Novels, Poetry & Creativism
We're all going to die, we all know it. As Mary Oliver puts it in her poem, The Summer Day, “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?”
Hell yes, Mary, yes.
The poem then asks: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?”
That is just the kind of question I've
I consider Glendalough, Co Wicklow, Ireland, to be one of the most 
inspiring places on earth. It's where Iseult Gonne is buried and where some chapters of But A Dream, the third book in my WB Yeats trilogy are set. I spent as much time as possible there when I lived in Ireland, especially while researching that novel.
This poem is a tribute to all that was given to me there.
Time Out At Glendalough
After you have walked the ruins
of seven churches,
tilted back your head to seek the top
of the tower that took
the rounded point
of Kevin’s steeple
and thrust it up,
three times as high,
from earth to sky to mark
the ground you walk upon
as holy;
after you have circled green lake paths
that urge you up, then further up,
to top the crashing
waterfall, then
higher;
after you’ve been stopped and stopped again,
by sight of ice-sliced mountain cut to valley
its mesh of rivers and falls,
rushing to empty all into two, long lakes
that somehow take this ceaseless gush
and hold it
still,
you will know
the allure of here,
as of all the places we call sacred,
is the silence.
You will have heard
the voice
of your own blood
dropping into
the deep.
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I see a reader on amazon.co.uk has dubbed the contemporary story in A Dance in Time (Izzy's story) to be “New Age”.
No, no, no.
I am not New Age. I never took on New Age beliefs for precisely the same reason that I dropped my
Last night, I said goodbye to my “Get it Written” class who, since January last, have been beavering away at the task of completing a book.
Some are now finished, some have completed first drafts, some have not got quite as far as they hoped when they started — but a core group has worked steadily towards their goal and are well along the way.
One of the handouts they took away with them was “Where Writers Go Wrong”. In my experience as a writing mentor and literary agent, one
Everybody says you are supposed to fight cancer. Newspapers carry stories of brave battles against the disease. And Western medicine pulls out its biggest guns for the war – chemotherapy, radical surgery, radiation…
I am having all those treatments and more — but the battle metaphor just doesn't work for me.
When I was diagnosed, I had reached a point of my life where I was learning to love what is. To accept that whatever was happening in a particular moment was just as it ought to be — however much I might wish it otherwise. To understand that what I called problems were often blessings in disguise.
This hardwon learning had me happier than I had ever been in my life.
So when
It's the launch of “A Dance in Time” tonight and I have almost no hair.
I have almost no hair because I have been having cancer treatment and last week, it started to fall out. In clumps. (Great timing!)
So what to do? I could wear a wig. I could wear a scarf. I could wear a hat.
Except wigs are
Beyond Muslim, Hindu, Atheist, Christian, Buddhist, Jew… Beyond socialism, nationalism, feminism, capitalism, tribalism, communism… Beyond power, politics, money, identity, sex … Read more
