As usual, the annual Flat Lake Festival has restored my soul for another few months!

Thanks to various friends for texts and messages of well wishing for my first reading from the novel-in-progress.  It went well.  Sadly, Rosita with whom I was due to read had to cancel at the last moment.   As I now had extra time, I was delighted to ask Sharon to join me for part of the presentation (that’s Sharon Cromwell – actress – my partner) and we read a short story for multiple voices together.  This is a link to yesterday’s Irish Times colour piece about the Flat Lake Festival.  My rather emotional Facebook response of last night (which took up 3 postings, now that FB has restricted its word count to 420 characters…) ran:

“(the review) kinda gets it… but doesn’t quite capture the sense of homecoming, the bumping into dozens and scores of people you went to school with, who taught you at school, who you taught, who saw a play you were in, who were in a play you saw, who were in a play with you, who you have admired since you started reading, whose work you only discovered a few weeks ago, whose work you only discovered when you sat and listened to them today in the barn, about whom you were WRONG all along…, the hilarity of barbecuing an Irish fry-up breakfast in the bucketing rain, the utter joy of watching Sam Shepard serenely singing and playing with lads you drink with in Drogheda, the reminder that Aaron Monaghan is the exceptional actor of his generation… the inimitable
Gombeens, the dyke with the bike (what a poem!), the disco phone box (Tom Canning apparently preserved in aspic since I last saw him c.1979).  If you want to understand Cavan/Monaghan, or the impossible concept of a local, down-home, rustic culture that survives globalisation by riding it, gliding on it, staying one step ahead of it by borrowing brazenly from it, book now for next year’s Flat Lake…