Now well into its third decade, the John Hewitt International Summer School returns for the seventh year to the now familiar surroundings of the Market Place Theatre & Arts Centre in Armagh, the ‘City of Saints and Scholars’.
Between Monday 27 July and Friday 31 July, the School will address the theme, ‘Unfettered thought: belief in the future?’, an idea inspired by these lines from Hewitt’s poem, The Glens:
I fear their creed as we have always feared
the lifted hand against unfettered thought.
I know their savage history of wrong and would at moments lend an eager voice,
if voice avail, to set that tally straight.
Belfastman John Hewitt came from a part of the world with widely-publicised and strongly-held disagreements over political and religious belief. He, and many of his generation, believed these would wither in the face of progressive “faiths” such as pacifism, humanism, socialism, tolerance and mutual understanding.
Born into the Ulster Protestant tradition, and making the predominantly Catholic Glens his ‘chosen ground’, John Hewitt moved from mere neighbourly tolerance to a sense that his radical, freethinking world-view might have omitted an ineradicable aspect of humanity, what Marx had called ‘the heart in a heartless world’. Did the phrase ‘unfettered thought’ fail to appreciate how ‘our unforgiving thoughts, by myth and old antipathies betrayed’ can slip into unspeakable violence?
In the 22nd year since his death in 1987, the John Hewitt International Summer School, through literature and the visual arts, politics, performance and discussion, sets out to consider whether belief, in terms of revealed religion and ideology, has a long-term place in mankind’s future, here and throughout the world, and to probe whether many, enough, or any of us, still believe, in political terms, in a better future, in what John Hewitt was to describe as ‘the state hope argued for...’
There is something for everyone in our programme for the 22nd John Hewitt International Summer School, whether you come along for a week, a day or for an individual event! There is, as always, a strong emphasis on poetry and among the visiting writers are award-winning poets Daljit Nagra, Leontia Flynn and Chinese dissident, Yang Lian. Among the well-known authors featured in the ever-popular Lunchtime Readings will be Claire Keegan, Helen Dunmore and Eugene McCabe, and there will, as always, be an attractive programme of evening events in the main auditorium at the Market Place. We hope you find something to whet your appetite on the menu of readings, talks, performances, workshops and exhibitions for the 22nd International Summer School in Armagh!
