Details of Channel‘s past events can be found below.
Issue 4 Launch
We’re delighted to announce that the launch of Channel Issue 4 will take place via YouTube Premieres on Wednesday 28 April at 8.00pm.
This issue’s release marks a year of remote work on Channel. We started the journal in 2019 in the hope of bringing readers, writers and artists together to reimagine our relationships with the natural world we all inhabit. When the ability to gather in person was lost after just one issue, we feared the sense of community we’d begun to build would be lost with it—but instead, our contributors have proven their capacity to connect across distances. The writers published in Issue 4 attend with exceptional vigilance to the minutiae of their lived experiences, inviting us to immerse ourselves in their localities and domestic worlds. It’s been a pleasure to get to know this host of Irish and international talent through their work, and we can’t wait to share their words with you all.
Issue 4 features writing drawn from over 1700 submissions. Fiction and poetry in translation also appear in Channel for the first time in this issue, with the work of translators Yoni Hammer-Kossoy, Dimitra Nikolaidou and Victor Pseftakis offering a powerful reminder of the ways we can engage with and honour each other even in isolation.
The launch will feature readings by Issue 4 contributors, along with photography capturing the settings that have inspired them. Also featured will be an introduction to the work of our talented cover artist Evelyn Broderick, a multidisciplinary artist whose practice brings together drawing, woodblock printmaking and sculpture to investigate the power of skill-sharing and embodied knowledge. Evelyn’s 2018 exhibition In Passing forms the basis for this issue’s cover.
We want to thank our Issue 1 cover artist, Rachel Doolin, who worked with us again to create a cover design for this issue that really does Evelyn’s art justice.
Issue 4 is now available for pre-order via our online store. Those who can afford to further support our work may consider subscribing to Channel to receive each new issue upon its release, or becoming a patron to also receive access to our digital archive of back issues as well as acknowledgement in print and online.
The launch video will be viewable below at the time of its release, or open the link in YouTube to chat with other readers and contributors during the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
Issue 3 Launch
The launch of Channel Issue 3 will take place via YouTube Premieres on Thursday 26 November at 8.00pm.
The online launch will feature readings by Irish and international contributors drawn from a pool of over 1700 submissions. Photography depicting the localities our contributors write from, and the human, plant and animal life that has inspired their work, will accompany the readings.
Also featured will be video content from the young artists behind My Generation, a project that brought teenage asylum seekers, refugees, migrants and youth activists working through Cork Migrant Centre together with professional artists to create temporary public artworks communicating their lives in 2020 Ireland. The artworks combine the teenagers’ handwriting, photography, collage and drawing to create a powerful call for action towards positive social change. This issue’s cover, designed by Kate O’Shea using a photograph by Clare Keogh, showcases one of these art pieces. By installing their work on Cork public buildings these young people have powerfully asserted their place in the city’s social and physical landscape, and we couldn’t be happier to celebrate their work through Channel Issue 3.
We believe community artworks like My Generation have a vital role in repairing the fractured relations between ourselves, one another and the natural world. When we work together to create, honouring our differences and centring our collaborative natures, we embody the same energy and influence needed to address the crises we’re facing.
We hope the work within and framing of Issue 3 makes clear that human rights and racial justice are fundamental elements of a functioning environmentalism. The biosphere is built on collectivity, creativity, diversity and change; the more often we embrace these, the closer we come to bringing ourselves and the natural world back into balance.
Issue 3 is now available for pre-order via our online store, and will be available from our stockists from the date of the launch.
The launch video will be viewable from this page on the day of its release.
Issue 2 Launch
The launch of Channel Issue 2 will take place via YouTube Live tonight, Thursday 9 July, at 8.00pm.
The online launch will feature readings by contributors including Richard W. Halperin, Liz Quirke, David Toms and Jane Robinson, along with exciting new voices drawn from a pool of over 300 submissions. Also included will be winning entries from the Writing for a Change competition, organised in partnership with the Irish Writers Centre and the National Botanic Gardens, which asked participants to respond to the issue of climate change in fiction or non-fiction pieces of under 400 words.
Photography and video footage of participants’ localities, taken during lockdown, will accompany the readings. Although we can’t gather in person this time, we hope this imagery will instead offer an opportunity to come together in celebrating the diversity of the places we live and write from.
The cover art for our second issue is a photograph by Carol Anne Connolly, an Irish visual artist from the West of Ireland, based in Co. Cork. The image featured on Issue 2 was taken while Connolly was recording the sound of waves through a cabin porthole on residency aboard the Celtic Explorer as part of Aerial Sparks, a project curated by Louise Manifold, in partnership with the Marine Institute Ireland.
With delays brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Issue 2 has been a long time coming. To all who have looked forward to its release, we want to say thank you for your patience. The talent in this issue makes it worth the wait!
Issue 2 is now available for pre-order via our online store, and will be available from our stockists from early next week.
The video can be accessed at 8.00pm at the link below:
Channel at BlueFire Street Fest
BlueFire Street Fest is a free open-air intercultural arts festival with a mission to promote social integration and cohesion amongst young Dubliners across all cultural backgrounds.
This year, the festival will be taking place in Dublin’s Smithfield Square on International Day of Peace, Saturday 21 September. The UN have chosen Climate Action as the universal call to action on this day, and Channel Issue 1 contributors will be present to share that call through poetry.
We’ll also be celebrating the occasion with the first sales of Issue 1, which won’t be available elsewhere until its launch in October.
Find us in the performance tent from 15:38 – 16:30!
Our readers
Patrick Deeley is from Loughrea, County Galway. His poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies and been widely translated. The End of the World is the latest of his seven collections with Dedalus Press. His critically acclaimed, best-selling memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, published by Transworld, was shortlisted for the 2016 Irish Book of the Year Award. His other awards include the Eilis Dillon Award, the Dermot Healy International Poetry Prize, and most recently the American-based Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for 2019.
DS Maolalai has been nominated for Best of the Web and twice for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).
Suzzanna Matthews recently completed a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing. While she considers California home, she spent a better part of her childhood in New England. She’s lived and studied abroad in Latin America, Europe and Asia. She lives in Dublin, where she is working on a collection of short stories.
Aoife Riach is a queer feminist witch with an MPhil in Gender & Women’s Studies. Her poetry has been published by College Green Journal, Impossible Archetype and other magazines. She was a 2019 Irish Writers Centre Young Writer Delegate and her poem ‘Vancouver’ was selected for the Hungering curation of the Poetry Jukebox.
Ecology and Print in Practice: Channel at Spare Room
Spare Room: Art—Architecture—Activism in Cork is a two week art exhibition that inhabits a disused building in Cork City Centre. Its theme is framed within the rationale of critiquing institutional complicity within different forms of precarious living conditions. The five arts projects produced for this exhibition strive to move art social practice beyond ‘rehearsals’ of the social into concrete outcomes. It situates art practice firmly within the social through highly innovative collaborative art processes and presents art-led feasible alternatives to collectively organizing and inhabiting the everyday.
From www.spareroomproject.ie
We are delighted to have the opportunity to present at Spare Room, an innovative art project produced by Dr Eve Olney and Kate O’Shea, taking place from 20 September to 4 October. With fourteen individual exhibits and a programme of daily workshops, presentations and performances, the project brings together a broad spectrum of artists engaging with ideas of precarity and community.
Our presentation, at 4.30pm–5.30pm on Sunday 22 September, will discuss the role of narrative in fostering a healthy relationship between society and the natural world. We will also touch on why we chose independent print specifically as a medium for community building around environmentalist issues, providing examples of how we’ve seen that materialised in the process of putting together Issue 1. This presentation will be open to branching dialogues around print media as a means for community engagement.
Copies of Channel Issue 1 will be available for purchase at Spare Room, as well as in Dublin at BlueFire Street Fest, in advance of the official launch of the magazine at the Irish Writers Centre on the 22 October.
Spare Room can be found at 88 North Main Street, Cork. We look forward to seeing you there, and encourage those attending our talk to also explore the full programme of events at www.spareroomproject.ie.
Issue 1 Launch
Join us in the Irish Writers Centre on Tuesday 22 October, from 6.30pm to 8.30pm, for the launch of Channel Issue 1!
We are delighted with the work we’ve had the honour to draw together, as well as with our beautiful cover design by Cork artist Rachel Doolin, and we can’t wait to introduce the finished product to the world.
The evening will feature readings of poetry and prose by a number of contributors (lineup soon to be announced). Copies of the issue will be on sale on the night, as well as online and in bookshops from late October onwards. There will be wine, conversation and a chance to connect with writers and readers who share a love of and a fear for the natural world.
In all uses of the word, a “channel” exists to direct something – an idea, a material, a spirit – through or towards something else. In nature, it may be a length of water that joins two seas or a navigable passage in waters otherwise unsafe for sailors. In electronics, a band of frequencies used for transmission. In selecting work for Issue 1, we hope to have honoured these meanings. The chosen pieces range from meditations on lichen to imagined futures, but all serve to foster a consciousness of the connections between all things and of the endless creative material offered by nature.
Although beautiful, the building is not wheelchair accessible and we apologise to anyone therefore unable to attend the launch. If you have any accessibility requirements, please get in touch at info@channelmag.org and we will do our best to help.
Following the launch event, we’ll retire to the Shakespeare bar on Parnell Street to continue the celebrations.
We thank you for your support to date, and can’t wait to meet you all.