A few days from now a large delegation – ten of us – will go to Mexico City . This will be a strong expression of solidarity for Mexican writers and journalists. It will also be unprecedented, with the entire Executive going – Hori Takeaki , Eric Lax and myself – as well as the Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee – Marian Botsford Fraser – and representatives of all four North American Centres, as well as the English and Japanese, all going to stand in public with our Mexican colleagues. Émile Martel, Russell Banks, Adrienne Clarkson, Gillian Slovo, Larry Siems and Adam Somers, as well as Renu Mandhane, head of the International Human Rights Program of the University of Toronto ’s Faculty of Law, will join the Executive.

We will be working with the three Mexican PEN Centres – Mexico , Guadalajara and San Miguel Allende. The culmination of this will be a public event organized by Jennifer Clement, President of PEN Mexico , and her members, involving the delegation and some 50 Mexican writers on Sunday, January 29.

There is also a public letter of solidarity to Mexican writers which I hope you will all sign. It is coming to you separately.

This is not a delegation of experts. It is a delegation of writers using our public voice. And what we do and say will be quickly transmitted to you in the hope that you will respond in your own countries.

This is all part of a sustained Mexican PEN campaign. Recently the Day of the Dead initiative initiated by Jens Lohman of Danish PEN and Tony Cohan of San Miguel PEN, spread our concerns about the threats faced by Mexican journalists throughout our membership. We hope that these new Mexican initiative will take on our campaign a stage further.

The PEN International Website

A lot of you are already sending material to the new website. This is what we need: Centres all over the world telling the rest of PEN about their work and their risks. Please contribute.

Finally, these last few weeks have been moving and historically important for Czech writers and for the belief in freedom of expression that all of us have. First, our former President, Jiří Gruša, one of the leading dissident writers of the post war period died. Then Václav Havel, about whom a great deal has rightly been written around the world. Then Ivan Jirous, whom Paul Wilson called the “leader of the Cultural Opposition”. Jirous was a poet, essayist and leader of the psychedelic rock band Plastic People of the Universe. The struggle to get him out of prison in part inspired the Chapter 77 movement. And finally, Josef Škvorecký has died, another great writer and leading dissident. Living in exile in Toronto he created 68 Publishers in 1971 and for two decades published banned Czech and Slovak writers. The books then made their way illegally back into Czechoslovakia . Of course, there are many more names, but when four courageous and inspired writers die almost together it should be marked as an important moment for all of us in PEN.

Best wishes,

John Ralston Saul

EDIT: The link to the PENProtesta petition against impunity in Mexico is available here

The  IPWWC , the International PEN Women Writer’s Committee.

“The Women Writers’ Committee was set up in 1991 to promote certain issues faced by women writers around the world – challenges at family and national levels such as unequal education, unequal access to resources and actual prohibition from writing.

The committee reaches out to both aspiring and practising women writers through PEN Centres and other organisations and networks, and works with the Writers in Prison Committee on behalf of incarcerated or endangered women writers.

Representatives from the committee attend meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. The committee has held conferences in countries such as Nepal, Kyrgyzstan and Senegal, and has published special newsletters. It uses Facebook to connect the work of women writers to the world. “

The Diversity Blog was launched on the 12/01/2012 and is encouraging women writers to contribute in creative areas ,like translation, poetry and literature. The information and contacts are carried at  this link.  More than ever social-media outlets like Facebook are contributing to new connections between women writers.  PEN International is facilitating these contacts across a variety of platforms which include Websites, Facebook and Twitter. There are currently two discussion groups for members and associates of PEN available on the Facebook platform, the PEN International discussion group (231 members) and the PEN International group of writers sharing opinions and texts.

Members can choose to contribute to these above-mentioned groups , or to link up with their international colleagues through sites like Diversity. Irish PEN has a Facebook account where queries regarding social-media can be sent by direct-messaging, alternatively contacts can be addressed to the Irish PEN  addresses, which I am linking  below here.

Useful Irish PEN Contacts

Irish PEN Phone Number : 087 966 0770

Irish PEN Email Contact : info@irishpen.com

Tweet to @PENireland

More than 100 poets from the 5 continents have participated every year since 1989.

The city of Trois Rivieres in on the St Lawrence seaway, half way between Montreal and Quebec. We provide travel for poets to and from Montreal airport.

There are 400 poems on walls in the city. We display 5000 in a park in the town centre during the festival.

The guest poets have only one thing to do – read their poems 2 or 3 times a day, no lectures. But they must already have at least 30 poems translated into French, as Quebec is 80% French-speaking, and our city is 99%.

One of our group will introduce the poet before the reading, read their poem in French, and then the poet will read it in his native language.

There will be about 350-400 readings of poems during the 10 day festival period,

28 September to 7 October.

More than 10000 people will attend 4-7 readings, out of the 40000 attendees.

We offer poets hospitality in a hotel, with a daily allowance for meals and another for readings.

The programme of the 27^th festival is on our website, as well as an incomplete list of previous participants.

For 2012, invitations are only offered to members of a PEN CLUB, but not in future years.

We would like to host an Irish poet every year.          Information is at link :  www.fiptr.com

Tweet

Award winning poet and Playwright Anne Hartigan in conversation with Patrick Mason, Tony Award winning director at the Abbey Theatre.

Where: United Arts Club, 3 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2

When: 8:00 – 9:30 pm

Fee: All events are €3 for members, non members welcome €5

Booking is essential!

Email: info@irishpen.com or Telephone: 087 9660770

Was Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind secretly the first non-fiction commissioning editor, when he exclaimed: ‘Now, what I want is, Facts…. stick to Facts, Sir!’? Or did he just have a healthy respect for the breadth and wondrous world of communicating factual information, recording lives and historical events, exploring and enthusing over hobbies, art, music or architecture?  Not to mention the ‘how to’ books on a range of topics from personal finance to making your will, guides to relationship survival or growing your own vegetables.   

Irish PEN is delighted to invite writers of all genres to attend this very informative and broad-reaching discussion on non-fiction publishing in Ireland.  Our panel on the evening will include: 

Ivan O’Brien, publisher and MD of The O’Brien Press;  Seán O’Keeffe, publishing director of Liberties Press, Joe Armstrong, non-fiction author and commissioning editor for international academic publisher Peter Lang and Gillian Hick,  a vet who has penned her memoirs, Vet on the Loose  and a forthcoming title Vet Among the Pigeons.

WHEN:         8.00pm.  Thursday, March 11^th 2010

WHERE:       United Arts Club, 3 Upper Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin 2.

COST:          €3 members, €5 non-members.

BOOKING ESSENTIAL:    

Tel:  087-9660770,  email:irishpen1@gmail.com

The Panel:

Ivan O’Brien is Managing Director of O’Brien Press, Ireland’s leading independent publisher of books for adults and children.  Born into the family firm, Ivan started his own publishing at the age of eight – and sold copies in the Hodges Figgis.  After an extended academic interlude, he began to work full-time at O’Brien Press in 1997, where he was held roles in production, sales and IT before becoming MD.

Seán O’Keeffe is the publishing director of Liberties Press and has been working in book publishing for 15 years.  He is also a published poet.  Seán co-founded Liberties in 2003 with his business partner Peter O’Connell. The press has quickly become one of Ireland’s leading non-fiction publishers, with more than 100 titles in print across a range of genres, including best-sellers by Garret FitzGerald, Richard Crowley and Michael D. Higgins. Liberties Press has an active foreign-rights programme and will be launching a fiction list in spring 2010.

Joe Armstrong’s book  Men’s Health – the Common Sense Approach was published by Gill & Macmillan in 1999 and translated into several languages. He also self-published Write Way to Stop Smoking in 2004. He co-authored another non-fiction book in 2009: From Special Care to Specialist Treatment - a History of Muckamore Abbey.  For the first title, he was commissioned by a publisher. For the second, he set up his own imprint. For the third, and most lucrative, he was paid by the hour. In his role at international academic publisher Peter Lang, Joe commissions books for publication and in 2009 commissioned 45 new titles in Ireland.

Gillian Hick was born in Dublin and has practised as a vet both in Dublin and in Wicklow for the past seven years, where she now has her own practice. She also works for the Irish Blue Cross. Her first humorous memoir was Vet on the Loose, and her second title Vet among the Pigeons will be published this year with The O’Brien Press.

Irish PEN acknowledges the ongoing support of The Arts Council and Dublin City Council’s Arts Office.