Charles Macklin Festival, Culdaff, County Donegal

I just got back from a weekend in Culdaff in County Donegal, host town to the Charles Macklin Festival. The Macklin of the title was an actor and dramatist who made his name on the London stage in the eighteenth century, most famously for his interpretation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. He’s also famous for killing a man by poking his eye out with a stick, but that’s another story, for another day.

I was facilitating a short story workshop and my fellow writers, Moyra Donaldson and Maureen Boyle were running poetry workshops over the course of the weekend. Also scheduled was a joint prose and poetry reading by the three of us in St Buadan’s Church, a beautifully atmospheric building in the town itself, built on the foundations of a monastic site. I’ve attended readings in churches before: one magical night at the Writers’ Festival on Rathlin Island a few years ago when there was a power cut and the enterprising organisers lit the path through the graveyard, as well as the church interior, with dozens of flickering candles. The electricity supply held out on Saturday in Culdaff, despite the Atlantic weather outside, and as the audience settled into the carved wooden pews, surrounded on all sides by gilded gospel tracts and inscribed marble memorials, and as the light faded beyond the leaded windows, we gave our reading.

I read a short story called ‘The Bells are Ringing Out’, a tale of a young woman’s memory loss and trauma, due to be published shortly. Moyra read a selection of poems from her collection Miracle Fruit, many of which, appropriately for the weekend, shine the light on figures from the eighteenth century: from the story of ‘The Skeleton of the Great Irish Giant’ to the gory goings on of the famous surgeon John Hunter.  And Maureen read from her poem sequence The Work of a Winter, written in the voice of Michael O’Clery, a Fransciscan monk from Donegal, and one of the seventeenth century authors of what became known as The Annals of the Four Masters. We were introduced by writer and broadcaster Malachi O’Doherty who commented that, from Maureen’s spiritually-themed work, to my psychological offering, to Moyra’s more visceral, physical content, we ‘trinity’ of writers appeared the perfect complement to each other’s work.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend comprising talks, exhibitions, performances, music sessions, even a blacksmith’s demonstration, and the people of Culdaff, and at McGrory’s Hotel, where many of the events took place, couldn’t have been more welcoming. Next time you’re over on Inishowen, call in. They’ll be glad to see you. Not a big stick in sight.