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Blogging, Diary, Educating Rita, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland Culture, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney, The Troubles, Themes of childhood, Writing
it does a body good: why I write
The third annual Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge begins today, and I’m in. As a disclaimer of sorts, lest I falter on the challenge to write thirty posts in thirty days, let’s consider this the April Fool’s Day post. That way, I’ll always have an out. So why do I write about my health online? What was it that got me started? I suppose it was the cancer. But it was also growing up in Northern Ireland. Ironic, when I stop to consider the teenage version of myself, slouched over a desk at Antrim Grammar School, twirling her hair and whining with unparalleled ennui to her teachers that there’s simply nothing to write about. Be…
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Blogging, Educating Rita, Field of Dreams, Goodfellas, grandmother, Memoir, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Soundtracks of our Lives, The Deer Hunter, The Natural, The Troubles, Themes of Childhood, Versatile Blogger Awards, Writing
Versatile? Moi?
Last July, I got lost on the Internet. As you do. On the way back Home, I bumped into Lesley Richardson, a self-proclaimed unpublished writer. Before long, I discovered that, like me, Lesley has badly behaved hair that she has learned to embrace, a husband, a beautiful teenage daughter, and a cat. She has just turned fifty, as will I in a couple of weeks. We immediately bonded over the shared trauma of life in 1970s Northern Ireland, not because of The Troubles, but because we had curly hair before brilliant minds invented products and tools to tame our stressed tresses and we were relentlessly compared to Crystal Tipps. You could be forgiven…
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words & music for st. patrick’s day every day
I’m a bit ambivalent about St. Patrick’s Day. What is it about March 17th that renders so many people Irish or some version of it that I don’t recall from living the first twenty-seven years of my life in Ireland. Everywhere I turn, there are people bragging about their Irishness, with plastic green bowler hats and/or T-shirts emblazoned with a command for everyone to kiss them. Because they are Irish. Even politicians are suddenly Irish – usually the American kind and definitely not those from a distinct group in Northern Ireland, where I’m from. It amuses me to imagine how many frazzled interns there must be in these United States,…
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My Mother’s Day Stratagem
I have worked in public education long enough that it is not uncommon for me to encounter former students, some of whom are now married with careers and children. It is always surreal to meet these adults who, just a twinkling ago, were writing in their composition books about who they would become when they were all grown up. Likewise, they are incredulous to learn that I am now the parent of a daughter who is older than they were when they were my fifth grade students. Equally perturbed by this scenario and all its implications is my daughter, and I find all of it highly entertaining – my former students…
