With the year still as shiny as a new penny, I celebrated the first rejection of 2021. Celebratory is not exactly how I felt — this was for an award I would have loved to receive and even dared hope for — but yet, it was a celebration: the work goes on. I have poems… Continue reading Acceptance of Rejection
Category: On Writing
Only Connect
The Cathal Buí Hedge School — named for Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna (c. 1680 – 1756) an Irish speaking poet, singer and quick wit — celebrates the man himself with a reading of his well-known poem The Yellow Bittern (about a bird who died not able to drink from a frozen lake, the moral… Continue reading Only Connect
Poetry Day
‘There will be time’ was the theme for Poetry Day Ireland 2020 — today. And as there is a time for everything, today was time for rejection: #25 — hooray! I was hoping to get to 25 by the end of the month but I thought the end of April was 1/4 the way through… Continue reading Poetry Day
Rejection Expectation
There’s nothing like setting a few goals at the baby-faced start of a new year. Early in 2020 I joined a Facebook group, #Rejection100: basically “complete failures hellbent on collecting and celebrating 100 rejections during 2020”.* Rejections are the pointy thorns in any writer’s life but with gifs and other tools in #Rejection100 we laud… Continue reading Rejection Expectation
One thing leads to another
It all started after Christmas, though you could say it had roots as far back as my set dancing years more than two decades ago. In that end of year time of looking both inward and ahead, I decided another season had come to do something more for my writing, so one evening in front… Continue reading One thing leads to another
One City, One Book
A UNESCO City of Literature, Dublin’s bookish roots continue to flourish. An important aspect of this is April’s annual ‘One City, One Book’, an initiative from the city council and led by the public libraries, that encourages all of the city’s inhabitants to read the same book. Each year, the chosen book has a connection… Continue reading One City, One Book
Letters from Home
Rare are the handwritten missives that used to cross oceans and continents, bringing news and love from, or to, home. I dreamed recently that it was already time to return to Dublin and though it was months from now, I was hand-delivering a letter I’ve already been working on for about six weeks. I took… Continue reading Letters from Home
The Journey of a Poem | A Poem about a Journey
Australia, spring 2000: I started a poem – the notebook with those first few scratched out lines is still on my desk at home in Dublin. My musician husband was playing at the New Zealand Pipers’ annual tionól (gathering), marking the 10th anniversary of when he had helped them set it up. Along with that,… Continue reading The Journey of a Poem | A Poem about a Journey
Workshops Can Work
I’ve sat through many creative writing workshops, the first in a classroom surrounded by forest on the side of a hill, in what was then called Malaspina College. I was 18, and revelling in my escape from awkward, geeky teen to more presentable almost adult. That workshop was mostly women (and come to think of… Continue reading Workshops Can Work
Without the lonely
Writing can be lonely, but being a writer doesn’t have to be. — Dave Rudden, author of Knights of the Borrowed Dark. It can be a tough job, slogging away on your own, with only your page in front of you, wondering if this is actually going anywhere, never mind in the right direction. But writing… Continue reading Without the lonely
kennedy street 