Patricia’s Blog
My piece in the current edition of Writing.ie here describes the path I travelled in writing my nonfiction book The Veiled Woman of Achill and the challenge of staying true to the facts of the story while building a compelling narrative around the 1894 dark events at the Valley House, Achill.
Read MoreOutrage on Achill. Delighted to get this review of The Veiled Woman of Achill by Aine Ryan in the Mayo News:
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Heinrich Boll in Ireland | Melville House Books. Melville House included Heinrich Boll’s Irish Journal in their book bundle for Saint Patrick’s Day. Boll’s book includes a wonderful sentence about Irish rain: ‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather.’ Irish Journal covers…
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You can walk in the footsteps of the artist Paul Henry, following the shoreline from Dooagh to Keel, as part of the May bank-holiday Achill Walks Festival. There are a half-dozen walks, some on the island, some on the north-west Mayo mainland in Ballycroy National Park and the Nephin mountain range. A century ago Paul…
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Laundry by Anu Productions has won The Irish Times best production award for 2011 Irish Theatre. The pity is that so few people got to experience this exceptional piece of drama as the audience entered the former Magdalene Laundry in Sean MacDermot Street, Dublin, in groups of just three people during the 2011 Dublin Theatre Festival. When I…
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I have belatedly been reading More Lives Than One by Gerard Hanberry from the Collins Press. It tells the fascinating story of Oscar Wilde, his ancestors and descendants, and the massive contradictions at the heart of the family. It is also an intriguing mapping of the Wilde west of Ireland lineage from Castlerea, Co Roscommon, through the Ballymagibbon estate at Cong, to Moytura House at…
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I have been absent from this blog while getting the book over the finish line. The Veiled Woman of Achill will be published by the Collins Press in April. There will be a launch in my home city of Limerick in late April and a launch / reading at the Valley House, Achill in early May.
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It bucketed rain in Dublin’s Sean MacDermott street on Saturday as we waited to be let in. Then we noticed a pair of eyes staring out at us through the grid as the door was unbolted. There was no time to shake the rain from the umbrella before being handed what smelled like a bucket of Jeyes Fluid by…
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It’s traumatic trying to select Edinburgh Fringe events and standing in the queue for the box office only makes matters worse as you’re bombarded with performers pushing their wares. But chatting in the queue can be helpful; it was great to hear so many people talk about Swimming with my Mother by Coisceim Dance Theatre ; but I’d…
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I was back on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork recently after an absence of over a decade. I had forgotten the shock of seeing the tall remnants of the nineteenth-century copper mine at Allihies astride the rocks and the Atlantic Ocean everywhere I looked. If my words were inadequate to describe the experience of the physical landscape…
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