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.
-
Art, Belfast, Breast Cancer Treatment, Cancer Language, Culture of breast cancer, Damian Gorman, Damian Gorman, Memoir, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, Survivorship, The Troubles, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, Writing
Please don’t call me a cancer survivor . . .
“He not being busy born, is busy dying.” ~ Bob Dylan it is the first Sunday in June, a day set aside to celebrate cancer survivorship. Did you know this “treasured worldwide celebration of life” has been on the calendar for twenty-six years? I wonder would I have been any the wiser had I not been diagnosed myself. So who…
-
Art, Artisans, Awesome Women, Cat Stevens, Crafts, Educating Rita, Field of Dreams, Fiftieth Birthday, Memoir, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Seamus Heaney, Willy Russell
if my books could talk to you …
While I have moved past the demise of the typewriter and the tape deck, the resurgence of the turntable reassures me that we will ever be entirely without our books. I love books. I love how they look, the way they feel and smell, and how it was that they came to be permanent fixtures on someone’s bookshelf. A minute or…
-
BRCA genes, Breast Cancer Treatment, Diagnosis, Gene Patenting, Mastectomy, Myriad Genetics, preventive mastectomy
so who owns your genes, Angelina?
Actress Angelina Jolie has made very public her personal and medical choice to undergo a preventive double mastectomy. Untold millions now know about her family history of breast cancer that robbed her of her mother, young at 56, and the mutation of the BRCA1 gene that led her to choose preventive mastectomies. Doing so reduced her risk of developing breast cancer from 87%…
-
Memoir, Mother Daughter Relationship, Mother's Day, Ordinary Things, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
seamus heaney & a dance for mother’s day
This Mother’s Day in America finds me thinking about my mother back in Castledawson, County Derry, a great armful of sheets rescued from the clothes-line before the rain begins to fall. Then, the folding, a precise ritual, my father her partner in a dance handed down from one generation to the next. My daughter learned those same moves not by the…