As I recall it, I was just calling in for a cup of coffee. It was spring 2013 and Seán Love had texted me out of the blue. He was in Belfast – in East Belfast – a hop and a skip from me, in fact, with a couple of people I knew, in the Skainos Centre on the Lower Newtownards Road.
I knew Seán through his work at Amnesty International and latterly at Fighting Words, which he and Roddy Doyle had set up in Dublin a few years before. I kept saying I was going down to do a workshop. Kept saying and never doing. So, I hopped it and skipped it to Skainos to say hello ... and walked out the door again an hour later having agreed to help set up a Fighting Words centre in Belfast. I don’t know that I have spent many better hours in my life.
It took a while to get everything in place, because – how do I say it? – things work a little differently here in the North. This is in no small part thanks to Young at Art/the Belfast Children’s Festival, whose then director, Ali FitzGibbon, became chair of the board; the 174 Trust at the Duncairn Centre in North Belfast; and flagship grants from the Ireland Funds and Ulster Garden Villages, Fighting Words Belfast was offering its first writing workshops to school-age children in 2015.
The windows of our second-floor home in Skainos took in gable-ends with loyalist paramilitary murals, the famous Harland & Wolff shipyard cranes, the brand-new Titanic Film Studio beyond, and the profile, in the further distance, of Cave Hill. Belfast’s pasts and possible futures viewed from the room where, on any given day, 20 or 30 stories took shape. The opening chapter always agreed collectively, everything that came after bearing the stamp of those 20 or 30 individual imaginations. Not for a minute in the 10 years since have they ceased to amaze.
In those 10 years Fighting Words Belfast has become Fighting Words Northern Ireland. Under the directorship of Hilary Copeland we have reached 25,000 participants, working with schools and community groups from Poyntzpass to Derry, and from Carrickfergus to Enniskillen. We have published thousands of stories and many beautiful anthologies, and audiences at the Lyric in Belfast, the Abbey in Dublin and venues across NI, have listened, wide-eyed, to the plays, poems, rap songs and stories that our young writers have performed and read at live showcases.
[ Fighting Words Northern Ireland launches new magazine for young writersOpens in new window ]
The challenges have been enormous and still are. (If 2024 was a particularly good year for you, don’t be shy to offer a bit of support.) From the outset, there has been a close relationship between Fighting Words NI and the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University Belfast. Fighting Words staff run regular training sessions for Creative Writing MA students who are interested in volunteering with them. The relationship has deepened in the past year, with the appointment of Stephen Connolly as the Seamus Heaney Centre’s first outreach and engagement officer and the opening of a new Heaney Centre building, with a room large enough to host Fighting Words workshops. It didn’t hurt that Stephen turned out to be a close friend of Mr Duck, the Fighting Words grumpy editor. (Though his quack is worse than his bite. Mr Duck’s, that is.)
It was a source of real pride to all involved in the Heaney Centre that the first writing produced in the new building, last June, was by a Primary 5 class from Botanic Primary School, a short walk from Queen’s University, in the heart of the Holylands, among the most diverse neighbourhoods in the city.
In fact one of the greatest endorsements I have ever heard, or read, of Fighting Words NI came from another workshop in the Heaney Centre in the opening weeks of this year. Asked how the workshop had made them feel, one young writer said simply, and with only a slight variation in spelling, “bombarded with joy”.
You would get that on a T-shirt.
You would – for all that the challenges remain (again, feel free to help) – take that with you into your next 10 years.
Fighting Words NI is very grateful for the support of its two principal funders, the Government of Ireland through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Reconciliation Fund, and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through the National Lottery
