It's easy enough to winnow through a couple of plays and find extracts that fit a broad theme. (Such as the fairly open-ended Streets.) The hard part is taking those extracts and stitching them together into a seamless, emotionally articulate narrative.

Yet that is exactly what Wireless Mystery Theatre has done. Streets, which debuts at the first of Belfast City Council’s Literary Lunchtimes in the Ulster Hall, takes a handful of scenes, some basic, but cunning, special effects and a few street songs and creates an entirely new thing.

Not that WMT have filed the serial numbers off and claimed it as their own. They acknowledge to the various writers – Louis McNeice, Ciaran Carson, Cathal O’Byrne and WR Rodgers – that feature in the production. At the same time, however, Streets is a distinct creation that can stand independently from its disparate origins.

What it becomes is a sprawling family saga. It follows the lives of two socially divergent families, one piously Presbyterian ('It was a sad little Presbyterian mouth') and the other determinedly Irish-speaking ('I suppose I must have picked [English] up off the street by the time I was three or four.'), who are each raising a young boy in Belfast.

With Belfast as a distinct third character of its own, the story cuts between the lives of the two boys. Other characters make brief forays into the limelight – a finagling pawn-shop owner and a canny coach driver, for instance – but the focus always returns to the two families.

Each is note-perfectly observed, raising chuckles from the audiences as they recognize elements from their own childhoods. ‘Can I have the deaths, Adam?’ the Presbyterian mother asks her husband primly, as he reads the paper. Her son observes that this is how she ‘stays in touch with life’. Quite a few people see their families in that one.

Children’s sing-song rhymes and quick bursts of guitar music – including a wry tribute to the apparently eternally late Belfast Trams – bridge any gaps in the narrative effectively. Although anyone not from Belfast might draw a blank on the etymology of the rhymes. It doesn’t detract from enjoying the performance, however, just niggles afterwards. ‘Hurry up and burn her legs, burn her legs, burn her legs.’ Why? Was that misheard? It seems rather mean.

There is no plot as such, just a series of vigenettes. It conveys the sense of Belfast, of the streets and place and people. There is a sense of time passing, of the characters moving at more or less the same pace through a day, but no distinct story.

Any WMT production would, of course, be incomplete without sound effects. Pretty much any sound effect can be purchased on the internet now, and played back through an MP3 player. Yet WMT lack the heart, the sheer playful glee, of tooting horns with one hand while manning a manual mixer with the other. The WMT take it so seriously – as they should – that it just makes it all the more fun to watch.

No-one is ever going to argue that the authors whose work contributed are anything but masters of their craft. However, it is, perhaps, good to be reminded of exactly why that is. It would have been nice to have more information about the authors and the particular works used for Streets. but perhaps next time they perform it, they will oblige.

Streets is a fun way to spend a lunchtime, and a strong addition to the WMT canon of work.  

The next Literary Lunchtime is a rehearsed reading of Ahab's Daughter by Lisa Keogh on February 22 at 1pm. The Wireless Mystery Theatre will also be performing The Wireless Room April 11-13 as part of the Titanic Belfast Festival.

Sam Millar, the multi-award-winning novelist, has emerged as one of Northern Ireland's most popular authors. Drawing on his experiences as a former IRA prisoner, Millar has penned five novels. He has also written a best-selling autobiography, On the Brinks, detailing the infamous 1993 Brink's robbery in New York.

Now Millar is launching his debut play, exploring the divisions in modern-day republicanism. Brothers in Arms, directed by Martin Lynch, begins a lengthy tour of Northern Ireland this month. True to form, the maverick writer hasn't taken the easy option.

The hard-hitting work confronts what is for many 'the elephant in the room' – the dissidents. Millar says he hasn't encountered any hostility to the controversial subject matter, yet. 'Once the play has been staged, and word gets out about it, then we’ll have to wait and see,' he smiles. 'But no one should be afraid of this play. They should welcome it.'

Brothers in Arms is set in the home of the Mullan brothers – one a dissident republican, the other a Sinn Féin MLA – on the day of their father’s funeral. The play explores the resentments, strife and secrets that surface in this volatile environment. It is about the legacy of the Troubles for those who served time in prison, and their families.

Yet, Millar says, 'It is not simply a "political" play. It is about a family torn apart by events they may have created in the past, but ultimately can no longer control. At the end of the day, no matter what our political differences may be, we always return to family.'

Brothers in Arms opens on January 27 and 28 with two discounted performances at St Kevin’s Hall in north Belfast, a decision that was important to local boy Millar. 'It lets the community know that "one of their own" has not forgotten his roots,' he says, while also stressing that Brothers in Arms is open to all. 'It will be perfect for those with little knowledge of what is going on in nationalist and republican areas.' 

After the previews, the production moves to Belfast's Waterfront Studio for a three-week run, before touring the country. 'It's daunting but exciting,' Millar says. 'Because of its universal theme of Cain and Abel, I’m hoping it will be warmly welcomed wherever it goes. It’s a very strong and emotional play, and worthy of people’s hard-earned money.'

Directed by Lynch and boasting the acting talents of BJ Hogg, Tony Devlin, Helena Bereen and Jimmy Doran, Brothers in Arms is audacious. 'I have to give credit to Martin Lynch and all at Green Shoot Productions for having faith in my ability as a writer,' Millar says.

'Martin has a very keen eye, and is quite clear on how he wants things to appear on the stage. The cast are terrific. It is frightening and at times overwhelming to see them take your words and make them their own.'

Brothers in Arms is the first instalment in Green Shoot's Ulster Trilogy, which asks three key questions: Who is winning in the Catholic community, Sinn Féin or the dissidents? Is the Protestant community disintegrating after 30 years of the Troubles? And how should we deal with the pain of victims?

Millar says he 'can't wait' until the rest of the trilogy emerges. 'The question of what is happening in the Protestant community will be very interesting on a personal level. I am in a unique position, because my grandfather was a proud Orangeman, who witnessed all his sons becoming Catholics. I think there may well be another play there!'

As for the recent spate of Troubles movies – Fifty Dead Men Walking, Five Minutes of Heaven et al – Millar is dismissive. 'I find most of them lacking authenticity,' he shrugs, reserving praise for just one film. 'I remember reluctantly sitting down to watch Hunger, not really knowing what to expect. Within minutes, I was totally hypnotised. It was so authentic, I could hardly watch. It affected me for days.

'The best movie ever made of the hunger strike, and it took an Englishman to have the courage to make it. Steve McQueen has outdone anything ever before to come this way, though I doubt we’ll see someone from "outside" matching his telling eye for detail and authenticity again.'

Not everyone is passionate about art based around the Troubles, however. At a recent talk in Belfast, the American novelist Lionel Shriver, who lived in Northern Ireland for 12 years, expressed disappointment that the public are still consuming fare concerning the conflict. She suggested we should 'move on'.

Perhaps surprisingly, considering Brothers in Arms' topic matter, Millar agrees. 'I think writers who base their books on the Troubles are either lazy or simply lack imagination. They should be avoided like the proverbial plague. All my novels are set in Belfast, with no mention of the past per se.'

Millar's own past, from 'blanket man' in the Maze H-Blocks to dealing with the American Mafia, seems tailor-made for the cinema screen. In fact, the movie rights to On the Brinks were bought by Warner Bros. Sean Penn was in the frame to play Millar. Unfortunately, the project was dropped after the film company came under pressure from the second Bush administration.

'In a way, it was a good thing, because I saw the intended script and it was the biggest load of crap I had seen in a very long time,' Millar says. Having broken his playwright duck with Brothers in Arms, maybe Millar will write the script himself. He seems open to the idea, as long as he can get the 'terrific Jeremy Renner' to play him.

Brothers in Arms previews at St Kevin's Hall, Belfast, on January 27 and 28. Contact the box office on 028 9029 1555. To find out about other showings go to CultureNorthernIreland's What's On guide.

Part of Jon Ronson's success as a writer and film-maker, documenting the exploits of the world's weirdest people, must come from the fact that he looks and sounds so innocuous. Small in stature, with youthful spiky hair, a washed-out t-shirt and little round glasses, he has the manner of a charming but slightly bewildered schoolboy.

As he walks, or rather shambles, on to the stage of the Black Box in Belfast clutching his latest book – The Psychopath Test: a Journey Through the Madness Industry – and a bottle of Peroni, you can see how he would lull his subjects into a false sense of security.

Not that Ronson is ruthless or exploitative in his methods. He's a pleasant sceptic, a wry observer rather than a ranting polemicist, which is refreshing these days when ranting polemicists are two a penny. But you would be a fool to underestimate him.

The other thing you need to know about Ronson is that he is a very funny man. His self-deprecating anecdotes get big laughs from the audience, right from the start. He talks about the DSM, the bible of mental health disorders: 374 pages long, it contains 886 possible maladies. 'I realised that I have 12 of them,' he quips, deadpan. 'Malingering, generalised anxiety disorder…'

I can believe he's a tense man. He constantly fiddles and twiddles, with his beer bottle, with his hair, never sitting still for a moment. But his new book is not about low-level neuroses like anxiety.

Ronson set out to discover the nature of real madness. He met the likes of Tony, the Broadmoor inmate who insists he faked insanity to get off with a lighter sentence, but who cannot now convince the authorities he is sane, and the influential psychologist, Robert Hare, who developed the standard clinical test for psychopathy, and who believes that many important CEOs and politicians are themselves psychopaths.

In fact, it turns out that psychopaths are surprisingly common. Ronson estimates that, statistically, there are at least two in the room during his performance. There might even be more, says Ronson. It depends on whether psychopaths, who are notoriously self-obsessed, like going to talks about psychopaths.

This evening is not all about craziness though. Questions from the audience prompt a range of thoughtful observations and bizarre stories from Ronson. Asked about his interest in extremists of various kinds, he says that 'a good way to learn about our world is to stand at the edges, looking in'.

There's a fair bit of interest in what Ronson thought of George Clooney, who appeared in the film adaptation of Ronson's book, The Men who Stare at Goats. 'He was like an awesome butterfly floating into my life and then disappearing again,' Ronson says. He wasn't impressed with Hollywood though, finding it 'brittle, cold, and full of schoolyard machismo'.

One of Ronson's best received anecdotes is about Ian Paisley, who he once accompanied on a missionary trip to Cameroon. Paisley continually referred to Ronson as 'The Jew' or 'my circumcised friend'.

Ronson describes receiving a call from his wife, then pregnant with their son, to say that it was possible the child might have Down's syndrome. By his own account, the habitually anxious Ronson 'freaked out', and sought out Paisley for some spiritual advice.

However, he never got further than tentatively asking, 'Er, Dr Paisley…?' The big man boomed, 'I'm busy, not now.' And that was the end of that encounter.

Ronson is a practised raconteur, who keeps the Out To Lunch Festival audience effortlessly entertained from start to finish. If I have one criticism, it is that we hear so little of him reading from his own books. But that's a small complaint in an evening of wit, hilarity and insight.

Visit the Out To Lunch website for forthcoming festival events.

‘We need to talk about Lionel,’ begins host William Crawley, to groans from the audience and a scowl from his guest. ‘Do you know how many times…?’ snaps Lionel Shriver.

The Orange Prize-winning author is back in Belfast – she lived and worked there between 1987 and 1999 – to discuss her career, and not just the book for which she is best known, We Need to Talk about Kevin.

Shriver is a spiky interviewee, but Crawley can handle it. The Radio Ulster man’s decision to begin this talk – part of the stellar Out to Lunch festival – with 20 minutes of back-and-forth on Northern Ireland seems to irk some attendees, but for this reviewer it is perfectly judged.

‘I may have lived the best years of my life in this town,’ admits Shriver. ‘I was engaged here. I was interested here. I have a huge affection for this city.’

Crawley suggests that in some sense Shriver is a Belfast writer, a tag, she concedes, that doesn’t offend her: ‘I’d prefer that to being called a North Carolinian writer. I earned this place.’

At 54, Shriver’s mature, outsider’s take on the Northern Ireland psyche is refreshing. She blasts both Troubles-fixated artists (she finds it ‘depressing’ that books set during the conflict are still selling) and the Troubles itself.

‘I got my political education in this town,' she explains, 'and one of the things I learned is that terrorism works. Belfast is where I learned that being a complete shithead gets you what you want.’

Proceedings move onto The New Republic, Shriver’s latest novel, due for publication in March. The fictional work is set in ‘a back of beyond that has spawned this ridiculously powerful terrorist movement’. Sound familiar?

Shriver’s time in Northern Ireland seems to inform much of her work and life. Indeed, she plans to leave some of her wealth to the Belfast Education and Library Board, payback for the many books she borrowed from her old local library on the Lisburn Road.

Though she occasionally refers to herself in the third person (‘A typical Shriver character is really difficult’), the novelist remains pragmatic about her methods. Motivated, she claims, by ‘the fear of failure’, she avoids subjects that have been done to death – so to speak.

Shriver’s most recently published work, 2010’s So Much for That, concerns the sexual relationship between a terminally ill woman and her healthy spouse. ‘I haven’t read that before, and yet it must be an issue,’ she says of the subject matter. Shriver – who clearly loves an audience – reads a passage aloud from the book, and it is as moving as it is harsh.

The scribe’s next project, a story she conceived in 1998 while living in Belfast, will tackle obesity. ‘I’m not sure it’s any good,’ Shriver confesses. ‘Have you any idea how hard it is to write interestingly about losing weight?’

Nevertheless, it is this quest for originality – previous novels touched upon everything from drumming to epidemiology – that seems to drive her and set her apart from the pack. ‘The muse is everywhere and everything,’ Shriver declares.

Finally, during a lively and revealing question-and-answer session, talk turns to We Need to Talk About Kevin, that tale of a fraught mother-son relationship that was recently adapted by Hollywood.

‘I am not trying to persuade other people not to have children,’ the author grumps, perhaps understandably peeved at the focus on one of her books at the expense of the nine others.

Not that she begrudges the rewards that have come her way. Cracking a rare smile, Shriver concedes: ‘Being a successful writer is a great deal more fun than being an unsuccessful writer.’

Out To Lunch continues until January 29.

Literary Lunchtimes begins with Wireless Mystery Theatre's performance of Streets on January 25. A combination of literature, drama and music, Streets explores how Ulster writers such as Cathal O`Byrne, Louis MacNeice and WR Rodgers mythologised, embroidered and romanticised the streets, roads and psycho-geography of the places in which they grew up.

The series continues with a rehearsed reading of Lisa Keogh’s play, Ahab’s Daughter on February 22. It is followed by Jennifer Johnston, one of Ireland`s most admired writers, reading from her latest novel, Shadowstory on March 28.

The final event is Martin Mooney: Remembering on April 25, in which the Belfast-born poet revisits the Ulster Hall’s past through poetry inspired by the famous building.

Literary Lunchtimes take place from 1pm to 2pm, apart from Jennifer Johnston which takes place from 12.45pm to 2pm.

Tickets for Literary Lunchtimes are priced at £3, apart from Jennifer Johnston: Shadowstory which is £5. Tickets are available onlnie, from The Ulster Hall and Waterfront Box Offices and by calling 028 9033 4455.

Belfast Waterfront and The Ulster Hall are now on Facebook. Visit them at www.facebook.com/waterfrontandulsterhall

For Charles Dickens, Belfast was ‘a fine place with a rough people’. He thought our citizens ‘a better audience on the whole than Dublin; and the personal affection there was something overwhelming’. This was his reaction to his first visit in August 1858.

With the bicentenary of his birth falling on February 7 2012, and his popularity as the leading democratic English novelist of the mid-19th century undiminished, it is worth recalling his three visits to Belfast in 1858, 1867 and 1869.

Dickens had first contemplated visiting Ireland in 1842 with a view to engaging in some travel writing. It did not happen, and, in any case, his contemporary, William Makepeace Thackeray, beat him to it with The Irish Sketch Book (1843).

Nonetheless Dickens included Ireland in his first major tour as a reader of his works in 1858, and apart from Belfast also visited Dublin, Cork and Limerick.

This was a wholly new kind of performance. As his friend, Frank Finlay, editor of Belfast’s liberal Northern Whig – who sold the tickets on that first visit – commented, ‘Mr Dickens is one of the few great authors who are also great actors’. He was an enthusiast for the theatre and wrote now largely forgotten plays.

Dickens certainly found performance invigorating. There was, however, another reason for his exhausting tours which embraced the whole of the British Isles and America: money.

For all his prodigious success as a novelist it was insufficient to maintain his profligate domestic regime, which embraced a wife and ten children, and from 1858 onwards a separate ménage with his probable mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Whatever else can be said about his Belfast visits they were financially worth it. In 1858 his two nights produced a profit of £130.

His first Belfast performance took place at the Victoria Hall on August 27 in 1858. Such was the press of the crowd that the performance itself was threatened – ‘there was a very great uproar at the opening of the doors, which, the police in attendance being quite inefficient… it was impossible to check’. Eventually A Christmas Carol received a rapturous response and all went ‘most brilliantly’.

On the Saturday morning, Dickens walked to Carrickfergus and back, a distance of 16 miles, and in the afternoon gave a reading from Dombey and Son. This evoked an extraordinary response. ‘I have never seen men go in to cry so undisguisedly as they did,' wrote the author. In the evening he read from The Poor Traveller, The Boots at the Hollytree Inn, and the Mrs Gamp episode from Martin Chuzzlewit.

Apart from his enthusiasm for the ‘tremendous houses there’, Dickens offered only brief and opaque wider commentary. Belfast citizens were ‘curious people too. They seem all Scotch but in a state of transition’. He found time to buy an Irish joke for his daughters in the form of ‘a trim, sparkling, slap-up Irish jaunting-car... It is the oddest carriage in the world, and you are always falling off, but it is gay and bright in the highest degree. Wonderfully Neapolitan’.

In 1867 he performed on January 8 at the newly built Ulster Hall. He opened with Dr Marigold and closed with the famous trial of Bardwell versus Pickwick from the Pickwick Papers.

No doubt the move to the Ulster Hall had been made to accommodate a larger audience, but there were problems with the acoustics. This may have affected the initial attendance at the same venue in 1869 on a tour billed as ‘the last that will ever be given by Mr Dickens in this country’.

On the night of January 8 a relatively sparse audience heard him perform from A Christmas Carol and the Pickwick Papers. But steps had been taken to improve the acoustics. Dickens performed from a special stage set in front of and below the usual stage and backed by a ‘black sounding board’.

This resolved the problem, and, re-assured, the Belfast audience flocked to his final performance on January 15 with many unable to gain admission. This time he opened with selections from David Copperfield, and finished with Bob Sawyer from the Pickwick Papers, an episode that had the audience convulsed with laughter.

Almost 40 years later an anonymous occupant of the gallery recalled the occasion. It still struck him how the performance came ‘apparently without an effort from the master’ and without any reference to a script. It seemed as though Dickens was ‘speaking to me alone’.

He described how the audience responded to the extracts from David Copperfield. ‘People unloosed their breaths, and a sigh went over the house when he had finished… The time of silence was very marked before the burst of applause told how the audience had appreciated him.'

True Belfast audiences had a tendency to mesmerised and uncritical adulation of the travelling stars of the day, but Dickens was both a super star and a pioneer of the really effective performed public reading. In any case it seems that Dickens thought well of the town.

Listen to John Gray's Literary Lions podcast below, which details Dickens' visits to Belfast, and also those made by other literary heavyweights – such as Jonathan Swift, Anthony Trollope and Lionel Shriver –  through the years.

Brussels sprouts used to make me gag. They were like lumpy phlegm scraped from the hankies of hell. I abhorred and refused them, no matter how they were prepared. Soft and slimy or hard and crunchy, these green leafy balls of doom were most unwelcome on my plate. Now, of course, I love them.

Which just goes to show that, given time, one can come round to anything. I didn’t like skinny jeans, Glee, gin, mince pies or purple. These days, I can’t sing along to Barbra Streisand covers performed by impossibly pretty American youths unless I’m wearing purple skinny jeans and washing down a mince pie with a gin fizz.

Hence I’ve changed my mind about e-readers. Yup. Indeed. And I want one for Christmas. Consider this a confession and, I guess, a retraction. The thing about nailing one’s colours to the mast is that when Christmas rolls around, one finds oneself having to scrape and struggle like mad to yank them off again before the shops shut.

I see lots of people reading Kindles and iPads on the train, and while I might feel worthy and earnest and holier than thou with my paperback from the Oxfam bookshop, I do like shiny new things. And iPads are super cute.

Reading is reading, I’ve decided, and I’m open to both electronic and printed books the way I’m open to fish finger sandwiches and scallop ceviche. Each has its place (and for an e-reader, that would be under the tree).

I once posed the question on this very website: who needs e-readers when we have traditional books? But I was younger then. OK, not by much, but humour me.

I confess: I am, hands up, head down, an armchair anarchist. I am not living in an Occupy Belfast tent protesting the evils of big business. Rather, I’m living in a nice three-bedroom house with central heating and two – yes, two – Christmas trees. A little one and a big one.

I can’t whinge about the cynical emptiness of e-readers, and live the way I do. That would be like wanting my Brussels sprout and eating it. It would make me a hypocrite.

So, I’d like an e-reader for crimbo and I take back everything I said. And to assuage my conscience, I’ll think about a time when everyone who enjoys reading owns an e-reader, and Amazon and Apple have to find a new audience to sell to. And then they’ll use their big bucks to convert people who don’t read at all.

We’ll know they’ve succeeded when looters are pictured sprinting away from riots clutching e-readers. There’s a nice warm Christmassy thought for writers everywhere.

Tara West is author of Fodder.

Neil Powell will never forget Christmas Eve 1988. On December 21, Pan Am Flight 103 crashed at Lockerbie killing all 243 passengers, 16 crew and a further 11 people on the ground. Three days later, Powell, who had over 15 years experience of mountain rescue missions in the Mourne Mountains, was at the clean-up operation in Scotland.

Flown in by the RAF, Powell and his mountain rescue dog, Pepper, spent five days at Lockerbie. ‘I don’t want to go into it, but there was human debris in the bushes and trees where the bodies had disintegrated,’ he says from his home in Newcastle, County Down. ‘I’d never been in a situation like that before. Up until then I’d been quite a squeamish person but sometimes you’ve no choice.’

Each year, the Irish Mountain Rescue service receives around 250 call outs across the island. When they do, the task of finding the missing often falls to remarkable people like Powell.

‘When you’re out on the mountains even relatively minor things like broken ankles can become life-threatening,’ he says. Winter poses very specific challenges for search and rescue missions, as Powell explains: ‘Ice, snow, fog, lower temperatures, these are all major hazards on the mountain.’

Powell is responsible for arguably the most important change in mountain rescue practice in Ireland: the introduction of search dogs.

When this erstwhile schoolteacher and self-confessed climbing ‘obsessive’ joined the Mourne Mountain Rescue team in the 1970s, search operations on both sides of the border were conducted entirely by humans. Powell thought man’s best friend might be able to speed up and improve what was hitherto a slow, laborious and often dangerous process.

‘Many nights when we were out searching for people on the mountains, you’d see shepherds using dogs to round up their flock. I thought, "Why can’t we get dogs to help us to look for people?”,’ recalls Powell, who has written a book, Search Dogs and Me, about his experience.

With a little help from a mountain rescue team in Glencoe, in the Scottish highlands, he began training dogs for use in search operations closer to home.

In 1982, after countless training exercises, Powell and Kim, his German shepherd, finally received their first genuine call-out: his GP had gone missing on Slieve Donard, the highest peak in Northern Ireland, in treacherous conditions.

Thanks to Kim the doctor was finally located after an extensive search – although he wasn’t exactly overjoyed to see his patient. ‘The doc was suffering pretty badly from hypothermia by the time we got to him,’ Powell recalls. ‘He was pretty irrational, and he didn’t even recognise me.’ The GP still gets a ‘bit of ribbing’ in Newcastle, but without Powell – and Kim – he would probably have perished on the mountain.

Powell returned home from Lockerbie with a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which only came to light five years later when he was studying for a Masters in counselling at Queen’s University. ‘Something like Lockerbie confronts you with the reality that life isn’t ordered, it isn’t predictable, and that can be very shocking.’

Nevertheless, Powell continued to take his dogs to rescue missions around the world. He recalls struggling in vain to find a young girl buried beneath rubble following the catastrophic earthquake that hit Turkey in 1999.

Meanwhile, in Kashmir, Charco successfully located a man who had been trapped for 36 hours. ‘To see him being pulled out alive was just amazing,’ Powell, who has also trained dogs in counterfeit disc detection in the US, says with typical understatement.

Originally from Cobh in County Cork, after 40 years, Powell’s heart is firmly in County Down. But having given up teaching more than a decade ago, a quiet retirement is the last thing on his mind.

When he’s not leading search and rescue missions on the Mournes or nearby Carlingford Lough, he is busy pioneering dog trailing, a cutting-edge technique that allows police to trace missing persons by the unique scent residue that each of us leaves on our clothes and the locations we pass through.

Search Dogs and Me is a paean to one man’s canine passion. ‘I prefer dogs to people,’ admits Powell, who lives with his wife and their eight dogs. ‘Dogs are characters. They have a lot more feeling and emotions than many people realise. I wrote the book as a way of perpetuating the memory of the dogs that passed on and to show people how great dogs can be.’

Search Dogs and Me is out now from Blackstaff Press, price £12.99

Most authors have a simple, three-step career plan: write a book, find an agent and get a publisher. The end result of which, it is hoped, will be a Derek Landy sized advance cheque on the doormat come Monday morning.

Belfast based crime author Gerard Brennan gave the process his own spin. He found an agent, Edinburgh based Alan Guthrie of Jenny Brown Associates, and turned him into his publisher. In 2012 Guthrie will be bringing out two of Brennan’s novel through his e-publishing company Blasted Heath.

It would be the best of both worlds, but unfortunately Brennan did have to fire agent-Guthrie before he could sign a deal with publisher-Guthrie.

‘Al is that strange creature, an agent with ethics,’ Brennan sighs over his coffee. ‘He thought it would be a conflict of interest to negotiate my contracts with himself. So I had to pick which professional relationship I had with him, agent and author or publisher and author.’

It wasn’t an easy choice to make. Good agents are hard to come by at the best of times, which this isn’t for the publishing industry, and an ‘editing agent’ like Guthrie is even rarer.

‘I did think I was giving up quite a lot,’ Brennan admits. ‘But, as Guthrie said, we’d been working together for two years and not sold the books. They were just sitting doing nothing when they could be getting read.’

For Guthrie that is the whole point behind Blasted Heath. He started out with an interest in self-publishing (he is a writer as well as being an agent and a publisher) and became a Kindle best-seller with a novella. It would have ended there, if the co-founder of Blasted Heath, Kyle MacRae, hadn’t convinced him otherwise.

‘At gunpoint,’ Guthrie adds with a grin. Blasted Heath plan, ambitiously enough, to publish 30 eBooks in their first year. Brennan’s Wee Rockets is going to be lucky number 9 of their debut list. ‘Wee Rockets is about a teenage gang running riot in West Belfast, getting increasingly audacious and dangerous. It has been described as City of God in Belfast. I am a big fan of that movie, so I quite like that comparison.’

Of course, that begs the question, if it is that good, why couldn’t it find a home with a traditional publisher?

‘When my work was being pushed to the big crime fiction publishers there was a feeling it fell between two stools,’ Brennan explains, weighing his imaginary novel in the air. ‘It was too literary to be crime fiction, too crime fiction to be literary.’

That dichotomy of genre made Brennan’s work difficult for the publishers to package and market. Particularly, he believes, since his work had a very strong Belfast influence. He couldn’t be marketed as ‘the next Stuart Neville’ or ‘the next Brian McGilloway’, and publishers didn’t have faith that ‘the first Gerard Brennan’ would sell.

‘They want something new, edgy and different,’ Brennan says wryly. ‘Yet the same.’

Despite his foray into e-publishing, Brennan isn’t abandoning the print and paper book. Pulp Press has just released Brennan’s novella The Point in paperback, and on Kindle. Guthrie, who was still Brennan’s agent at the time of the sale, describes the book as ‘full of pace and humour and heart.’

The humour part is something that crops up in most reviews of The Point, somewhat to Brennan’s confusion. He didn’t set out to write a funny book, he just wrote the way people he knows talk.

‘I guess we’re a lot funnier than we know here,’ he shrugs.

Readers will have to wait till January to find out if Wee Rockets – a novel Brennan once described as being about ‘granny-bashers’ – is funny too. As the publisher, however, Guthrie is confident that the novel will live up to the Blasted Heath mission statement: ‘fascinating characters, gripping stories, deadly writing’.

‘Wee Rockets,’ he says, ‘is right on the money everytime.’

Proudly displayed on the wall of the newly opened CS Lewis Centre in Belmont Tower is a quote from the man himself. 'I think we Strandtown and Belmont people had among us as much kindness, wit, beauty and taste as any circle of the same size that I have ever known.'

For Lewis (or Jack, to his friends and family) Belfast was anything but a hopeless place. It inspired him as an author and influenced his work. Director of the CS Lewis Centre, and lifelong aficionado of the Lewis pantheon, Sandy Smith, hopes that this new permanent exhibition of Lewis' works will inspire and influence residents and visitors to the city alike.

Lewis was born just 400 yards from Belmont Tower, in a house known as Little Lea on Dundela Avenue. He was baptised in St Marks, where his grandfather was rector, and attended Campbell College as a boy.

Indeed, when Lewis’ politically minded father was aspiring to a seat in Westminster he gave a speech in Belmont Tower. And while Lewis achieved world-renowned academic and literary success, Smith argues that the author never forgot his roots.

'To CS Lewis, Belfast was always home and he had a fondness for this area in particular. So it is really fitting to have the exhibition here in Belmont Tower.

'I think Belfast has been remiss in not celebrating him more. Narnia may be a fantastical and far away land, but I always say that it is also an Irish colony, discovered and populated by an Irishman!'

Smith is deservedly proud of the permanent exhibition at the centre, launched this this to coincide with Lewis’ birthday. It contains many of Lewis' first editions supplied by Smith himself (‘loaned’, as he is quick to correct me, with a chuckle).

Having led a CS Lewis literary tour around Belfast for the past six years, and given lectures throughout Northern Ireland, Smith is one of the foremost authorities on the author. His enthusiasm shines through as he gives a tour of the exhibition.

There are cabinets containing Lewis’ novels (most famously the Narnia series), his academic work with Tolkien and the Oxford literary group he co-founded, the Inklings, his fictional and non-fictional collections of letters and a sizeable theatre upstairs for showing DVDs.

Quotes from Lewis and his peers pepper the walls. There is also information about the surrounding area and its relation to the writer and his work. In the middle of the room sits a homely table and chair, a hounds-tooth jacket slung over the back. A copy of CS Lewis At the Breakfast Table is casually left out. Smith is particularly fond of this addition, making it feel as if ‘Lewis was right here, but he just popped out’.

Lewis often cited the Mourne Mountains as an influence on the Narnia landscape. He stated that ‘walking through the hills [I] could easily imagine a giant coming over the horizon’. Lewis also found inspiration for the books in his immediate surroundings.

'Not many people know it, but the wardrobe was real,' Smith enthuses, holding a picture of an ornate armoire, 'and not only that, but it was built in Harland and Wolff.' The wardrobe was crafted by Lewis’ grandfather, who worked in the famous shipyard, and whose hobby was woodcraft. He built the beautiful cabinet in his spare time.

A vivid childhood memory for Lewis was his grandfather (who lived just round the corner on Parkgate Avenue) delivering the wardrobe to the family home. The famous wardrobe now resides across the water, displayed in a CS Lewis centre in Illinois – in fact, Smith has made many pilgrimages to see it.

The final part of the exhibition focuses on joy – a recurring theme throughout Lewis’ life. In his 1955 work, Surprised By Joy, he made a distinction between joy and happiness or pleasure. For him joy had to have ‘the stab of the unexpected’.

He used this expression when referring to his conversion to Christianity. It is also a theme that crops up throughout the rest of his works and indeed his life. Lewis married a woman named Joy Gresham, their relationship being the subject of the film Shadowlands.

Smith explains, when Lewis was a professor at Oxford, it was a running joke amongst his students that he had, once again, been ‘surprised by joy’. Even the Narnia books were about bringing life back to a ‘joyless land’. Not only did Lewis find plenty of joy in Belfast, but he also left plenty of love too.

Belmont Tower is located at 82 Belmont Church Road, Belfast. Telephone 028 9065 3338 for more information.

Jonathan Bardon’s history of the Plantation roughly marks the 400th anniversary of the most successful systematic colonial undertaking in early modern European history. For good or ill we have lived with the consequences ever since.

Bardon has been a supremely effective writer of general narrative history, whether of Belfast, Ulster or Ireland. Here he rarely loses the thread and has a telling eye for quotation.

Thus we have Thomas Blennerhasset urging others to come to Fermanagh: ‘Art thou a gentleman that takes pleasure in the hunt? The fox, the wolfe, and the wood-kerne do expect thy coming.' For him the dispossessed Irish were merely animal prey.

At the outset Bardon seeks to confound previous easy assumptions. Catholic Ulster was not exterminated in the war of conquest up to 1603, although extermination was a weapon notably employed by Sir Arthur Chichester.

He surely over emphasizes the survival of Catholic leaders who took the government side, and under emphasizes the extent to which Catholics lost the most fertile lands in the province. Indeed his own narrative undermines any such case. It may have taken a century, or the ‘long plantation’, for consequences to work themselves out but, the die was cast from an early stage.

The impetus for conquest and plantation lay in growing English assertiveness and the need to secure Ireland against Spain. Hence the emergence of a new generation of adventurers and colonial promoters, and James I, first monarch of the United Kingdom, was particularly won over to plantation.

Those urging the venture drew on precedents from Roman history and previous failed endeavours in Ireland, but they were already building on developments following the defeat of the Irish in 1603. To the fury of soldiers and servitors, the Irish leader, the Earl of Tyrone, was pardoned, but the partisan application of English law by the victors made his position untenable, leading to the Flight of the Earls in 1607.

Meanwhile in County Down, Hugh Montgomery freed Con O’Neill from captivity and, working with James Hamilton, defrauded him of much of his territory in circumstances on which Bardon is unable to cast new light. Their unofficial plantation in the Ards Penninsula from 1605 onwards was to prove the most successful of all.

The official plantation of counties Armagh, Cavan, Donegal, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone from 1610 onwards was prescribed in the utmost detail with areas designated for Scots, English, and natives. Undertakers were to build castles and towns and to bring settlers with them, while removing the Irish.

As ever, English government could prescribe but things worked out differently in Ireland. There were insufficient willing investors of weight in the project, hence royal insistence that an unwilling City of London should take on Derry. Above all it proved impossible to develop the new settlement without the native Irish. Often they were willing to pay higher rents than new settlers.

There are questions about the quality of the new immigrants. According to Bardon, their standards of agricultural practice were frequently no better than those of the natives. As Presbyterian minister, Andrew Stewart said, they were ‘generally the scum of both nations’ (i.e., England and Scotland).

Bardon suggests that this was ‘unfair’ without saying why. Surely it was starving Scots and desperate Englishmen who were prepared to take on wolves and lurking wood-kerne. Colonial settlement was ever thus.

By contrast Bardon takes at face value contemporary English judgements on the incompetence of the surviving Gaelic gentry in the new era. Yet as his narrative makes clear, the takeover of their lands continued by both fair means and foul. Amongst the most rapacious were the new bishops of the established church.

Religious persecution combined with loss of land helped trigger the rebellion of 1641, a disaster for the Irish merely re-enforced in the Williamite War. On both occasions the settler community was intent on preventing any concessions to those who were defeated.

For all its success by, the end of the 17th century the Plantation of Ulster lacked the simplicity of the American colonial endeavour, one often modelled on Ulster experience. There, the Indians were exterminated or driven further into the wilderness, and often by Ulster Presbyterians. In Ulster the natives remained.

Bardon continues his tale right down to the recent Troubles in which: ‘The unchained sectarian dragon leaped from its cage as fear, suspicion, atavistic hatred and memory of ancient wrongs gushed to the surface…’ Thus, thanks to the Plantation legacy, we are apparently an endlessly doomed people or peoples.

Yet by the end of the 18th century, Catholics and radicals had abandoned Jacobite dreams of reclaiming lost lands. Instead they sought political reform, and it was surely the prolonged failure to reform or democratise Irish government that had the enduring incendiary effect. That is quite another story.

Indeed developments since the Good Friday Agreement suggest that there always was a political way out of Bardon’s endless Plantation legacy impasse, and one founded on equity.

The Plantation of Ulster is published by Gill & McMillan.

There can be something very comforting about sifting through old photographs, even if the faces staring back at you are those of strangers. To then discover that there might be a connection to family folklore adds a sense of intrigue.

I recall from my childhood, references that my mother made to having had a distant cousin who had been an athlete of some note. Mother could not remember his name, but she thought that he was from somewhere in Limerick or Tipperary, across the county border from her home in Waterford.

Whoever this mysterious athlete was, he had emigrated to America and had been representing his adopted homeland at the Olympic Games. She was sure that he’d won a medal. Oh yes, and it had been gold.

As these were the days before Google and Wikipedia, the means of checking the accuracy of her story were limited. My boyhood inquisitiveness about his identity soon waned. Maybe it was just a fable.

However, that curiosity was piqued after reading the wonderfully intriguing book, Places We Play: Ireland's Sporting Heritage, written by Mike Cronin and Roisin Higgins.

In the authors' own words, the book 'explains the impact of railways, the military, landed wealth, local tradesmen and national politics on the development of the built sporting landscape'.

In pre-famine Ireland, hurling and horse racing had their place beside prize fighting and rowing. Midway through the 1800s the movement of people back and forward between Ireland and Britain brought the influx and spread of more sports.

Cricket, golf, rugby and soccer found a willing audience ready to participate in their development alongside Gaelic games.

'English heritage have done a series of books on English sporting sites, so we decided to see if we could have a similar project in Ireland,' explains Higgins, who is a research fellow at the Dublin-based Boston College-Ireland.

'It was conceived during the years of the Celtic Tiger. So many places were being moved, everything was being sold to property developers and no one was stopping to pay attention to what had been there. What we had wanted to do initially was to record what was there.'

Higgins is referring to places such as the indoor real tennis court at Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin, which was constructed in 1885 for Edward Guinness, or Trinity College Pavilion, which looked out over Ireland’s first ever modern athletics meeting in 1857.

By that stage the Turf Club had already been in existence for 67 years, and the Down Royal Corporation of Horsebreeders, formed in 1685 by Royal Charter from King James II, was well on the way to its second century of business.

'Why do some historians and academics not think that sport is significant, given its importance to the economy and how it tells the social history of Ireland?' asks Higgins. 'Some see it as a distraction rather than having been at the centre of things. But just look at how dependent somewhere like Galway was on the industry.

'Horse racing was more about the breeding of horses. Racing itself was not the business. Showjumping was about figuring out which horses were best suited to the hunt. It in itself was not a sport. Horses were big business and the sports came out of that business.'

And politics was never allowed to get in the way of business. Racing at Down Royal was cancelled as a mark of respect to those who died at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, for instance, and following the death of Michael Collins during the Irish Civil War in 1922.

'That really tells a story of how the horse racing fraternity was linked up and down the country and that the sport took place in neutral grounds,' says Higgins.

The Irish Golfing Guide of 1916 gives one indication of the influence of the railway on sport in Ireland.

'When you look at the map of the old railway lines it is extraordinary to see how many there were. The system was so important to where things were located. One of my favourite photographs is of a hotel at Lahinch Golf Club. The West Clare railway line is in the foreground and then there is the opulence of the hotel behind.'

Other venues developed, too, near the railways that transported thousands of spectators to sporting events all over the country. While passengers had to pay fares, horses travelled free to race meetings. And in industrial Belfast, football grounds were built in the shadow of the shipyards and the city’s linen mills. Motorsport, too, was important to the country’s image.

'Events like the North West 200 were heavily supported by the Northern Ireland government in the early years of the state. It saw this as a way of presenting the country as being a modern industrial society,' Higgins adds.

Unbeknown to Higgins or Cronin, Places We Play acts not only as an expert guide to Ireland's sporting heritage, but it could also provide the answer to a family mystery that has intrigued the Coyles for decades.

Amongst the fascinating and beautiful images of Ireland’s sporting history are photographs of the statues of Matt McGrath and Pat Ryan. Both men won Olympic gold as they competed in the hammer throwing event for the USA in the first part of the last century. Both men came from Munster.

Maybe one of them was the distant relative that my mother referred to all those years ago. It's a lovely bit of sporting history to be able to cling on to.

Places We Play: Ireland's Sporting Heritage is published by The Collins Press.

For 40 years Blackstaff Press have published some of the freshest, funniest and most thought-provoking literature in Northern Ireland. Now, to prove that this old publishing house can learn new tricks, they are launching an eBook list. And to help publicise the launch CultureNorthernIreland is running a Facebook competition to win a Kindle.

‘I suppose we have been thinking about it for a while,’ managing editor Patsy Horton explains. ‘It is a growing market. More and more people are reading eBooks and using eReaders, and I think it is our job as a publisher to give them the content they want to read in the format they want to read it. We want people to keep reading.’

And people do want eBooks, whether they read them on an e-reader, a laptop, a tablet device or even their phone. In 2010 eBook sales were 5% of the book-buying market. In 2011 Amazon, whose latest Kindle device is omnipresent in Christmas ads this year, revealed that they sold more eBooks than hard-copy books. And Dorchester Publishing have abandoned the traditional publishing format entirely for eBook catalogues and print-on-demand.

Producing digital content is obviously a good move for the big boys of publishing, but what about smaller, independent publishers? Have they had the same success?

‘There’s just not a lot of data out there for small publishers,’ Horton says, shrugging. ‘Not even in terms of pricing or the market. I think Amazon has a lot of information, but they aren’t really releasing it.’

As a result of that dearth of information this ‘first wave’ of eBooks from Blackstaff Press is very much a work in progress.

‘We have learnt a lot this year,’ she says. ‘Over the next year year we are going to learn a lot more. It is a steep learning curve.’

Horton has selected an eclectic mix of books from Blackstaff’s current and back-catalogue to find out which do best on the eBook market. Will books like Dream On by John Richardson and Blue Cabin by Mike Faulkner, whose authors have a strong and active online presence, outperform classic literature like Sam Hanna Bell’s December Bride or important non-fiction like A Time to Speak by Helen Lewis?

The price of eBooks, always a bit of a bugbear for eBook readers, is also something that Horton plans to ‘tweak’ as they go along. At the moment the rule of thumb they are working with is ‘20% less than a paper copy’.

‘Pricing is up for grabs at the moment,’ she grins. ‘We are going to monitor it and see what happens. I don’t think you need to price eBooks incredibly cheaply though. Faber have an app for The Waste Land out at the moment that’s £9.99. Obviously an app is a lot more work than an eBook, but it is a model of what can be done.’

For the moment Horton is focused on the launch of the eBook catalogue and gradually making all of the Blackstaff’s back-catalogue available in e-format. However, she does – cautiously – admit that the move into eBook publishing might allow them to take a few commissioning risks.

‘I think it will free us up to experiment more – to some extent,’ she said. ‘There are still editorial and developmental costs involved, even though you don’t have to pay for print or storage. And the challenge will be changing our mind-set, thinking digitally from concept.’

Horton doesn’t believe that the eBook revolution will ever do away completely with paper and ink books. People who love books, who want to read them over and over again, will still want the tactile experience of turning pages. Although it might, she notes, lead to a resurrection of the hard-back novel market.

Either way, what Blackstaff Press wants for their digitally enabled future catalogue is the same thing they have always wanted: ‘It’s what I want as a reader. Content that will excite and challenge.’

Oh, and anyone thinking of getting an e-reader this Christmas? CultureNorthernIreland’s own Lee Henry will have his book available in eBook from Blackstaff in May 2012.

Go to the Blackstaff Press website to see what eBooks are available.

It was all Hallow’s Eve when Carlo Gebler came to Queen's University for the second in the 2011/12 Blackbird Book Club series. He made out to spook us: 'My despair is Biblical,' he declared. But in truth, he entranced us.

Gebler, like David Park, approaches the trick and treat of talking about his own work by recessing himself within a series of stories. And like Park, he bore witness (though through a sensibility bereft of or free of any kind of theological aspection), to the transformative influence of teachers.

In the case of Gebler, two teachers were of especial significance; the first, who taught him to become entranced by reading, and the second, who taught him causality. Both were women.

And, it is clear that these two forces have propelled his unique practice as a writer. He cited Geoffrey Hill who said that ‘writing is a machine for making you feel'. It is a provocative and perhaps uncomfortable formula. There is something a mite chilling about the trundling in of a machine across the fine tuned imagination of the writer.

But Mr Gebler reiterated this apparent paradox when he spoke of three elements: the inner ‘cinema screen’ of the imagination, the ability to make the reader feel and a classical clarity that causes that feeling to be felt.

Gebler spoke of the back story his latest novel, The Dead Eight. The title he acquired from his long experience working in the prison system. The ‘dead eight’ is the term used by initiates to describe the look and shape and effect of a gun barrel.

Gebler translates this into an entirely different context. The mysterious, raddling ‘insider’ quality of the title is borne out by a tale which questions the official version of an historical ‘fact’. As in The Cure, Gebler uses the sharply questioning attitude to history he learned from his Communist teacher to interrogate received beliefs, presented as facts.

Like Sebastian Barry, Colm Toibin and Colm McCann, Gebler is within that postmodernist tradition of Irish writing that combines a forensic attitude to the past with a deeply imaginative sensibility.

The ‘dramatic act’ of The Dead Eight occurs a long way into the novel. Why? Because, as Gebler explained, the inexorability of that act has to be established. Here we see his indebtedness to a 19th century model of fiction, especially, perhaps, Dickens. So we can see an historical training that demands causes.

But, there is something else. Why would we, as readers, care a hare about Moll or about the man convicted of murdering her were it not for the ‘back story’ that Gebler establishes. And this relies upon a whole series of ‘inner cinema screens’ where the author enables us to imagine Moll and all that is in the making of Moll, ancestrally. In that sense, Gebler is very much in the Irish tradition.

His background and the influences he has absorbed are cosmopolitan. But he declares himself Irish. His characters do not even attempt to speak in dialect, their concerns are totally different from the Great Debate of Tradition and Modernity, local versus metropolitan, duty versus desire, which assails the characters in, let us say, a novel by Edna O’Brien, Gebler's mother.

Gebler’s focus is both far more intimate and far more public. For the heart of this novel is the mismatch between the individual and the State. As Gebler put it, the sate is intent on serving its own interests.

There is, on one side, the marginalised, the innocent victim, and on the other, the professional political and judicial elite grasping at the obvious because the truth is too much bother. Crucially, in between lies an ancestry which includes a peerless old lady, a declared and an undeclared prostitute.

And Gebler, through his understated but often lyrical imagining, brings before us, the relatives we might not have wished for but who were, in the course of history, inevitable. As he quietly said, ‘the past shapes the present’. It seems to me, he proved his resonating case. And his plea for the Defence against the smooth roguery of the State is eloquent, understated, well argued and imaginatively invincible.

Gebler could have chosen to say he had no country, that he was stateless. Schooled in England, with a Czech-Bohemian father and a mother living the most of her life outside Ireland, now domiciled in Fermanagh, he has every historical reason to declare detachment. But, without demur, he calls himself Irish.

And I think that affords him every right to tell his story of Ireland. It is not O’Sullivan, with the greyhound embossed, printed in New York, and brought home by my Uncle Frank, and read, as a special treat to people who had been taught to forget their history. This is work for our time. Gebler gave us no tricks, but stories that are timeless, ghostly, entrancing, for the long nights after Samhain.

Bill Rolston is the author of Children of the Revolution, a pioneering oral history of the experiences of children of combatants in the Northern Ireland conflict.

Amongst participants in the book are Gearoíd Adams, son of Gerry Adams; Fiona Bunting, who witnessed the assassination of her father, Ronnie; Mark Ervine, son of David Ervine; and Jeanette Keenan, daughter of Brian Keenan.

John Lyttle, son of UDA leader Tommy ‘Tucker’ Lyttle, also appears, as does the daughter of Dan McCann, who never knew her father because he was killed as one of the Gibralter Three; and Liz Rea, daughter of UVF founder, Gusty Spence.

Some of the most moving accounts are from children who rejected the role of their parents, notably John Lyttle and Dan McCann’s daughter. Others were less questioning and, indeed, simply followed in their father’s footsteps.

They provide what is, in effect, their own war memoirs, while still others have found it easier to live with the parental past because it is ‘a foreign place – that was then, this is now’. Rolston justifies the ‘revolution’ of his title because this has been an era of ‘radical change’.

Other themes emerge. There was the practice of telling children lies, albeit for protective reasons, thus Mark Ervine and Gusty Spence’s children did not realise their fathers were in jail. Worse still, wives and mothers often did not know what their husbands were involved in. They had to carry the heaviest burdens.

All then had to cope with the return home of virtual strangers after decades on the run or in prison, and, as Rolston points out, men with very little experience of relationships, in any case, because they often went to jail by the age of 18.

Rolston makes no claims to covering a representative sample. Some children were incapable of speaking to him or ‘fell off the edge’ whether by suicide or otherwise. Yet these accounts reveal ‘survival and resilience in the face of terror’.

At the least there were no ‘inevitable consequences’ of dislocation and trauma. Rolston points to the importance of communities where the abnormal had become the normal as a sustaining force.

He accepts that the experiences of children of combatants may not differ much from that of the children of victims. It is all an arena that he would like to see explored further, and, for example, the lives of children of British soldiers who served here.

Children of the Revolution is out now, published by Guildhall Press.

Appropriately, the launch of Ben Simon's latest exploration of the Belfast hinterland, By the Banks of the Lagan, takes place at the Lock Keeper’s Cottage in Newforge. Simon is nothing if not prolific: the new publication follows hard on the heels of a pioneering history of woodlands around Belfast (2009), and an oral history of the Cave Hill (2010).

Today, the lock keeper’s cottage is most often mentioned in relation to certain political scandals. Simon's book reveals that there is so much more to the site.

It was the third lock on the Lagan Navigation which between 1754 and 1794 was pushed through all the way to Lough Neagh. Simon's interview with Dorothy McBride, daughter of the last lock keeper and one of ten children, reveals what it was like living in the cottage.

McBride and her siblings were brought up in the simplest of circumstances. There was no electricity or running water (except when the river flooded). All cooking was on a range fuelled by coal donated by passing barges, and they grew their own vegetables, and kept poultry, cattle and pigs to make ends meet.

Even after the First World War twenty or more barges passed the Lock Keepers Cottage daily. Most were horse drawn, with the bargees living aboard in minimal accommodation. It wasn't until the early 1950s that traffic fell to one or two barges a day, leading to the closure of the canal.

Before that, however, a simple rural world upriver from Belfast co-existed with the industrial corridor. The mills and other workplaces have now vanished, but Simon was still able to find witnesses who worked in almost all of them.

People who remember when Belfast had many markets, not just St George’s market, which were supplied by the immediate Lagan hinterland. Lighters brought coal upriver to the gasworks where hundreds worked in the midst of heat and fumes. They can recall when Stranmillis was a hive of industrial activity.

The account of Vulcanite is a particularly alarming one. It still operated during the Troubles, although its hazardous machinery would sporadically explode of its own accord. Further up river major brick works were still in operation up to the Second World War.

Newforge is remembered as home to a food processing factory where Clement Wilson was a progressive employer. He assuaged the elite of the neighbouring Malone ridge by the extensive planting of gardens which survive to this day.

Sadly the archetypal mill village at Edenderry, home from 1866 of John Shaw Brown’s St Ellen Works which specialised in high quality damask weaving, lost both mill and mill pond in recent years before a new tide of developers.

Simon is still able to reconstruct life in the mill: hot, dirty, and noisy. He also charts the various categories of mill housing. The road to Edenderry is still narrow and a dead end, but it is hard to believe that the gates on it were locked at 9.00 pm effectively trapping the inhabitants.

There were even stranger communities. Purdysburn, originally the home of the Batt family, was converted into a model asylum in 1894, which operated on a largely self-sufficient basis with patients growing much of their own food.

The biggest of the mansions along the river, Belvoir, was already semi-derelict by the 1920’s though one witness recalls antlers, elephant’s feet and other animal trophies lying about. Bizarre that a gamekeeper was kept on, and made life difficult for locals wishing to feed off pheasants and the plentiful hares in the neighbourhood.

One tends to assume that the river was heavily polluted by the mills, not to mention the nauseous Corporation dump at Annadale where, amidst fires and stinking leachate, deformed cats roamed. Yet Simon finds a witness who attests to good fishing and the sighting of salmon in the middle of the last century. Here too are accounts of swimming contests, though accidental drownings and suicides were all too frequent.

By the Banks of the Lagan follows the model of Simon’s oral history of the Cave Hill. It seems even more revealing because the Lagan has seen dramatic change. Simon backs up his oral accounts with useful introductory essays to each stage on his journey, and with extensive endnotes. When features on the river lie beyond the scope of memory, as in the case of Molly Ward’s celebrated inn above Annadale, he fills the gap from documentary sources. Where other witnesses offer additional information, as with long-forgotten popular place names, their testimony is added in.

This is how to do oral history. It certainly adds to the interest of a visit to the lock keeper’s cottage which has been restored along with its neighbouring lock. In addition to that famous, or infamous, cafe, this is now the base of the Lagan Valley Regional Park where a new future for the river beckons.

Certainly as Christmas advances upon us the appeal of this large format and beautifully illustrated book and all for £6.00 should be obvious.

By the Banks of the Lagan is available from the Lagan Valley Regional Park Office.  

As part of this year's Aspects Literature Festival, award-winning local poet Medbh McGuckian is reading in the sumptuous Walled Garden at Castle Park. 

First opened to the public in 2009, the garden is much bigger than you would think and it feels a world away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. It’s a milieu tailor-made for immersing oneself in the poet's engrossingly eloquent world.

McGuckian was born in Belfast in 1950, and has published numerous volumes of poetry, winning multiple awards along the way, including the National Poetry Competition and the Bass Ireland Award for Literature. She has also been Writer-in-Residence at a number of eminent universities.

After what seems like an interminably and unnecessarily long-winded introduction, McGuckian takes to the ‘stage’. She is jovial and unassuming, relaxing the audience immediately (making a joke about the intro sounding like her eulogy).

McGuckian starts by dedicating the reading to her friend Dr Michael Allen, a senior lecturer at Queens University, who passed away last month. Allen, part of a cohort of respected local writers, was a hugely important author of critical essays and McGuckian describes him as 'the first person [I knew] who could really explain what a poem was'.

To match the beautiful walled garden setting, McGuckian chooses to read poems that have a garden theme. She starts with ‘The Rose Pirate’, based on the famous Sam McCready Rose Garden.

The perfumed language and unusual choice of words in McGuckian's poems are striking. It’s a true pleasure to hear this laureate deliver the lines with seasoned ease.

Her next poem, a light-hearted Beatrix Potter-inspired garden poem called ‘Studies’ for which she won one of her very first awards, includes some laugh-out-loud moments. Genteel, well-behaved laughter though, to match the surroundings.

In ‘Tulips’ McGuckian’s command of language is awe-inspiring. The lines are achingly beautiful: 'their faces lifted many times to the artistry of life.'

McGuckian continues with a couple of poems based on Chinese gardens, before moving on to ‘The Frame’. It is a quite brilliant poem about her old house. 'A wreck,' she calls it.

After this McGuckian strays from the garden leitmotif, reading a few more personal poems. These poems deal with subjects such as having to find someone to look after her children, the pain of losing childhood, her father’s death, freedom within a marriage and a terribly sad poem about one of her students who drowned.

The next poem, ‘The Sin Eater’, is McGuckian's attempt at religious writing. She admits she found it hard not to be preachy and apologises in advance for offending anyone. The 'voice' in the poem is that of Jesus agonising in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Once finished, she slams the books shut and proclaims ‘Terrible!’. Her judgement aside, this is the one poem that engenders spontaneous applause. It is certainly an intriguing take on the topic.

After her final poem, an amusing and beautifully evocative piece about Gregory Peck’s garden called ‘The Lily Grower’, McGuckian obliges the audience with a Q and A session.

This is as fascinating as the reading. McGuckian openly talks about her time studying under Seamus Heaney. She knew it was special, even though Heaney was still years away from being fully recognised as the literary behemoth he is today.

When asked if she thinks poetry should be difficult, McGuckian cites the new Jane Eyre adaptation starring Michael Fassbender. She points out that the way in which Jane speaks to Rochester is a form of poetry.

‘Normally people talk clumsily but it’s through this [poetic] language that Rochester falls in love with Jane,' McGuckian explains. She says that this ‘difficulty gives more meaning to what we call reality’.

It is a wonderful afternoon of thought-provoking poetry in one of North Down’s most beautiful settings.

This weekend will see hundreds of people flocking to Belfast to take part in TitanCon, a three day celebration of all things science fiction and fantasy related.

Co-chair, Ian Lawther, explains further. ‘TitanCon is a science fiction, fantasy and gaming convention, which will take in all literary aspects of the genres, plus their role in other media - such as television shows, films, comics and tabletop wargaming’.

Logan Bruce works with Studio NI, who are (in conjunction with some other groups) responsible for bringing the event to the people of Belfast. Also treasurer of the convention, Bruce is enthusiastic about its contribution to the arts scene.

‘Studio NI have been around for seven years now, and we’ve run a number of events over that time. We work with other groups and have been building up a support network for the local arts sector, and now we’re happy to bring to Belfast our first science fiction convention’.

Unfairly, the speculative fiction genre has been known to attract derision from some closed minded critics, seeing it as a lowbrow form of art, the realm of (for want of a better term) nerds. However, Bruce is quick to rail against this negative stereotyping.

‘It’s just such a terrible generalisation. All you need to do is look at the history of speculative fiction here in Belfast alone. Would you say that Gulliver’s Travels is lowbrow? It is a fantasy novel inspired by the Cave Hill Titan. And there are countless others, not least of all C.S. Lewis, with the Narnia novels’.

Lawther agrees vehemently, stating that, ‘People only need to look to the success of Game of Thrones to see the popularity of the genre – everybody in Belfast wants to have something to do with it. Thousands of people from Northern Ireland were extras in it. Science fiction and fantasy aren’t the geeky things they used to be’.

Indeed, Game of Thrones (HBO’s smash hit sword ‘n’ sorcery series, shot in Belfast) features heavily in the Titan Con roster. Doreen Ritchie (otherwise known as Silverjaime), secretary of the convention, explains more.

‘I’m from Brotherhood Without Banners, who are a George R.R. Martin [author of the novels Games of Thrones is based on] fanclub. We have a number of actors from the television series coming over to take part in the convention – they will be doing various demonstrations, as well as taking part in discussion panels.

Furthermore, on Sunday there is a bus tour running around the locations used in the series, ending up in Castle Ward where there will be a medieval feast’.

There are also many other aspects of TitanCon to attract SF/F fans of every ilk, including appearances from local favourite authors such as T.A. Moore, Gerard Brennan and Peadar O Guilin, a speculative fiction workshop from Belfast comic writers and artists, Andy Luke and Paddy Brown - not to mention guest of honour and esteemed SF novelist, Ian McDonald.

There will also be countless other panels and demonstrations from other local writers, artists and filmmakers. Wiith such a wide diversity of events, does Lawther worry that, by appeasing the fanboys, they will alienate first timers?

‘The way we run TitanCon, the main focus is on the panels and the workshops. The panels are very easy to navigate, and the workshops will have instructors there, so it is easy to get involved.

'When it comes to the gaming side of things, there will be people running demos for first timers on how to play games – people new to conventions should still find it all quite easy.’

Ritchie agrees, placing emphasis on the communal nature of the event. ‘I think everyone’s going to have a great time, and it is worth pointing out that there has been a lot of discussion preceding it online.

'A lot of fans will be meeting together for the first time; people from as far away as America, the Philippines, Europe – it’s going to be a great get-together!’

The event kicks off on Friday September 23 as part of Culture Night, and will run all weekend. Of course, the committee is focusing on making sure the convention is a success, but, ever hard-working, they have already begun considering the next event.

‘We’ve started provisional work on next year’s committee and guests,’ explains Lawther. ‘As long as there’s not a disaster this weekend [cue lots of wood-touching], we should be full steam ahead for next year!’

‘TitanCon is also the first convention of its kind, as the Arts Council of NI have given us funding to run it. They have been very supportive – when we started TitanCon it was set up by the fans, for the fans. So with the Arts Council’s help, we have been able to keep ticket prices down as well. With this in mind, we hope we can build a great future for TitanCon’.

TitanCon opens on Culture Night at McHughs Bar. For more information about the convention go to their website.

‘There was another warehouse we were looking at,’ Kerry Woods from Tinderbox Theatre Company explains. She is perching on a plastic-covered dining room chair in a storage room full of car-boot sale cast-offs.

There are bunk-beds around the corner and a strange park-diorama in a terrarium leaning against the wall. ‘But we would have had to pay to dirty it up, and that just seemed wrong. We wanted somewhere with an authentic dystopian atmosphere.’

She is talking about a site for Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life, a new play written by Paul Kennedy and commissioned by Tinderbox specifically for the 2011 Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen’s. 'The play is set,' Kennedy explains, 'a generation after a global apocalypse that killed most humans and animals.'

The Old Victor Stationery Warehouse on Marshalls Road in Castlereagh had the apocalyptic ambience they were looking for. It is an echoing, dusty barn of a space, with no heating and a limited water supply. Driving into the huge, empty car park, with broken branches blowing over the cracked concrete, it isn't hard to imagine zombies rattling the chain link fence.

Not that Kennedy is letting slip with the details of his apocalypse. Stating a desire not to 'spoil the craic', he is close-mouthed about the plot and staging, and even about the characters he has written. 'There is a man,' he eventually admits, 'and a woman.'

The reason for his secrecy is that in places, Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life is as much art installation as play. Staged as a promenade piece, the audience are led around the warehouse from act to act, with the set being constructed and altered as they go. 'Things are happening in front of them,' Kennedy says. 'And, at the same time, to the set behind them.'

Even for a company with Tinderbox’s theatrical pedigree, this is a massive undertaking. However, it was obvious from the outset that Kennedy's play wasn't going to be suited to a traditional stage.

Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life started out as a scene written in a Tinderbox workshop exploring how to convey movement on stage. The piece immediately caught dramaturge, Hanna Slattne, and director Mick Duke's interest, and Kennedy was commissioned to write a full length play.

‘This is the longest I have ever worked on a play,’ says Kennedy, whose first professional sale as a writer was a Western he had challenged himself to write in a month. ‘It was a long process, but you could really see the difference from draft to draft.’

The play was a departure for Kennedy, and in more ways than one. It is the first sci-fi dystopia that he has written, and the first play he has set in the future. Most of his plays are set in the past, ‘to stop mobile phones from spoiling everything'.

As a playwright, however, he prefers not to get too attached to any one genre. After this production is over, he will begin work on a rom-com screenplay he hopes to film in 2012.

For the moment, however, everyone involved in Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life is focused on getting the Old Victor Stationery Warehouse ready for an audience. It has been, to put it lightly, something of a challenge. Drinking water has had to be brought in – ‘It’s all Ballygowan!’ – and if they want to plug something in, then they have to turn the lights on.

Audiences should also heed the advice to wear warm clothes and sensible shoes. It is ‘nippy enough’ in September, Woods says, but by the end of the October it will be cold indeed.

One problem that they haven’t been able to work around is the sheer scale of the stage they are working on. At the moment rehearsals take place in a small side-room. Once the set has been built, however, they will be trekking from one side of the warehouse to another.

‘We found an old scooter I thought Mick could use that,’ Woods says, pointing to a rusting, motorized scooter leaning against a wall. Unfortunately it was broken. Woods' eyes glitter. ‘I haven’t given up though. I’ll find something.’

Guidelines for a Long and Happy Life is showing at the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's from October 15 – 29 at the Old Victor Stationery Warehouse. Book tickets here. For further information on all Belfast Festival events, visit What's On.

I recently shared a taxi from Liverpool Airport (the John Lennon one) to Liverpool with four Liverpool FC fans who had come from Belfast to Liverpool to see a match. After a few minutes' worth of awkward conversation (mostly consisting of me asking inane questions about football) one of the fans coughed and said, 'You don't know anything about football, do you?'

'No,' I replied, and this was the truth. There then followed several moments of what can be described, without journalistic exaggeration, as stunned silence. The fans had never ever met anyone who not only did not know anything about football, but who was prepared to admit it.

Once they recovered their composure they started with the questions. How had I turned out like this? I tried to answer as best I could. I couldn't give them a story. Trauma hadn't made me football averse. No, the truth was - it was just the way that I was, or the way that I was born, or the way my DNA had been formed.

When I was a child I had no interest in sport, or football, or gangs, or fighting, or spitting, or anything of any of the other things that most of the boys around me were interested. And it gets worse: not only was I not interested in what everyone else was interested in, but I was interested in what no one else was interested in.

I was interested in symphonic music, fine art, ballet, women's fashion, RL Stevenson, painting, poetry, cut flowers, the rural landscape, classical buildings, old castles - and I could go on. The list was long.

Now I am not saying I was advanced or precocious or even that I would have known the word 'symphonic' as a child. What I am saying is that I always knew, from as far back as I can remember, that these things were what interested me, and that there was no one around who shared these interests.

In other words, I always knew I needed to keep my ideas and interests to myself and that if anyone discovered what it was that really interested me they would think I was weird. Finally, I never thought for a single second that things that interested me were not appropriate because I was a boy.

Two other things happened in childhood that I think are also worth mentioning in relation to the subject (stereotyping). One was the discovery of the class system and social inequality (which I discovered when I was about eight). To say this was a surprise is an understatement. I was literally stunned by this discovery and the realisation that the world was unfair, and I've never stopped being stunned by it.

The other crucial discovery (which like the one above has shaped me profoundly) was, when observing games of Kiss-Chase in the playground, that the girls who were being chased, though they certainly ran, did not run so fast as to outdistance the boys. Oh yes, they got caught and kissed because they wanted to be, not because they were slow runners.

When I saw this, or realised it, my understanding of human relations, sex, boys, girls, men, women, et cetera, was overturned. Suddenly I saw that the relations between the sexes was as likely to be based on trickery and subterfuge and deceit as it was to be based on truth.

I am now 57 and when I look at the world, the western neo-liberal world in particular (which is the world I inhabit) I recoil with Swiftian disgust.

The various emancipations we enacted in the 20th century have made many people happier, I am told. They probably have - certainly the legalization of homosexual acts and abortion are very good things. However, there is so much else that doesn't seem an improvement to me and hasn't made people happier (although the culprit that I blame is capitalism rather than emancipation).

For instance, men now largely see women as neurotic or predatory bimbos, and women now largely see men as witless or predatory buffoons. This is progress? That we think like this of each other didn't happen by accident. We have organized our culture in such a way that we are encouraged to think like this about each other.

And while I'm on the subject of what I don't like, that is encouraged by our world and that concerns the relations between the sexes, can I add to the list the following: the elevation of lad and ladette culture; the way relationships (and love) have been commoditized; the obsession with status and consumption; the obsession with the sexual activities of others.

I'm told endlessly that I'm a pessimist and a Cassandra and that life is better, especially with regard to relations between the sexes, but I am unconvinced. I think our relationships are being poisoned by the way we've organized society (and by social inequality).

I also, finally, feel I cannot do anything about this except to teach my children this: when you lie on your deathbed you do not think about your career or how many sexual conquests you notched up, or how much you were paid or how big your last car was, or that all men are idiots and all women are poltroons. When you lie on your deathbed you only ask two questions - 'Did I love? Was I loved?'

But, considering the way we currently organize gender relations, the question is going to be harder and harder to answer because our society, if it has its way, is going to do away with love entirely.

I started by talking about my unusual, non-standard, non-typical male proclivities in childhood. They remain unchanged. I am still listening to music and reading poetry and doing the weird things I always did. It's the only way to get through.

Carlo Gebler, Malachi O'Doherty and BBC Radio Ulster presenter, Gerry Anderson will debate the stereotyping of the heterosexual male at a panel discussion in the Elmwood Hall on October 17 as part of the Ulster Bank Belfast Festival at Queen's. Book tickets here.