“Authentic Irish breakfast, only €7!” “National Leprechaun museum, 700 meters!” “Viking Splash Tours: Helmets Included!” These are my first impressions of Dublin. I’ve been chronicling my first impressions of Northern Ireland for the past two weeks, and the dominant emotion has been one difficult to put into words. The unnerving juxtaposition of rolling green fields, […]

Who is telling the truth in Brian Friel’s Faith Healer? Everyone, and no one at the same time. Judging the truth of the three characters’ stories and anecdotes is nearly impossible, as they all relate the same set of events from different vantage points and present different sets of facts. Perhaps a better question regarding […]

I visited the home page of The Ulster Herald, a Northern Irish newspaper, and scrolled through the front page looking for a prototypically Irish headline to catch my eye. I didn’t have far to look. Midway down the page, I found this gem: “Maginnis ‘Confirmed’ Thatcher Ordered Drumnakilly Shootings.” Even after the death of Margaret […]

Working with Hanna Slattne of the Tinderbox Company in Belfast, we were challenged to create a world that would function with an interior logic of its own. The catch? That world had to include the paranormal. Logical ghosts? Why on Earth not? Working with Kelsey and Kate the Younger (who I expect to sally forth […]

First impressions go a long way, or so they say. (I don’t know who they are, for all that they tend to say a lot of things I use to introduce blog posts.) While I’d spent some time in the United Kingdom prior to beginning the Armagh Project, I knew immediately that I’d crossed more […]

Much can be discerned about a person by the way they pack a suitcase. Lira Devlin, on the other hand, did not have a suitcase. She was not the traveling type; after leaving home for college, she found work in the neo-hipster college city she had lived in for the past four years, and moving […]

Quick disclaimer: I have not been classically trained as a journalist. Or non-classically trained, for that matter. The only “journalism” I’ve ever done (and I use scare quotes liberally) has been personal, reflective work on current events, where I take something that seems interesting and relevant to me and write about what that is and […]

Belfast. A study in contradictions. Barbed wire and murals of masked gunmen stand out against residential buildings where children play in the front yards and flowers grow in window boxes. Poets, still perfectly articulate after three pints (that I counted), reading slam pieces about the exploitation of the working class, unemployment, and sectarian conflict back-to-back […]

Traveling opens your eyes to the small differences that make us, as a people, who we are. In America, I don’t frequently think of myself as American qua American. I sport very little red, white and blue; I personally have not eaten a cheeseburger in probably four years; I get emotional while watching Fourth of […]