In the quiet room of the Armagh City Youth Hostel, the instructors have convened for a very important meeting: there is a bottle of cherry wine that must be consumed. There’s one problem: there’s no corkscrew in the hostel and it’s after 6PM in Armagh! After much consideration, they’re heading off to McAnerney’s, the Catholic […]

I think I’ve been procrastinating on writing these blog posts because I want to refuse to believe everything has happened already. I don’t want to process the experience and understand the end. It aches to reflect on the impact of these past few weeks. It aches to think of Sunday. It aches to realize the […]

You mean it’s over? This Sunday, we leave Northern Ireland and return to the States.  It’s as if I’m returning to another life in a parallel universe; everything here feels familiar and yet noticeably different.  When I go home, coins will be disused, debit cards will work more often, I’ll be able to drive, and […]

Today, at the John Hewitt International Summer School, my colleagues and I presented the culmination of our month of work in Armagh to a crowd of unsuspecting strangers. I know, right? We were pretty stoked going into it, as you’d expect, since many of us aren’t actors. But, still, filing up the stairs from the […]

I’m obviously a bit behind with blogging but after Saturday and Giant’s Causeway and the beginning of  the very busy John Hewitt Summer School, I’ve been a bit distracted. The festival has begun though and it’s amazing. Admittedly, it is a little intimidating to be surrounded  by so many brilliant people but at the same […]

Day Two of Hewitt Festival was a good deal better than Day One for two reasons. First, while my crime fiction workshop has still to teach me anything new about writing (I’m now convinced that the best and only way to learn about writing is just to do it), it has revealed a great deal […]

It’s that time of the night again where everything is bleary, my fingers are numb from typing two other blog posts, and a sentimental air fills the quiet room of the Armagh City Youth Hostel. I look out the window, and it’s pure dark and I wonder, with the end of my journey rapidly approaching, […]

As promised, in a continuing fit of self-involvement, another blog post in the same night! Part of the Hewitt Summer School is the completion of a workshop that meets three out of the five days and presents its work on the last day of the festival. These workshops cover a variety of writing genres including […]