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Wishing Well – Joanne Boyle: Making Art Belong to Everyone
A visual artist and art tutor, Joane Boyle spends her days moving between her own studio practice and teaching in places where art is often least expected. Over the past sixteen years she has worked with the Probation Service, teaching both young people and adults, many of whom have experienced the criminal justice system. She has also taught in homeless shelters, mental health hospitals, nursing homes and community groups, bringing creativity to people who may never have imagined there was a place for them in the world of art. Listen to the radio show on (July 7th) Looking back, she believes her own creative journey began, not with paint or sculpture, but with music. “It made me reflect,” she says. “Music was my first portal into hearing somebody express something that wasn’t everyday – something outlandish or theatrical or bigger than life.” Like many teenagers growing up in the 1990s, music became something she owned. Friends exchanged cassette tapes, new albums were passed from person to person, and songs became the soundtrack to emotions that often felt too large to explain. “As a teenager the emotions are bigger than what can be handled sitting in a classroom studying maths,” she […]
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Making a Difference – When Poetry Becomes Action: Christy Fleming’s Words of Hope
For more than three decades, Christy Fleming has been helping people navigate life’s difficult moments. As a therapist, author and poet, he has worked with men struggling with their mental health, communities affected by homelessness and families living with Alzheimer’s. His latest project, a song inspired by his own poem Glowing From Within, continues that lifelong commitment to supporting others, this time raising awareness and funds for the Friends of St. Luke’s Cancer Charity and the Liberty Soup Run. Listen to the radio show here (July 6th) The idea came not from a single event, but from a growing awareness of two issues that seemed to appear everywhere he looked. “Every time I was going to the shop or meeting people, somebody was saying, ‘Did you hear about so-and-so?’ They either had cancer or they were homeless,” he says. “It got me thinking.” Those conversations also brought back deeply personal memories. Fleming lost both of his parents to cancer within six weeks of each other in the early 1980s, an experience that has stayed with him throughout his life. More recently, other members of his family, including his former wife, have also faced the disease. “My dad went first, and […]
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From One Green Island to Another – Jamaica, hold on, I’m coming over!
There are surprising echoes of Ireland in Jamaica. Not only in the names and accents left behind by Irish settlers carried across via the British Empire, but in the landscape itself. Beyond the beaches and turquoise water lies a deeply green island interior, lush and mountainous, occasionally reminiscent of the west of Ireland under better weather. However, Jamaica cannot be spoken of without reference to last year’s Hurricane Melissa, a beast of storm, larger than the island itself, which made landfall at New Hope in 2025, causing ruinous damage and claiming 45 lives. Such was the catastrophic impact of the storm in Jamaica, the name Melissa is now retired from the rotating list of storm names by the World Meteorological Organisation, to be replaced by the name Molly which will next appear in 2031. Driving across Jamaica there are still pockets where the harsh hand of the storm is visible in ruined buildings, ripped off roofs and flattened trees. However, as a people the Jamaicans have a huge capacity for looking forward and already some 80 percent of resorts have been restored and are open again for business. A waitress tells me she is a farmer, with two acres under […]
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Wishing Well: Sue Rainsford – Writing from the Body
Sue Rainsford does not begin her novels with plots, she begins with images. Listen to the radio show here (June 23rd) A father and daughter digging a grave for someone not yet dead. The outline of a body pressed into the earth. A young girl sitting on the edge of her own coffin, looking away. From these fragments emerge novels that readers and critics have variously described as strange, haunting and unsettling. Rainsford herself seems amused by such descriptions. “People are always bending over backwards to tell me how strange my writing is,” she laughs. “But I never set out to write anything intentionally strange.” The Dublin-based author has built an international reputation through novels that explore the body, identity, desire, illness and the often uncomfortable realities of physical existence. Her debut novel, Follow Me to Ground, was published in Ireland before being picked up in the UK and later by Scribner in the United States. It was followed by Redder Days, and this October her third novel, From Out My Heart, will be published by Lilliput Press. Listening to Rainsford speak, it quickly becomes clear that her work is deeply influenced by her background in art history. She studied […]
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Radical Notions of Love: Why Nadia Ramoutar Still Believes in Poetry
There are easier ways to spend one’s time than writing poetry. Dr Nadia Ramoutar knows this perfectly well. Sitting in conversation about her latest collection, Radical Notions of Love, she cheerfully acknowledges that poetry ranks somewhere near the top of the list of activities unlikely to generate wealth, security or commercial success. The observation is delivered with characteristic humour, but beneath it lies a serious point. Poetry survives because people continue to find something in it that cannot be measured in sales figures. Ramoutar has been finding that something for most of her life. “I’ve never not done it,” she says. “I’m like Emily Dickinson. I have shoeboxes of poems and poems and poems.” The comparison is made lightly, yet it reveals something important. Poetry for Ramoutar is not an occasional creative outlet or a hobby revisited every few years. It is a constant companion, one that travelled with her when her family emigrated to America when she was seventeen and remained part of her life long after many people had left poetry behind with their schoolbooks. She traces that early love partly to an inspiring English teacher and partly to circumstance. Living abroad, poetry became something portable, a connection […]
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