This is exciting to see… in a new departure for the Children’s Book Festival, Children’s Books Ireland have joined forces with blogger David Maybury to set up the WRITE STUFF, a unique online meeting-place for budding young authors and poets as part of this year’s festival.
. blogger David Maybury, currently in Australia it seems
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Writers Celine Kiernan, David Donohue and Mary Melvin Geoghegan will be stationed in public libraries in Monaghan, Sligo and Longford, but will be connecting with school children across the country, in a ground-breaking online creative writing project over the course of the month.
We’ll be sure to check in with The Write Stuff when the festival is well underway, and will post on this again.
Many will be familiar with TED – the ‘ideas’ conference which takes place annually in Long Beach, California. For those unfamiliar, the TED site is well worth a look – with hundreds of presentations on every kind of subject from becoming a buddha to the future of the electric car, there is, as the saying goes, something for everyone.
The TED site says; “We believe passionately in the power of ideas to change attitudes, lives and ultimately, the world“, so in this context it’s great to see a lot of interesting arts material to be found here. Some examples;
A talk by Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz, (readers may have seen a solo exhibition of his work in IMMA some years back)
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an inspiring look at classical music and ‘one-buttock’ piano playing….
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Finally, poetry like I’ve never heard it performed before;
Artistshare is an interesting organistion based in the US. They provide a opportunity for those interested in the arts to provide funding for artists to make work.
Rather than looking to attract a small number of large funders, they’ve used the internet to “allows fans to fund and directly participate in the projects of their favorite artists”.
As with many traditional friends schemes, there are various levels at which a fan can engage. Depending on the project, fans can pay anything from $10 (for a download) to $5,000 (to get a producers credit / dinner with the band etc, etc.).
They mostly seem to work in the area of music, but have also support film production and literature.
Here’s Artistshare’s CEO explaining what they do:
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Could something like this work in Ireland? Maybe there are already examples of organisations working like this in Ireland already. If so it would be great to hear…
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