Patricia’s Blog
I didn’t get to the Rolling Sun Book Festival in Westport this week-end. Only heard about it late in the day and was intrigued by the title. It seems that at certain times of the year the sun appears to roll down the side of the mountain on the nearby Croagh Patrick. I spent my childhood…
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Read on the New Urban Habitat blog about six fun ways to spend a cold, dark night and get through these days of stark, depressing economic news. Read aloud to one another. Tell a story. And more suggestions for these windy nights.
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The Irish story is bad and getting worse if we are to believe Morgan Kelly in today’s Irish Times. Maybe it’s time to get some perspective – and some solace – from our history. We can do it online through The Irish Story, a digital first publisher of concise ebooks and short, snappy features on Irish…
Read MoreI’ve nothing to say. What would I write about anyhow? My grammar would be all wrong. They’d laugh at me. All this at a recent writing class. And then there was a tea-break and the chat and the story-telling started and could have gone on all night. So you want to write but just can’t…
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I recently came on this video with a Halloween flavour. The Banshee lives in the Handball Alley was recorded five years ago by artists Micheal Fortune and Aileen Lambert in three Limerick schools as part of Limerick’s CUISLE Poetry and EV+A Festivals in 2004 and 2005. Sit back and enjoy the ghostly tales of banshees, headless…
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Paul Henry’s ‘The Bog Road’ was sold at auction during the week to an anonymous bidder a century after the artist arrived on Achill Island, the setting for the painting, and stayed on and off for almost a decade, endlessly absorbed with the colour and variety of the island’s cloud formations. Henry had a fascination with writing and…
Read MoreThere are three commandments, James N Frey says, if you want to write dynamic prose: Be specific Appeal to all the senses Be a poet (but not too much of a poet!) Frey’s How to Write a Damn Good Novel is one of my well-thumbed books on writing: ‘A Step-by-step no-nonsense guide to dramatic storytelling.’ You can read a short interview…
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Christy Moore’s song ‘Lisdoonvarna’ made The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry in a week that was disturbing and surreal. We tried to get our heads and imaginations around 50 billion – the cost of bailing out Irish banks. We said fifty thousand million very slowly but that didn’t seem to make it any more real, just more frightening. And…
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This is the first sentence of a new short story: ‘Her eyes were not exactly blue or grey.’ Alisa Cox – she who wrote the writer guide Writing Short Stories – has recently posted this (and three more sentences) of a new story on her blog. It whets the appetite and leaves me frustrated since I’ll have to buy the…
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To pick our Best Book Club Reads out of fifty books and five years of reading from an opinionated group can be daunting. We stuck to the task, made lists, noted votes, talked, changed our minds, remembered a great read that we’d omitted, voted again and came to our decision, exhausted and only slightly happy because of the…
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