 children took part in making juggling balls from a mixture of flour, rice and balloons…it can be done!! She then proceeded to show the children how to juggle… Tuam seems to have many budding jugglers in its midst.
On Wednesday 11th July, an art and craft workshop entitled “Beautiful butterflies, gruesome grubs and beastly bugs” took place in the library. Nineteen children took part and made scary looking insects.
“If you go down to the woods today, you are in for a surprise…" a teddy bears picnic was held on Wednesday 18th July. Forty-six children arrived with their teddies to join in the fun!
On Thursday 19th July, 2 circus skills workshops took place in the library. Eimhin Shortt taught the children basis circus skills and played theatre games. Everyone who attended the workshops had lots of fun and lots of laughter could be heard in the library!

• Story-time takes place every Thursday morning from 11.30 – 12.30 for children aged between 3 and 8.
• Computer classes for retired people take place every Friday morning from 10.00 – 11.30.
• An exhibition of new works by the Nuala B. Higgins Art Group will take place from Tuesday 7th August to Saturday 11th August.
• Anne Harkin Petersen will open an exhibition on Tuesday 7th August at 7.00.

Harry Potter Week in Galway

Wizards, muggles, half-breeds and squibs, the magic within the Harry Potter books was celebrated during a week long event running up to the launch of the final Harry Potter book on Friday night, 21st July.
Workshops, games and story telling, all conducted by magical volunteers and organised by Pilar Alderete from the Spanish Department of NUIG, and Fionnuala Gallagher the NUIG Arts Officer, were held throughout the week in Galway City Library, Westside Library, Ballybane Library, Oranmore Library and in the University.

Children, teenagers and adults all responded with enthusiasm from the opening event at Ceannt Railway station (magically changed to Platform 9 and 3/4 for the day) right up to publication day.

On Friday morning a group of adults, teenagers and children met at the Railway Station and proceeded to City Library (Gringotts) via Diagon Alley (Shop Street). On arrival at Gringotts (the City Library) a sorting ceremony was performed (manually, as the Sorting Hat was unavailable) by means of a questionnaire to be completed. Once all were sorted to their respective houses a discussion was started on the first book in the series and a quiz was held. The depth of knowledge of all involved was tested as questions were posed on spells and potions and such like!

On Saturday and Sunday events were held in NUIG and involved the books The Chamber of Secrets and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Monday everyone was back in the Library in Westside for art workshops and discussions on The Goblet of Fire
On Tuesday everyone headed to Ballybane Library to meet with the Ministry of Magic and a wonderful storytelling session by Claire Murphy on how to deal with giants, fairies, ogres and their likes should one meet with them. It was a magical morning in the library, with all enthralled by Claire’s wonderful voice and sweeping gestures. A discussion and quiz followed on the book The Order of the Phoenix
On Wednesday it was back to NUIG for a treasure hunt and discussion on The Half Blood Prince.
On Thursday the Harry Potter Week moved on to Oranmore Library with a workshop on Defense against the Dark Arts. This was a yoga workshop conducted by an Indian girl involving lots of concentration and the use of wands.
For the grand finale on Friday the event moved to Westside Library with The Big Harry Potter quiz. 50 easy and not so easy questions were posed. After much deliberation and lively discussion as to the right answers by children and parents an eventual winning team was announced and the answers to the questions were revealed.

Galway County Library want to say that it was a great was a pleasure to work with Fionnuala Gallagher, the Arts Officer in NUIG, and Pilar Alderete, a teacher in the Spanish Department in NUIG, who was the driving force behind the event. Pilar, who is from Spain, did her MA in Translation Studies choosing the topic of Harry Potter and its translation. She is a keen Harry Potter fan and expert on all aspects of the books.
The idea behind it all was to creatively explore the books and the writings of JK Rowling. While the target audience was 11 to 17 years, we actually had younger and older! We found many Harry Potter fans amongst the parents!
One little girl who attended all events said that the week was like "being at Hogwarts." This comment summed up the experience very well. Galway City Libraries became, together with NUIG, a place akin to Hogwarts School of Wizardry - a place of magic and mystery for a week.

Death of Galway Children’s Author Pat O’Shea

Pat O'Shea, the author of the children's novel The Hounds of the Morrigan, which took 13 years to complete and became a bestseller, has died recently, aged 76. Hailed as a classic by reviewers, the book is still admired by new readers of all ages more than 20 years on.
Telling the story of two children asked by an Irish god to recover a blood-stained pebble before it falls into the clutches of Morrigan, the Celtic goddess of war, it draws deeply on Pat's idyllic early years - on long summers in east Galway, on her love of Connemara, and on a rich store of history, myth and folklore absorbed and added to with scholarly care over many years.

Born Pat Shiels in Bohermore, Galway in 1931 and educated at the Presentation and Mercy convents in Galway, she was the fifth and youngest child of an affectionate family. A keen reader, she grew up close to the sea in the unspoilt countryside around Lough Corrib in the West of Ireland. Benefiting from the still existing Irish tradition of story-telling by the fireside, she absorbed the many tales told both by her mother and her Uncle John. Outside the house, there were plenty of other older people, too, with time for children and telling stories that often reached back into ancient mythology.

The inspiration for The Hounds of the Morrigan came from a dream. Starting work on it years later, after making literally thousands of notes, Pat O'Shea welded a comic fantasy onto a scaffolding of Irish mythology at its wildest. In the story two children, Pidge and his younger sister Brigit, are asked by the Irish god Dagda to go on a quest to recover a blood-stained pebble before it falls into the clutches of the Celtic goddess of war Morrigan.
Moving from Galway to the land of Faery, the children encounter a series of talking insects and animals, all of whom back them in their great adventure. Ranged against them are Morrigan's two side-kicks, Breda Fairfoul and Melodie Moonlight, a brace of motorbike-riding witches in command of a terrifying pack of hounds.

Added to Galway City Library Collection

Ecological Design, by Sim Van der Ryn
This book contends that "in many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis." It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used. We have used design cleverly in the service of narrowly defined human interests but have neglected its relationship with our fellow creatures. The book explores new ways of designing cities, neighbourhoods, buildings, industry, food systems, and other areas of human activity.

The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream by Peter Calthorpe
Calthorpe sets forth the principles of building good neighbourhoods and communities. He feels that the commons — public spaces that provide communities with convivial gathering and meeting places — have become increasingly displaced by an exaggerated private domain: shopping malls, private clubs, and gated communities. Even the street, our most basic public space, is given over to the car and its accommodation, while our private world becomes more and more isolated behind garage doors and walled compounds.

Design With Nature, by Ian L. McHarg
This book has done much to redefine the fields of landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, and ecological design. Described as a "user's manual for our world," this book offers a practical blueprint for a new, healthier relationship between the built environment and nature. In so doing, it provides scientific, technical, and philosophical foundations for a mature civilization that will replace the polluted, bulldozed, machine-dominated, dehumanized, explosion-threatened world that is even now disintegrating and disappearing before our eyes.