Talk by Maurice Whelan

Talk by Maurice Whelan, novelist, poet, and psychoanalyst at Byron Bay on Saturday 1st of June 2013, examining the creative mind. He is interested in the mind of the writer and in the creativity that is necessary to live a life. He explains how a creative mind is nourished and protected. He explores the importance of silence. He argues for a full engagement with everyday emotional experience. He poses questions: How does a writer take ordinary events and from them make an extraordinary story? Where is transformational energy to be found? Maurice views writing a novel or a poem as an act of personal expression and social communication – a writer must always have a reader in mind. In advancing his ideas he will draw on his own prose and poetry and on two Irish writers, the poet Seamus Heaney, and the novelist John McGahern. James Joyce said a piano was a coffin of music that needed a pianist to play it to life. John McGahern added that a book is a coffin of words; it is the reader who breathes it to life.