Quality Waffle

I have been meaning to write this post for a while, but between the jigs and the reels, or work, college and family schtuff, I’m only getting ’round to it now.

Anyways, after missing Literary Death Match in June, I made sure to attend the next installment. Held, in the Workman’s Club, the match was less of the geeky and more of the giggles and silliness.

Hosted with much clever humour and lots of aforementioned silliness, by Todd Zuniga, the death match involves three judges – Trevor Byrne, Cathy Davey and Jarleth Regan this time round, and four relatively unheard of, yet very talented, writers – Sarah Maria Griffin, Simon Ashe-Browne, Philip O’Connor and Noel Sweeney. Oddly enough the two poets of the group – Griffin and Sweeney were not pitted against each other – and were instead arranged to contend with two prose writers – Ashe-Browne and O’Connor. This arrangement was left to a bizarre method of throwing pieces of paper bearing each writers names into the audience and letting the audience shout up the names they had caught.

The battles themselves involved each writer reading/performing their work, and then handing over to the judges to decide who should go through to the final. It seems a little unfair to think that writers should be judged on their performance, but actually the judges were very careful not to put too much weight on their performance and did instead judge on their work.

The night was full of laughs and general silliness, including a battle to the death between the two finalists – Griffin and Ashe-Brown, which involved scrunched up paper and a basketball ring.

Griffin did emerge triumphant in the end, and I think that from the get-go the entire audience was behind her. Her performance was very captivating, but her poetry (and I don’t even like poetry that much) was fantastic: funny, quirky and giving great observations on the trials of love. See for yourself.

In all, I’m looking forward to the next death match, whenever that is. I giggled my way through the night and got to experience new writers with fresh material and engaging performances. Clickedy click to see when the next event is on.