Compass Lines – A North South Writers’ Exchange

Compass Lines: A Writers’ Exchange Project

Compass Lines is a writers’ exchange project aiming to establish links between writers and communities in the North and South of Ireland, while additionally examining relationships between the East and West of these islands, through workshops, public discussions, and the commissioning of new collaborative writing.

Compass Lines aims to encourage artistic fusion and integrate a sometimes fragmented audience, geographically and otherwise, through the strategy of combining writers with various concerns and backgrounds. Eschewing their comfort zones and usual patterns of working presents a diversion and a challenge to the writers, and a way of instigating discussions about ideas of process and place that reside in contemporary writing and which are often ignored through traditional views of literature.

Developed by poet, editor and curator Christodoulos Makris in collaboration with the Irish Writers Centre as producing organisation, and with the participation of the Crescent Arts Centre as partner venue, Compass Lines will comprise a series of enterprises, alternately in Dublin and in Belfast, each with the participation of two writers – one with connections to the north of Ireland and one to the south.

Each enterprise consists of three strands:

1. Community Connection: the writers visit an organisation or group in the hosting city to conduct workshops.

2. Discussion: a moderated public event during which the writers will discuss their practice, focusing on process, craft, dissemination, etc. The event will include readings and scope for Q & A sessions. Public, details below.

3. New Writing: specially-commissioned collaborative writing to be published as an individual limited edition pamphlet. Available exclusively with entry to the public discussion.

Compass Lines #2

Nerys Williams and Miriam Gamble

Wednesday 11 May 2016, Crescent Arts Centre, Belfast

7.30pm, entry via Eventbrite €8/€6 or on the door €10/€8

Includes a complementary glass of wine.

Nerys Williams

Originally from West Wales, Nerys Williams lectures in American Literature at University College, Dublin and is a Fulbright Alumnus of UC Berkeley. She has published poems and essays widely and is the author of A Guide to Contemporary Poetry (Edinburgh UP, 2011) and a study of contemporary American poetics, Reading Error (Peter Lang, 2007).

Nerys’s first volume, Sound Archive (Seren, 2011), was shortlisted for the Felix Denis (Forward) prize and won the Rupert and Eithne Strong first volume prize in 2012. She is the current holder of the Poetry Ireland Ted McNulty Poetry Prize.

Miriam Gamble 

Miriam Gamble is from Belfast, but now lives in Edinburgh. She is a graduate of both Oxford and Queens University Belfast and in 2007 she won an Eric Gregory Award for her pamphlet with Tall-lighthouse entitled This Man’s Town. Her first full-length collection,The Squirrels are Dead (2010) won a Somerset Maugham Award in 2011, and Pirate Music followed in 2014, both of which are published by Bloodaxe.

Christodoulos Makris

Christodoulos Makris is a poet, editor and independent curator. His work has appeared widely in Irish and international journals and anthologies, and he performed in many venues and festivals including the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. His most recent book The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press, 2015) was chosen as a poetry book of the year by RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine. He is the poetry editor of gorse, and co-edited the bilingual exchange anthology Centrifugal: Contemporary Poetry of Guadalajara and Dublin (EBL-Cielo Abierto / CONACULTA, 2014). In 2014 he produced and co-curated the transnational poetry collaborations project and tour Yes But Are We Enemies which involved more than 40 contemporary poets from Ireland and Britain. Other curatorial projects include cross-stream: ways of writing (with Fingal Libraries) and Phonica, an independent poetry and music venture with an emphasis on multiformity and the experimental.

“a straw in the wind, a forerunner, in Irish poetry and Irish poetry publishing” – Harry Clifton, The Irish Times

“one of Ireland’s leading contemporary explorers of experimental poetics” – Rick O’Shea, The RTÉ Poetry Programme