Fear and Loathing: How to Transform Anxiety into Poems that Work, with Victoria Kennefick for the Irish Writers Centre, Saturday 10th October, 10:00am – 12:30pm, Tourist Office, Town Hall, Banba Square, Nenagh, E45 NX26, €30
Anxiety, it could be said, is the curse of our age. It adopts many guises and germinates from many seeds planted by childhood hurts, illness, loss, relationships, ageing and technology to name but a few. How do we, as poets, grapple with these myriad anxieties, face them, channel them and craft them into poems that are in real service to our readers. Join us for this immersive, generative workshop where we will focus, breathe and truly bear witness to the full spectrum of what it means to be human and make poems that will confront, soothe, and dispel the crippling spectre of unacknowledged fear. Feel the fear and do it all anyway!
Victoria Kennefick’s debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize and the Butler Literary Prize. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. She was the 2025 Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.