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Anahorish, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Anna Deavere Smith, Art, Awesome Women, Great Advice, Human Rights, Justice, Language matters, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Oprah Winfrey, Peace, Phoenix, Politics, Prop 300, Punishment, Seamus Heaney, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Theater
a walk in other people’s shoes, other people’s words
Every afternoon at 3 0’clock, for the first twenty-five years of my American life, I sat down on my couch and watched Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It was Oprah who taught me Gavin de Becker’s “The Gift of Fear” and later, if ever I were kidnapped, that I should remember Sanford Strong’s Rule #1: to never let myself be taken…
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Anahorish, Anahorish, Antrim, Arizona, Bellaghy, Borders, British Army, Broagh, Castledawson, Dennis O'Driscoll, Fosterling, From the Republic of Conscience, grandmother, IRA, Language matters, Loss, Love, Memoir, Memoir, Memory, Mother Daughter Relationship, Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Culture, Ordinary Things, Personal Helicon, Poetry, Politics, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Tony Parker, Writing
back to Anahorish ~ Seamus Heaney’s ‘first hill in the world’
Our poet, Seamus Heaney, will be buried in Bellaghy tomorrow evening, his body brought home from Dublin to rest next to the grave of his little brother, Christopher, whom many of us know from “Mid-Term Break,” a poem now learned by heart by Irish children in schools North or South of the border. The first time, I heard Mid-Term Break, was…
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Birthdays, bombing, IRA, John Hewitt, Loughinisland, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Omagh, Peace, Sectarianism, The Good Friday Agreement, The Peace Process, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, UVF, W.B. Yeats
omagh – this is our life
In the summer of 1998, I took my new baby daughter home to Northern Ireland, my lovely, tragic Northern Ireland. It was my mother’s sixtieth birthday, and between my father, my brother, and a handful of relatives who could keep a secret (an impressive trait in rural County Derry) we planned a “This is Your Life” style surprise. It was delicious, knowing…
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Belfast, Bullying, Damian Gorman, Eleventh Night Bonfires, Family, Friendships, Jilly Cooper, Memoir, Northern Ireland Culture, Sectarianism, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood
skipping out of northern ireland – an incendiary subject
“On yonder hill there stands a lady Who she is, I do not know. All she wants is gold and silver, All she wants is a handsome beau . . .” My breath quickens with every tentative jump over the skipping rope, its ends twirled by two girls who are singing about the lady standing on the hill. I am wearing…
