April 2006
April's Blue Room opened up with a lively workshop led by local actor and writer, Carol McQuigan. Carol and Ellen Phethan are running a series of four workshops between April and July, aimed at helping creative writers give confident and effective public readings of their work. It certainly got off to a good start.
At the other end of the evening we had the delightful young singer/songwriter Lesley Roley, who entertained us with a beautiful twenty set which the audience really appreciated. Lesley is the frontwoman for local band Saugal Massie. She sings, writes and plays guitar. She blends genres, performing her own material along with some covers.
In between, we had fantasic and varied readings of short stories and poetry from Carole Baldock, Nessa O'Mahoney, Kelly Railton, and Celia Bryce.
Carol Baldock is proud owner of 3 children (all in good working order), 2 cats (need slight attention), a computer and a BA Hons. Widely-published (non-fiction, poetry and prose). With enough poems over the past few years to fill a drawer, her pamphlet, BITCHING, is now in its second edition. Her first full collection, Give Me Where to Stand, is due this year from Headland, and her books include Writing Reviews and How To Raise Confident Children. Formerly Coordinator of Liverpool's Dead Good Poets Society, she is now Editor of Competitions Bulletin as well as Orbis, a renowned international literary journal of over 30 years' standing.
Celia Bryce was born in Jarrow and worked as a nurse in Tyneside and Manchester before hanging up her uniform to pursue an arts career. She works with adults and children in the community and in schools but spends the majority of her time writing literary and commercial fiction. Her short stories have been published in England and Ireland and broadcast on Radio 4. She won the Richard Imison Award for a first radio drama in 1993. She will be reading from her collection of short stories Headlines and Other Growing Pains(Biscuit Publishing Oct 2005) at this year's Fish Festival in Bantry, Ireland.
Nessa O'Mahoney was born in Dublin. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Irish, UK, and North American periodicals, has been translated into several European languages, and has been broadcast by RTÉ radio. She won the National Women's Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards. Her first poetry collection, Bar Talk, was published by iTaLiCs Press in 1999. Her second, Trapping a Ghost, was published by bluechrome publishing in Spring 2005. She was awarded an Irish Arts Council literature bursary in 2004, and an Arts Council travel award and a residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists' Program, Woodside, California, in 2005. She is Assistant Editor of UK literary journal Orbis, she edits the online literary journal, Electric Acorn and teaches creative writing at the University of Wales, Bangor.is a poet who currently lives and works in Liverpool.
Kelly Railton is twenty-eight, and lives in Newcastle. She began to write two years ago when she followed a creative writing course with Sunderland University. she has recently been attending the Blue Room workshops, where she is developing her first collection of short stories. She will be reading one of these at the Blue Room.