Writers Institute Mourns the Passing of John Montague

The New York State Writers Institute mourns the passing of our beloved friend and colleague John Montague, major Irish poet of his generation and long-time faculty member of the Institute and the University at Albany.

The author of more than 30 books of poetry and a recipient of the Chevalier de la Legion d’honneur, France’s highest award, he died in Nice on December 10, 2016, following surgery.


Born in Brooklyn on February 28, 1929, and raised in County Tyrone, Montague served as Distinguished Writer-in-Residence for the New York State Writers Institute during each spring semester, teaching workshops in fiction and poetry and a class in the English Department, University at Albany. Governor Mario M. Cuomo presented Montague a citation in 1987 “for his outstanding literary achievements and his contributions to the people of New York.”


In 1998, he was named the very first Ireland Professor of Poetry, a new position created to honor the shared literary heritage of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with joint appointments at Trinity College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast and University College Dublin.


Read this account of his funeral in the Irish Times:  http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/john-montague-remembered-at-funeral-as-poet-of-wonder-1.2906056

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Times Union Book Club with NYS Writers Institute!

The Times Union is launching a new book club in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute.

Alice McDermott's novel Someone (2014) will be the first featured book. Someone tells the story of one woman's "ordinary" life across the decades of the 20th century in an Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn. McDermott received the 1998 National Book Award for her novel, Charming Billy.

To register for the Book Club go to timesunion.com/tubookclub.

The following events will take place in association with the Book Club:

Book Club discussion hosted by Times Union staff
• When: 7 p.m. April 8
• Where: Times Union, 645 Albany Shaker Road, Colonie
• Note: Copies of "Someone" can be purchased at the Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza in Guilderland or at Market Block Books in Troy.

Reading, Q&A , book- signing and McKinney Writing Contest award ceremony
• When: 8 p.m. April 15
• Where: Biotech Auditorium, Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Building at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy.
• Note: The event is free and open to the public, and cosponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with Rensselaer's 74th Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading.

Q&A and meet-and-greet with McDermott
• What: In conjunction with the institute, McDermott will answer questions and sign books at an event for Times Union Plus members (those with print or digital subscriptions). Light refreshments will be served.
• When: 11 a.m. April 16
• Where: Times Union, 645 Albany Shaker Road, Colonie
• Note: The event is free. Register at timesunion.com/tubookclub to attend.

More about the Book Club:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Times-Union-Book-Club-Alice-McDermott-6130671.php

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Heaney Obituary in the Associated Press

"He was a wonderful raconteur. There was so much local enthusiasm for his work...." --NYS Writers Institute Director Donald Faulker, quoted in the AP obituary for Seamus Heaney (with contributions from Bethany Bump of the Schenectady Gazette).

More here:  http://www.dailygazette.net/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=U0NILzIwMTMvMDgvMzEjQXIwMzAwMA==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom

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"A Great Day for the Irish," Seamus Heaney Visits Albany

Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Laureate who passed away today, visited the Writers Institute in 1985, the second year of our existence.

The late Tom Smith proclaimed it "a great day for the Irish" and "a great night for poetry."

Here are links to audio files from that visit, with an introduction by UAlbany Irish literature professor (now emeritus) William Dumbleton.

http://luna.albany.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?QuickSearchA=QuickSearchA&q=Seamus+Heaney&sort=Archive_Collection%2CAuthor_Name%2CAuthor_Name_2%2CAuthor_Name_3&search=Search

Here's an obituary for Seamus Heaney in the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/family-says-irish-poet-and-nobel-winner-seamus-heaney-dies-at-74/2013/08/30/a5f38506-1162-11e3-a2b3-5e107edf9897_story.html

Explore the riches of our archive on the UAlbany Luna platform here;
http://luna.albany.edu/luna/servlet/UALBANYSCA~16~16

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Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet, Dies

Seamus Heaney, who visited the Writers Institute in 1985, and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, died in Dublin today.

More in the New York Times: 

Mr. Heaney, who was born in Northern Ireland but moved to Dublin in his later years, is recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. His fellow poet Robert Lowell described Mr. Heaney as the “most important Irish poet since Yeats.”
      

In a statement, Faber & Faber, which published his work for nearly 50 years, called him “one of the world’s greatest writers. His impact on literary culture is immeasurable.”

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/31/arts/seamus-heaney-acclaimed-irish-poet-dies-at-74.html?_r=0

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The Excruciating Details of Death by Starvation

J. Hoberman reviews Hunger, screened tomorrow, Friday, 7:30 at Page Hall:

"Perhaps because of McQueen's experience making video installations, Hunger is a compelling drama that's also a formalist triumph. The opening close-up of prisoners rhythmically banging their cups is held long enough to establish the movie as something percussive, deliberate, cool, and object-like. McQueen is not just remarkably sensitive to duration, structure, and camera placement, he brings those issues to the forefront without mitigating the power of the situation being represented. In a way, the movie is also an installation—as intensely visceral as it is rigorously detached."

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-03-18/film/the-excruciating-details-of-death-by-starvation-in-hunger/full/

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Anne Enright Shortlisted for Orange Prize

It was announced today that The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (who visits RPI tomorrow) was shortlisted for the United Kingdom's Orange Prize for Fiction, which comes with an award of 30,000 British pounds (approximately 48,000 U.S. dollars).

The novel is a tale of adultery and its consequences.

The prize is awarded for "excellence, originality and accessibility in women's writing from throughout the world."

Other authors on the shortlist include Cynthia Ozick, now 84 years old, who visited the Writers Institute in March 2005, as well as Ann Patchett, Madeline Miller, Georgina Harding and Esi Edugyan.

Read more in the Irish Independent.

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If It Hadn't Been for the Child: Anne Enright

Anne Enright, who visits RPI on April 18th, writes in her new novel, The Forgotten Waltz (2011), about a child caught in the strife caused by an adulterous love affair:

"IF IT HADN'T BEEN FOR THE CHILD then none of this might have happened, but the fact that a child was involved made everything that much harder to forgive. Not that there is anything to forgive, of course, but the fact that a child was mixed up in it all made us feel that there was no going back; that it mattered. The fact that a child was affected meant we had to faceourselves properly, we had to follow through. "

"She was nine when it started, but that hardly matters. I mean her age hardly matters because she was always special—isn’t that the word? Of course all children are special, all children are beautiful. I always thought Evie was a bit peculiar, I have to say: but also that she was special in the oldfashioned sense of the word. There was a funny, offcentre beauty to her. She went to an ordinary school, but there was, even at that stage, an amount of ambivalence about Evie, the sense of things unsaid. Even the doctors—especially the doctors—kept it vague, with their, 'Wait and see.'" More in Caravan magazine.

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Some Drivel Is Best Left Unpublished

An interesting meditation on writers, their memoirs and their scandalized parents appears in a recent issue of the Irish Independent. Though short, the piece mentions four of our past visitors: Colm Toibin, Edna O'Brien, Toni Morrison (who was in residence at UAlbany at the Institute's inception) and Anne Enright (who visits a second time, this coming April 18th at RPI).

"Upset by the domestic revelations in her son's novels, Colm Toibin's mother threatened to write a book of her own. Nora Joyce got round the problem through the simple expedient of not reading her husband's work, but Edna O'Brien's family were so scandalised by her early books that they burnt them."

More.

Picture: Edna O'Brien in The Guardian in 2011.

Read an interview with O'Brien by former Institute Director Tom Smith here.

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Love Destroys Everything in Its Path-- Anne Enright

Writing in Oprah's O. magazine, Lizzie Skurnick reviews The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright, who comes to RPI on April 18th:

"In America we like our adultery straight up: a bubble of illicit passion that ends in regret. That's not what Irish novelist Anne Enright is serving in The Forgotten Waltz (Norton), which forgoes the simple morality tale for something more complex and satisfying. The novel begins as the otherwise involved Gina first sees the love of her life, the also-spoken-for Seán. Detailing the standard stuff of clandestine affairs—tawdry hotels, wife-stalking—Enright does not hide the ugliness of betrayal. But her real story is about the once illicit lovers' fraught attempt to live as a family—one that includes Seán's alarmingly strange preadolescent daughter, Evie. Casting aside cultural bromides about the immorality of affairs, Enright puts us squarely in the center of a terrible truth: Love can be miraculous—and still destroy everything in its path."

Original posting.

Picture: At her home near Bray, Ireland (from the New York Times)

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The Short Story: The "Cat of Literary Form"

Anne Enright, who visits RPI 4/18, writes about the shortcomings of the short story as a literary form in The Guardian:

"I am not sure whether the novel is written for our convenience, but it is probably written for our satisfaction. That is what readers complain about with short stories, that they are not 'satisfying'. They are the cats of literary form; beautiful, but a little too self-contained for some readers' taste. Short stories are, however, satisfying to write, because they are such achieved things. They become themselves even as you write them: they end once they have attained their natural state. "

"Or some of them do. Others keep going. Others discard the first available meaning for a later, more interesting conclusion. In the interests of truth, some writers resist, backpedal, downplay, switch tacks, come back around a different way. Poe's famous unity of impulse is all very well, but if you know what the impulse is already, then it will surely die when you sit down at the desk." More.

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Love, Dark and Doomed

As her favorite Valentine's Day reading choice, New York Times Preview Editor Jen McDonald chose Anne Enright's The Gathering (2007).

Enright visits RPI under the cosponsorship of the Writers Institute on April 18th.

"I tend to like my literary love dark and doomed, so my pick is Anne Enright’s “The Gathering,” a novel whose tragedy unspools from a pulse-quickening romantic scene in the third chapter. It’s a flashback to the moment the narrator’s grandmother, Ada Merriman, first laid eyes on Lambert Nugent, who would not become her husband but would play an outsize role in the lives of her descendants...." More.

Enright also visited us in 2008.

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