Editor
The writer hails from County Antrim and has lived in the desert southwest of the United States for over 20 years. Her blog is her virtual home away from home.
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A Poem for Michael and Christopher, Act Two, Door into the Dark, Postscript, Seamus Heaney, The Underground
After Heaney & Looking Forward
Whether it be a matter of personal relations within a marriage or political initiatives within a peace process, there is no sure-fire do-it-yourself kit. There is risk and truth to yourselves and the world before you. And so, my fellow graduates, make the world before you a better one by going into it with all boldness. You are up to…
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Alex Haley, Charlottesville, James Baldwin, Nazis, People Get Ready, Race in America, Racism, Trump, White Supremacy
How to Be A Racist – An Object Lesson
We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world ~ James Baldwin. I came to Arizona in the late 1980s. Something of a cliché, considered part of the “brain drain,” I was a well-educated immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and subsequently found…
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Coming of age, Dispatch from the Diaspora, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Paris Attack, Rory Gallagher, Stiff Little Fingers, Terrorism, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Ulster Hall Belfast, Themes of childhood
A Moment of Silence for The Miami Showband
People often say that music was harmless fun. It wasn’t. It must have terrified the terrorists. When people came to see us, sectarianism was left outside the door of the dancehall. They came in, they were brought together and they enjoyed the same thing. They looked at each other and thought, there’s not much difference here, and nature was doing…
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Breast Cancer Advocacy, Breast Cancer Treatment, cancer, Cancer Language, Damian Gorman, John McCain, Memoir
P.S. Moxie is No Match for Cancer
I don’t know John McCain. I don’t know if he cried when he learned of his cancer diagnosis. I don’t know how he feels about expectations of him to beat it because, after all, he has proven – in the context of war – that he is a fighter: “Senator John McCain has always been a fighter. Melania and I…