31st Transition Year English Evening
The 31st annual Transition Year Evening on Tuesday maintained its consistently high standards across the decades. Over those many years, almost 300 pieces of writing have been read out in the Big Schoolroom, listened to by the current Transition Year, the Third Formers who will step up to that level shortly, teachers and a guest speaker. Mr Kirwan presented the evening.
Last night the speaker was Dr Conor Farnan, English teacher and author. He is currently working on a book on the poet Paul Durcan; some of his comments on the readers are quoted below. Marie Weber started strongly with a short story which demonstrated ‘a gift for telling detail’. She was followed by Carolyn Curry, with a ‘superb’ comparison between three great novels – The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights and Persuasion – which had a ‘real critical register’. Harry Casey’s confidently-delivered piece about being underwater was ‘exquisitely sensory’ as he used water as a metaphor for anything that might change us. Lucy Higgins’s ‘even-toned’ piece on the differences between adults’ and young people’s experiences now was ‘a perfect piece of discursive oratory’, which always kept us engaged ‘as if we were about to be wrong-footed’. Angela Ge’s piece about her first love – drawing – was read by Merida Zhang, starting with the beautiful Before what I knew what love was, I fell in love. In her ‘carefully-chosen words on a careful writer’, Emer Lari analysed Claire Keegan’s story Foster, ‘with a critic’s ear and eye’. Claire Higgins read her quirky and amusing piece ‘The Cheat’, which had another memorable opening: I think I died today, but it’s hard to say. Her story had the courage of its convictions in following its premise right through to the end. Finally, Sienna West gave an overview of her experience in Transition Year and on seizing every opportunity: this was ‘a really fresh response’.
Dr Farnan then talked about the importance of reading, starting with an example of how his little daughter started to ‘read’ pictures in a book. He emphasised how critical language can be, with examples from his own life, including a tribute to his own ‘magical’ English teacher in Navan, who talked about literature with reverence. The most meaningful moments in our lives are so often accompanied by literature. He spent a week at a creative writing course with Claire Keegan (who wrote Foster, commented on earlier by Emer Lari), and she said that was mattered in writing was not writers but each sentence following another, each paragraph following another. He recommended the value of always having a commonplace paper notebook for jotting down quotations and observations.
You can read Dr Farnan’s full address here.
Finally, Dr Farnan read out the names of this year’s Premier awards for the course (80%+): Carolyn Curry, Angela Ge, Claire Higgins, Lucy Higgins, Alexander Olley, Charlotta Rosengren, Darren Ulogwara, Sienna West and Merida Zhang.
