An Abundance of Writing

The abundance of the month of May has spread to my writerly endeavours.

Creative Writing for Celebrants

I was very pleased to once again be approached by newsletter subscriber Aodhnait Flynn of Celebrant Training Ireland. She wants me to train budding celebrants in the art of crafting creative love stories for weddings and tender, evocative eulogies for funerals. I'll be doing two two-hour workshops on Sunday 29 June. It's a privilege to be asked, and I enjoy keeping up my links with the celebrant world.

SpeakEasy Is Next Week

I told you I'd bore you with the details of the next SpeakEasy, which is in a mere eight days. On Friday 23 May, Belfast-based poet Mícheál McCann will travel the length of the island to be our featured poet at SpeakEasy.

Come and hear Mícheál at 8pm in Phil Grimes Pub, Waterford City. We will also welcome popular local musician Eoin Dalton and of course, all our lovely local writers for the open mic session, this time featuring West Waterford Arts Group.

SpeakEasy is sponsored by Waterford City and County Council.

Photo Description: This is the SpeakEasy poster. The details that you see in my newsy snippet are contained in the poster, against a blue-grey background, and there's also an image of a microphone.

Interesting Marketing Exercise for Waterford Music

I recently collated the results of a survey Waterford Music carried out on our audience at our final spring concert. I was interested to know whether the content I create for them has any effect. As you might have guessed, the effect of our publicity campaigns was hard to gauge from the answered.

But I was heartened to see that social media and the Waterford Music newsletter were popular sources of information about our concerts, as I am responsible for creating content for those platforms.

Haiku in the Japanese Gardens

A reminder that you can register for the writerly Gathering on Saturday 14 June at the Japanese Gardens. You can also register for the various haiku events happening in the Gardens that day. There are three haiku activities being led by Gilles Fabre, founder of the Seashores.

First, Gilles will lead a haiku walk in the gardens on the morning of the 14th. Then you can read haiku at our open mic event in the Gathering. Finally, he invites people to join him for a kukkai, a haiku workshop, either in the Gardens or at a local bar.

Successful Speak Up Workshop

The Speak Up Waterford public speaking workshop was a great success. Thirteen people turned up, and within moments, they were all speaking confidently and laughing their heads off, thanks to facilitator Lynda Gough's infectious enthusiasm and joy. The workshop finished with us all performing our pieces of writing into a microphone, strutting our stuff and taking ownership of our words.