BOOKWORM
JOHN BOLAND
From a little Acorn to the Big Apple
Not quite a Luddite (what freelancer
could survive withouta PC and modem?), I'm still an unreconstructed believer
in the written word as found in newspapers, magazines and. between hard
covers. Yes, of course the Internet can be a wonderful research tool, but
some of us still prefer to got the information we need from the books we've
amassed down through the years. Apart from anything else - indeed, above
anything else - the shape, feel, portability and sheer physicality of books
are what many of us still love. And we can take them on the DART. .
So I feel slightly uneasy when Nessa O'Mahony tells me
about Electric Acorn, which she describes as "Ireland's first online literary
magazine" and whose initial issue (if that's the word, for it) includes
not just emerging Irish poets and short-story writers but also "various
writers from all over the world who have visited the website, liked what
they saw and submitted work to the new publication".
Nessa, who is a fine poet herself and a member of Dublin
Writer's Workshop, from which this initiative springs, feels that "one
of the best aspects of having an Internet website is that it, exposes the
writer to a much wider audience and provides plenty of potential for exchanges
of ideas and views between writers all over the world".
Indeed, Kenyan novelist David Karanja contacted her through
the website and, as a consequence, will be reading in the Irish Writers
Centre in September, while she has also got responses from Robert Drake,
an American who is compiling an anthology of gay writing for Faber and
from New-York-based William Grogan, who has offered to arrange readings
for any Dublin Writers’ Workshop members visiting the Big Apple.
Nessa’s also offering website space to any Irish Publications
"who could benefit from an online presence" and is busily preparing the
next issue of Electric Acorn. If you're interested, you can email up to
five poems or one 3,000-word short story at: info@dublinwriter's.org.
Oh, and - the Workshop's website address is: http://www.dublinwriters.org
Meanwhile, any correspondence to Bookworm will find its
way to me at The Irish Times,
I 1-1 5 D'Olier Street, Dublin 2. A boringly old-fashioned address, I know,
but what can you do. |
