Memoir writing; exploring ways to access memory using a range of triggers and writing

techniques in an informal and supportive workshop .

Writing Workshop

with Maureen Boyle

Writing Your One Wild and Precious Life

at: Ballyscullion Park Stables Room,

61 Ballyscullion Rd, Bellaghy, BT45 8NA

Saturday 28th February 2026

10.30am – 3.30pm with a break for lunch*

Tickets limited to 12 places

*Tea and coffee will be provided. Please bring a packed lunch.

Join writer Maureen Boyle for a one-day workshop at Ballyscullion Park on the beautiful shores of Lough Beg.

In our workshop we will explore ways to access memory using a range of triggers and writing techniques. We will read examples of memoir writing and think about the issues that arise in any memoir project: consideration of those whose lives intersect in our stories; how research might help the project, the options we have in terms of form and voice; issues of truth and fictionalisation. This will be an informal and supportive workshop in which you may work in prose or poetry, and you do not need to have written memoir before, or you may be in the midst of writing one – the workshop will work for both stages of writing.

Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at the age of eighteen. She studied in Trinity College, Dublin and did postgraduate work in the Universities of East Anglia and Ulster. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University and taught English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. She is a mentor in Memoir and Poetry at the Irish Writers’ Centre. The Work of a Winter, her debut collection of poetry, was launched in December 2017, and is currently in its second edition. The collection was shortlisted for the 2019 Shine/Strong Award. Strabane, a long poem, appeared in 2020. Her second full collection, ‘The Last Spring of the World’ was published in June 2022 with Arlen House.

Description supplied by the event organiser.