THE University of Iowa is looking for a "creative writing teacher". Does this mean that the teacher, rather than the writing, is to be creative? Never mind. The successful applicant, who will be involved in the university's 1997 summer writing programme, will have "extensive teaching experience in the workshop environment", which, when translated into English, means that he or she will have taught in workshops.
In this summer writing programme ("program", actually), fiction and non-fiction will be the work "discussed and critiqued". Not criticised, mind you, but critiqued.
Bear in mind that this gobbledegook comes from a university with lofty aspirations about teaching people how to appreciate and write English. Or at least I assume the wording came from the university - I encountered it in the latest edition of the occasional newsletter issued by the Irish Writers' Centre, and I trust that the Irish Writers' Centre isn't responsible for such linguistic nonsense.
Anyway, if you think you fit the bill (and a talent for jargon should help your cause), you can send a one-page CV, listing your teaching experience and writing achievements, to The Irish Writing Program, Division of Continuing Education. University of Iowa, Iowa 52245, USA.
Alternatively, you can e-mail your enquiries to: martin-roper(a)uiowa.edu. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised if you can conduct the whole course through e-mail, thus saving yourself the stress of a long plane journey to Iowa.
FROM the same newsletter, I learn that Ferdia MacAnna, who has been appointed first writer-in-residence at Dublin City University, will be holding a six-week workshop in fiction at the Writers' Centre. The sessions will take place every Saturday from January 18th to February 22nd, and applications are invited from writers based in the northside of Dublin.
Why the geographical racism? Well, the workshop is being organised in association with DCU, which is situated on the northside, but nonetheless the exclusion of any aspiring writers from south of the Liffey does seem a bit arbitrary and silly, especially given that Mr MacAnna himself resides in the decidedly un-Northside haven of Sandycove.
However, if you're from the correct neck of the woods and you wish to take part in the workshop, you should submit a sample of your work (two short stories or a ten-page extract from a novel, the newsletter says) to DCU/IWC Fiction Workshop, Irish Writers' Centre, Dublin 1.
FERDIA MacANNA, by the way, is currently working on a new novel, Cartoon City, which is a thriller set in contemporary Dublin. No doubt he'll be listening to fellow thriller writers, Eugene McEldowney, Vincent Banville and Sheila Barrett, when they get together to slouch down the mean streets of the genre at an evening in the Irish Writers' Centre next Thursday. Admission to this discussion is £4.
WHITHER artistic freedom and the Arts Council's relationship to it? This was the basic theme of Ciaran Benson's worthy, if somewhat wordy, speech in Trinity College's Douglas Hyde Gallery a few nights ago.
The occasion was the publication of Krino 1986-1996: An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, edited by Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams and published by Gill & Macmillan. The magazine Krino was the brainchild of Gerald Dawe, who began it in Galway, and though after eighteen issues it might seem a bit presumptuous and premature to be bringing out a selection from it in book form, nonetheless there's much of real substance and interest here from many of the best Irish writers though Derek Mahon mused at the launch that he'd never got round to appearing in the magazine.
Gerald Dawe contributes a short and unfussy preface, as does Aodan Mac Poilin, who begins his warning about the dangers facing the Irish language by roundly declaring: "Yes, Gaelic doomsters are boring. Yes, Irish was a drag at school. Yes, the Irish-language movement was implicated for decades in a sterile orthodoxy, compounded of nationatist essentialism and Catholic triumphalism. Yes, Irish literature in English does reflect the greater reality of the greater number of Irish people. Yes, there is enough current hypocrisy around the language issue to make a cat sick. Yes, we have all met and suffered from the tunnel-visionaries, impossibilists, messiahs, inadequates and straight loonies who infest the language movement." However, he insists that "the issue is more important than its apologists," and his two-page preface, a model of plain speaking, gives the clearest case I can recall for the cherishing and nurturing of the Irish language. It's worth the price of the book in itself.