This is my last blog post! Eep! I’m aware that “eep” is not technically a word, and SpellCheck is equally aware of the fact, but it’s really the only onomatopoeic way I can think of to describe the extremely conflicting emotions that I’m having right at the moment. Do I want to leave Armagh? Absolutely […]

For those of you not familiar, my adoration of the word “swag” is marginally inappropriate. I use it to describe things that may or may not actually have swag, from a car I pass while walking down the road to a particularly impressive sandwich. But after presenting this afternoon at the JHISS in front of […]

Day two of the JHISS festival is coming to a close, and I really can’t be enthusiastic enough about it. In the past twelve hours, I’ve had: a lengthy chat and literary discussion with the incomparable Nessa O’Mahoney, a poetry reading by Penelope Shuttle that made me feel like I was peering into the inner […]

I’ve just arrived back at the hostel after day one of the 26th Annual John Hewitt International Summer School. I know that as a writer, it’s my job to sum up overwhelming experiences in brief, pithy phrases, but I’m having trouble with this one. Perhaps just because the day was just so… so unbelievable. The things that […]

They say to write for your audience. They say a lot of things that I don’t necessarily listen to. I don’t write for my audience, I write considering the possibility that I might someday have an audience. When I sit down to write a story-slash-short-fiction-piece-slash-novella-explosion, my prime source of motivation is the nugget of a […]

This prompt feels strange to me, because the last time I was asked to write about how I felt about a play and why, it was a trick question. Going into my personal preferences and reactions lost me practically all the available points on the question. “Which one did you like and why?” is, in […]

The rehearsal process. For a fiction writer who’s never even been in a school play before, it’s incredibly strange. Before coming to Armagh, I wasn’t particularly up on my dramatic reading. As far as plays went, I was well-versed in Shakespeare and had read a few other dramas: The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, […]

Do any of the characters in The Beauty Queen of Leenane have clear-cut objectives? Certainly, but after reading the play my first impression was that their only objective was to be as cruel and destructive to one another as possible. There’s a note of honesty to this: human experience, after all, is colored with cruelty […]

How do you reduce a seventy-page plus tale into a haiku? You cheat a little and write multiple haiku and hope that’s okay. Girl without father Father without direction Reconciled or lost? What can we learn here? Answers are harder to find with silent questions. Oh, and one more thing. I like to insert some […]

“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, […]