Sharon Keely

So the Hamptons and NYC night scene haven't changed in 40 years. Great read, TY Rob Franklin.

This, along with much else, struck a chord:

'But exuberant expressions of rage seemed to him mere admissions of one's vulnerability, the power the other still held. He'd withhold them.'

Dylan Moran: ‘You are coming to me, Barry, asking me for a chronology of my emotional history? Is that what you really want?’ Do people have a skewed idea of who Dylan Moran actually is?

www.independent.ie/entertainmen...

BE to DM: People want to see dog shit on the road and step in it, so they can be annoyed or offended

DM: ...People really, really wanting to say who they are by screaming at whatever shit they’ve stepped in and saying: ‘I’m not that.’

YouTube video by Farm Aid Arlo Guthrie - Deportee (Live at Farm Aid 2000)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtig...

I love the Paula Meehan portrait!

As were you Wendy!

I look forward to you doing more of it Jackie. Everyone around me yesterday agreed, you did a great job!

Thank you @jackielynam.bsky.social for your excellent chat with @wednesdayerskin.bsky.social and Donal Ryan at Write By The Sea today. The perfect light but firm, well-informed touch!

The power of the novel... I'd read/heard plenty about Ireland's 'mother and baby home' genocides, but it took this book for me to really feel the enormity of it.

'The further the girl was from poverty, the closer her child was to living. Death wasn't random.'

My aunt's child lived.

'We had more children ... so as not to have to spend so much time together. Had we liked each other less we'd have had four, five. There's nothing like love's dilution to keep things in proportion.'

I couldn't put this down... I first heard about American nurses in the Vietnam War from a really sweet lady (a volunteer at my local library) who served there. In awe that she lived through such horror and somehow regained her lovely disposition in the years since.

Great review by Conor Crummey:

stingingfly.org/review/the-b...

And so close to Molly's in Letterfrack!

I feel like I know this pub...

'Brendan drank in McCrink's every night where the clientele were already dead to themselves, their elegies long written in the heartbreak of their wives and children and their own brokenness.'

Drone by Solmaz Sharif Drone :    somewhere I did not learn  mow down  or  mop up :    somewhere I wouldn’t hear  your father must come...

Drone by Solmaz Sharif
www.divasofverse.com/2019/02/dron...

Lovely story.

Everyone Still Here, Liadan Ní Chuinn

An Interview with Liadan Ní Chuinn — TOLKA by Catherine Hearn

www.tolkajournal.org/read-online/...

I had a theory on who Liadan might be... less certain after reading this, they come across as much more polite than the writer I had in mind. Great stories, the gut-wrenching devastation, quietly told, stays with you.

I will now! Didn't know he had one. Thanks Eleanor.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.
Unquestionably the most useful book for writers I’ve read in a long time.

Taking a little break from Wimbledon

No session moths??

But no session moths spotted??

Thanks for posting Peter, must visit. Had to look up that house, the whole scene looks so Greek/Turkish! www.causewaycoastalroute.com/Newton-Penpr...

'He took off his hat and hung it on a peg in her entrance-hall which was the shape and size of a small kitchen table, and from the ceiling of which hung a crystal chandelier.'

Pulled this off my shelf a couple of nights ago. Lovely, sweet stories, set in Cumbria's becks and fells, perfect antidote to the daily news. Thank you Jane Gardam, may you rest in peace.

Delighted to have a piece in Issue 23 here, at p.43
www.thewellsstreetjournal.com/past-issues-1

'Cynics see social problems, but [no] solutions. [I]f you think our problems [are] who we are, why do anything about it? So cynics end up voting less often ... protesting less often ... people who benefit from a population that doesn't trust itself are often autocrats and authoritarians.'

Ouch!

That makes sense - they're a hardy bunch!

Congratulations!

'the philosophers were wrong and the meaning of life is not that it ends but that your one job on earth is to make everyone as miserable as your own sad self.' - a piece on our current leadership??

No - it's from Aria Aber's lyrical novel, anyone who was a wild child will love this, set in Berlin: