If ever there was a good template for a charity publication, the four Lifelines anthologies, admirably edited by secondary school Wesley College students was it. Now, the same publisher, Town House, has asked editor and author Marie Heaney to collate a similar collection of letters, poems and literary fragments in aid of Focus Ireland.
Called Sources, it is a collection that admirably taps into the same market that bought Anam Cara in such huge numbers - those in search of what Heaney calls "spiritual sustenance". The replies from people such as Bertie Ahern, actress Olwen Fouere, Cardinal Cathal Daly, psychologist Maureen Gaffney and scientist Susan McKenna-Lawlor describe a piece of music, a certain walkway, more often a particular piece of poetry or a quotation that they have found spiritually helpful.
Among those entries that stand out in Sources are Ciaran Benson's nine-page biography of his own journey towards his a la carte Buddhism; cartographer and writer Tim Robinson's chart of prime numbers which is accompanied by a piece of writing that finds a balance between belief and mathematics, and journalist Kathy Sheridan's tender but terrifying description of entering Omagh hours after the bombing.
Sheridan nominates a passage from Aeschylus as her piece of spiritual sustenance:
Pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our despair there comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Another anthology published this week also offers writing by well-known figures and is also in aid of charity. Mothers is the work of UNICEF and The O'Brien Press, and features recollections of their mothers and childhoods from people as diverse as chef Conrad Gallagher, business man Tony O'Reilly, actor Pauline McLynn, milliner Philip Treacy and soccer manager Mick McCarthy. A highlight of the book must surely be the photos of the contributors as children - Pat Rabbitte with tumbling curls for example (below).
Pat Rabbitte with his mother
Those who popped into Tosca restaurant on Dublin's Suffolk Street for the opening of Tom Mathews's latest exhibition, Lots of Fun, on Tuesday night were treated to Senator David Norris's very literary party piece. For this show Mathews has turned his cartoonist's eye on James Joyce - the 21 pieces are all portraits of the writer and his work. One features Joyce as a juvenile delinquent decorating a Martello tower with the graffito, "The Buck Stopped Here".
But the one that caught Norris's eye was a highly decorated rendition of the two-and-a-half line long word on the first page of Finnegan's Wake which has stumped many readers and critics.
Norris rejoiced in Mathews's pictorial portrayal of the word as a roll of thunder and proceeded to give an ad hoc verbal portrayal of the uberword himself.
One of the greatest writers in the field of literary theory, George Steiner, is making a trip to Ireland courtesy of Graph: Irish Cultural Review together with the Irish Writers' Centre and the School of English at TCD.
The lecture will take the form of an interview conducted by Graph co-editor Michael Cronin in the Edmund Burke Theatre, TCD, at 7.30 p.m. next Friday. That Steiner is here at all is due to the persistence of the Graph editors, Cronin, Barra O Seaghdha, Evelyn Conlon and Peter Sirr. Sirr, who is also director of the Writers' Centre, says: "We wanted to get somebody of his stature to speak. There aren't many like him left - a European polymath." Unusually, admission is one copy of Graph 3.3, on sale in bookshops or at the event.
It's now 20 years since novelist, J.G. Farrell drowned in a fishing accident off west Cork at the age of 44. A recent reading of his work at the Royal Society of Literature on Hyde Park Gardens, London, proved to be as much a reunion of old friends as a literary event.
Those reading included two old friends, novelist Margaret Drabble and biographer Hilary Spurling. Drabble recalled her friendship with Farrell, which she said formed the basis for her novel, The Gates of Ivory, and expressed her thanks to Lavinia Greacen, author of the recent biography of Farrell, for confirming that she really did eat in Bertorelli's restaurant in Notting Hill quite so much. She herself had quite forgotten, although there is a plaque there to that effect.
Other friends there included biographer Michael Holroyd, writer Anthony Sampson, journalist Piers Plowright and Farrell's brother, Richard.