Anna Livia Creative in association with The James Joyce Centre presents To be or not to be…A Mother on Thursday, May 15th at 7.30pm.
Featuring original work by poet Jessica Traynor and actor/spoken word artist Nicole Rourke, this compelling evening will delve into the choices, complexities, and emotional landscapes of motherhood and non-motherhood in the 21st century.
Expect a fresh, dynamic take on a powerful topic.
Come along, stay for a chat (and maybe a glass of wine!)
THE PERFORMERS-
Jessica Traynor is a poet, dramaturg, essayist, and poetry editor at Banshee. Her third poetry collection Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times book of the year, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize. She is 2024 recipient of the Tundish Award from Field Day for contributions to the arts in Ireland and the 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry. She was 2023 Arts Council Writer in Residence in Galway University, a judge for the 2023 Forward Prizes, and is a critic for The Irish Times. Her next poetry collection, New Arcana, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
‘Jessica Traynor [is] capable of creating canonical work which draws on a contemporary re-thinking of poetic traditions while finding a voice that is wholly her own.’ - Poetry Ireland Review
Nicole Rourke is an actor and writer. She has featured with many Irish theatre companies and has extensively performed internationally over the last three decades. Rourke’s one-woman play, Baggage, premiered at the SoloSIRENS festival in Dublin, and went on to be adapted to film, reaching a global audience. Baggage has recently returned from a highly successful run in Cork, and will tour nationally and internationally in 2025/26. Rourke’s other notable success is Raven and the Crone, which premiered at The New Theatre for the First Fortnight Festival. Both Baggage and Raven and The Crone were directed by renowned theatre maker, Deirdre Molloy.
Rourke’s spoken-word projects mark a distinctive originality within the genre. Her Joycean-inspired piece, The Lingerie Queen of Dublin, topped the bill at the James Joyce Centre Bloomsday celebrations in 2024. This piece will feature in the Anna Livia Creative presentation of Strings in the earth and air on 12 June (at the James Joyce Centre), as part of Bloomsday Festival 2025. Outside of her performance work, Nicole is a seasoned creative workshop facilitator and is co-director of Anna Livia Creative.
‘An absolute force of nature. Engaging, hilarious and fabulous....Nicole Rourke is a goddamn sparkling GENIUS’ - SoloSirens Festival Review
For more information on her work, go to https://www.nicolerourkecreative.com/
Tickets are €20. Doors open at 7pm. The performance will be followed by a wine reception.
