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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Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Damian Gorman, Death and dying, Memoir, Poetry, Road trips, Soundtracks of our Lives, Summertime, Van Morrison, Writing
rest easy, Dermot Healy
Breast cancer forever changed the connotations of certain words for me – “staging” I no longer immediately associate with the theater; “fog” I am more apt to attach to a state of cognitive loss instead of the stuff of Van Morrison’s misty mornings or the cloud that can obscure parts of Pacific Coast Highway as we head north in the summertime; “cure” no longer the…
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California, Father's Day, Happy Father's Day, Love, Memoir, Milestones, Mix tapes, Morro Bay, Ordinary Things, Phoenix, Pismo Beach, Rites of passage, Road trips, Rolling Stones, San Luis Obispo, saying goodbye, Songs for the Road, Summertime
on the road again
From June until September, when the temperatures soar well above 100 degrees, most Phoenicians suffer a kind of amnesia about why they live in a desert city where, for most of the year, the weather is the kind that people from rainy, grey places covet. In the summer, all hot and bothered, we retreat to our air-conditioned offices, and grumble that our backyard pools aren’t…
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Belfast, Crafts, Family, Fathers and sons, Happy Father's Day, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Social Media, Soundtracks of our Lives, Themes of Childhood
inarticulate speech of the heart – on father’s day
This will not be a happy Father’s Day for my father. From far away, he will worry about my daughter and me and how we are doing on this, my daughter’s first Father’s Day without her dad. He’ll wish he could be in Phoenix, to fix things for us, to paint the laundry room or clean the windows or mix cement to…
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Antrim, Belfast, Belfast Peace Lines, bombing, British Army, Bruce Springsteen, Castledawson, Good Vibrations, IRA, Joe Strummer, La Mon House Hotel Bombing, Memoir, Mix tapes, Movies, Music, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Pop-in Records, Record Shops, Regrets, Sectarianism, Sherman Alexie, Terri Hooley, The Clash, The Miami Showband, The Troubles, The Undertones, Themes of childhood, UVF, Vinyl Records
for the record . . .
Dedicated to the legendary Terri Hooley . . . I rarely watch movies when I’m flying, but on the plane from Chicago to Dublin two Novembers ago, perusing my options for in-flight entertainment, I paused when I heard the unmistakable hiss that comes after a stylus is dropped right in the groove, and a Northern Ireland accent infused with Woodbine cigarettes: “Once upon a time in the city…