The Galway International Arts Festival takes place next week and will feature a series of talks on the theme of home.

The poet and writer Theo Dorgan is one of the speakers involved. He will be delivering a talk called 'Home Is Where You Start From', based on a 5,000-word essay about the house he grew up in, which he wrote for a book of essays edited by Lucy McDiarmid and Rhona Richman Kenneally.

Theo says the essay was "one of the most difficult things that was ever proposed to me, because when you share your memory of home with family and friends, you're really under an obligation to try and get it right."

There were 15 people living in the house, and Theo says he and his siblings "grew up as a kind of collective."

He lived in the same house until his late teens, and although he has moved around since, he feels there is something about your first home that stays with you as "a perfectly preserved memory."

"I've had many homes, but there's something primal about the first seven years and you keep coming back to that as a kind of touchstone. It's the anchor of my imagination."

"It's not so much the physical place itself that matters as how much attention you pay to it while you're there."

"Home is portable. It goes into your memory and becomes a living source. I don't have to go back to the house, I still have it. In a way you never leave home, you just live elsewhere."

To catch the full chat press the play button on the image on the top of the screen