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This episode aired first on Saturday 9th July 2022. The guests were Anthony Lenihan, Beth Bonness, Glen Hubbard, Liza Costello, Marc Anthony Mc Cann, Lesley Curwen and Mike Gordon, produced and hosted by Damien B. Donnelly. Below are details and links to all the guest stars…

Anthony Lenihan

Anthony Lenihan is a retired from primary teaching last year. He has a background in drama, inclusive of amateur and 3 years professional (a few moons ago now!) acting. Plus a Dramatherapy MA from Maynooth.

Beth Bonness

Beth Bonness, the eldest of six girls, grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She moved to the Pacific Northwest with her computer science degree and her husband, where they raised their three daughters in Portland, Oregon. She fell in love with the beach and enjoyed climbing Mt. Hood, once. After 30 years working in product development and marketing (and one too many acquisitions), she said “good-bye” to high-tech corporate culture … to write. Her poems have appeared in The Timberline Review, Typehouse Magazine, Friday’s on the Boulevard, and the newly released debut chapbook Transition Thunderstorms by The Poetry Box. Her short film script Entanglements was a finalist for Get It Made Season 7, and two of her short film scripts made it to the Willamette Writers FiLMLaB quarterfinals. She is currently working on a post-stroke memoir about saving a 100-year-old mansion with her husband, and a psychological thriller screenplay about sub-conscious personalities. Beth lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and writes early in the morning before she wakes up too much.  Since Beth’s strokes, a piece of her still hovers over her right shoulder keeping a portal open so she never forgets not being able to express herself with words that made it out of her head. She’s started a writing group, Thought Echoes, for creatives who have had a stroke/brain injury. They meet monthly via Zoom. 

Follow Beth on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BethBonness

Find out more about Beth at her website https://www.bethbonness.com/

Glenn Hubbard

Glenn Hubbard has been writing poems since 2013. He has just returned to the UK after spending 35 years in Spain.His most important influence – though not always obvious in his work – is the poetry of R.F. Langley.

Liza Costello

Liza Costello is from the Irish midlands, where she and her family recently returned to live, in the same seventies bungalow in which she grew up. Her short stories and poetry have been published in places like Mslexia, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Independent, The Interpreter’s Hat, Crannog and The Manchester Review. She has been shortlisted for the RTE Radio 1 Short Story Prize, among other Irish writing awards, and came joint second for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award for an unpublished collection. In 2011, she won first prize for the Dromineer Literary Festival Poetry Award (adj. Dermot Healy). Her first novel, The Estate, was originally published as an Audible Original; narrated by Denise Gough, it was chosen as a book of the month and editor’s pick, before Hachette Ireland released the print version in 2021. Her second novel Crookedwood was released this June (Hachette Ireland).  

Liza is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/as_in_Leeza

Liza’s website is https://www.lizacostello.com/

Mark McCann

Marc McCann is 41 years old and lives in Northern Ireland. He’s been writing poetry now for a few years as he feels like it’s a opportunity to express feelings and emotions and to be creative with words.

Follow Mark on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mccann_marc

Lesley Curwen

Lesley Curwen is a poet and sailor from Plymouth. Her poems, often about the sea, loss and rescue, have been accepted by Arachne Press, Nine Pens, GreenInk, Quay Words, Broken Sleep, Slate, Black Bough and Snakeskin. The process of editing words on screen, as a broadcaster, has helped her learn about the subtle music of voices. She is working on her first pamphlet.

Lesley is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ElCurwen

Find out more about Lesley at http://lesleycurwen.com/

Mike Gordon

Mike Gordon is 73. He and his wife, Penny, have lived in London for the last 42 years. He has three grown up stepsons, a daughter-in-law, and one grandson, a young man, whom for the last 13 years, “has kept the sun in our eyes”. He was the inspiration for the poem “The Vanishing Point”. Since childhood he has been writing and “collecting” words, poems, aphorisms, quotes, haiku. All are words. They have offered and given to him, a perspective of the world around him. His sole criteria for choosing the words for The Walking Bird has been if he felt that they still resonate today. These thoughts, prompted by ideas, places, relationships and humour, the prerequisite to everyday living, can and do only reflect one person’s life. The desire is that they will contribute to what we share in common. They are his attempt at making simple that which, at times, seems complex.

Follow Mike on Twitter at https://twitter.com/IamMike_Gordon

You can buy The Waking Bird on Amazon at https://www.amazon.co.uk/walkingbird-collectedwords/dp/1527294676

Damien B Donnelly, Producer, Host and Poet

Damien B Donnelly is a 46-year-old Irish, adopted, gay, writer and podcast producer who spent 23 years living in Paris, Amsterdam, and London, returning to Dublin in 2019. In 2020, his debut pamphlet Eat the Storms appeared on the Poetry Book Society Winter List 2020/21 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize followed by a Stickleback collection, and second Pushcart Prize nomination, in Jan 2021, both published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. He produces and hosts the poetry podcast Eat the Storms, now in its 5th season with 300+ international guests on over 12 platforms. In the Jitterfritz of Neon, a poetry pamphlet co-written with Eilin de Paor, was published in Jan 2022 followed by his first full collection Enough! in July 2022, for which he was awarded an Agility Award by Arts Council, Ireland. The Fingal Arts have funded his next collection Back from Away, due in 2023. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, both online and in print. In May 2022 he opened submissions to the inaugural issue of The Storms, a journal of poetry, prose and visual art.

He is on Twitter at https://twitter.com/deuxiemepeau and instagram at both @damiboy and @weshallalwayshaveparis

You can purchase his pamphlets at his website https://deuxiemepeaupoetry.com/

Backing music for Eat the Storms is from Purple Planet Royalty Free Music, with thanks…

https://www.purple-planet.com/

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