Date: Thursday 28th, Friday 29th and Saturday 30th May 2026 daily
Venue: The Butler Centre
Time: 9.30AM-12.30PM
This three-day workshop focuses on facing uncertainty, exploring darkness, and engaging in the creative writing process. Whether your project is fiction or non-fiction, every writer needs to understand how to enter that process, to open the door into the unknown place.
We’ll explore examples of voice and pacing; characterisation and structure. We’ll examine the role of inspiration, and nurture that ‘small beginning’ that heralds the process that begins somewhere in the stillness within.
In her book ‘Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing’, Margaret Atwood says:
‘Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.’
Graham Swift, in ‘Making an Elephant’, is of the view that ‘A novel is a very big undertaking…It grows somehow mysteriously from some small beginning…you are glad that it’s beginning even if it proves to be the wrong thing.’
Darkness, uncertainty, mystery. These are our writing companions. But we also need words on the page. Novels, stories, plays, poems, memoir – all get written one word at a time. And all the necessary words come from inside us – which is not the same thing as autobiography.
Catherine Dunne is the author of twelve novels, several essays and one work of non-fiction. “An Unconsidered People” documents the lived experience of Irish immigrants in Britain in the dismal years of the 1950s. Catherine’s novels have been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the International Strega Prize. “The Things We Know Now” won the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and “The Years That Followed”, published in 2016, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her latest novel, “A Good Enough Mother”, won the European Rapallo BPER Banca Prize for fiction in November 2023. Her work has been translated into several languages, she was the recipient of the 2018 Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and is a member of Aosdána.
