January 4, 2019 at 11:48 pm (destinations, Links, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, California, Cee Neuner, Fridays, Garden, inspiration, Ireland, photography, Redwood City
Cee Neuner has very interesting prompts. This week’s is MONOTONES. Love it.
Lake Annagmakerrig: 4:30 a.m., 8 November 2018 (Just realized that it’s too light in the photograph for 4:30 a.m. DUH! The photo is time-stamped for California time, which is eight hours ahead of Ireland. The actual time in Ireland when self took the picture was 12:30 p.m.)
It amuses self to think about how the first color that usually comes to mind when one thinks of Ireland is green.
Clouds, Annaghmakerrig: 7:30 a.m. (California time, which means 3:30 p.m. in Ireland), 7 November 2018
Fatsia, Backyard, Redwood City: 11 a.m., 26 September 2018
2 Comments
January 2, 2019 at 5:45 pm (Books, Memoirs, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: causes, essay, inspiration, politics, The New Yorker, wisdom
Self has been subscribing to The New Yorker for over 30 years.
She saves back issues. Obv.
Here’s an excerpt from a Talk of the Town piece published 28 May 2018:
“The Long Fight,” by Amy Davidson Sorkin
- Among the many matters on which congressional Republicans have failed to press Donald Trump, a joke told by a communications aide may not rank particularly high, but it should have been among the easiest to address. This joke came during a White House meeting, after Sen. John McCain announced that he could not vote for Gina Haspel, Trump’s nominee for C.I.A. director because, at her hearing, she would not concede that the agency’s past practice of torture was immoral. “It doesn’t matter,” the aide said. “He’s dying anyway.” Instead of apologizing, the White House launched a hunt for the person who had leaked the remark. Some Republicans expressed outrage, but when G.O.P. senators attended a private lunch with Trump, on Tuesday, the incident wasn’t even mentioned.
After reading the piece, self adds McCain’s The Restless Wave, the book the Senator co-authored with Mark Salter, to her 2019 reading list. In that book, McCain writes
- that he knows that torture can break people, and make them say anything — even tell lies, producing bad intelligence — and that it can rob a person of everything except “the belief that if the positions were reversed, you wouldn’t treat them as they have treated you.”
Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
December 31, 2018 at 6:11 pm (Books, destinations, Links, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Traveling, Weather)
Tags: England, fantasy, inspiration, London, Mondays, Oxford, Philip Pullman, pilgrimage
Much thanks to sonofabeach96 for the prompt, which sent self back to her archive of photographs, taken during her most recent trip:
London Alley, 20 November 2018
Rainy Night, London, 20 November 2018
Wolvercote, the Ruins of Godstow Abbey in the distance, 16 November 2018: Philip Pullman’s LA BELLE SAUVAGE led self here. (When’s Book 2, The Secret Commonwealth, coming out? Been waiting a long, long time!)
3 Comments
November 14, 2018 at 4:19 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Filipino Writers, Links, Places, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Cee Neuner, inspiration, Ireland, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, writing process
Cee Neuner, thank you for coming up with such interesting prompts.
When Self Can’t Sleep: 3 a.m. in her cottage at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig
Late October: Walking back to the cottage after dinner in the Main House, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
The cottages at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig make maximum use of natural light.
Self was able to keep working on Blue Water, Distant Shores, her novel-in-progress about 18th century Philippines (As of now, 322 pages)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
November 13, 2018 at 9:19 pm (Books, destinations, Lists, Places, Recommended, Traveling)
Tags: fantasy, Garden, His Dark Materials, inspiration, novel, Oxford, Philip Pullman
All locations in Oxford (or adjoining):
His Dark Materials locations:
- Exeter College (Jordan College in the books)
- The Bodleian Library
- Oxford Botanical Garden (Lyra and Will’s Bench is here)
- The Pitt-Rivers Museum
- The Covered Market
- Christ Church
- Story Museum (to see Philip Pullman’s head-of-chapter drawings from His Dark Materials)
The Book of Dust locations:
- Walk Paths Along the Isis
- Port Meadow
- Wolvercote (a 1-hour walk from Port Meadow): The Trout and the nearby priory
- Jericho area: Juxon Street and The Butterfly Tattoo
- The Ashmolean
- The White Horse Pub next to Blackwell’s
It was a spectacularly beautiful day. Self started out from Oxford City Centre and made it all the way to the Oxford Botanic Garden:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
October 17, 2018 at 3:30 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Recommended)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, discoveries, inspiration, Ireland, Irish writers, poetry, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
from the poem Return Visit (in the collection I Bailed Out at Ardee, which I discovered in a bookshelf in my unit at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig)
There’s a sign,
you that’s one for signs,
you’ve climbed the mountain,
gone into the wood
to touch the stones —
the stones can’t be found.
Scan the view.
Weigh the lean
mid-winter air.
That sapper’s mark
has its eye on me.
I stand there years,
then know-nothing,
Leave a Comment
October 14, 2018 at 12:02 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Places, Sundays, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: England, flash fiction, history, inspiration, Literary Magazines, memories, mysteries, short story, Stonehenge, Wigleaf
In 2014, self went to see Stonehenge.
She signed up for a small-group tour, the only one allowed on the site towards sunset. All the big tour buses had left. The guide, a retired military officer, led the group across a sheep meadow.
This is unquestionably the best approach. It allows the view to unfold gradually. You are reminded that this was how people, in time immemorial, must have approached the monument: in procession. Self could hardly contain her excitement at her first glimpse of the pillars of stone.
The mystery of the site has stayed with her. The fact that no human habitations were ever built around it. What was it used for?
From this vantage point, we could clearly see the jagged outline of the stones, just above the rise.
Well before she saw Stonehenge, she’d written about it in a piece called Stonehenge/Pacifica, published in Wigleaf, 2012.
It was a dream I had, some restless night. One of those weeks or months or years when we were worried about money.
But when were we ever not worried?
First there was the mortgage, and then the two.
And then your mother got sick, and your father died.
And my mother I think developed Alzheimer’s, but we never mentioned it.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
October 14, 2018 at 9:22 am (Artists and Writers, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Holidays, short story collections, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Bluestem, dystopia, inspiration, Ireland, science fiction, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
Self is going to try, while she’s at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, pulling all her science fiction together into one collection.
What to call it?
She’s toying with the idea of making this the first story:
THE FREEZE (published in Bluestem)
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Redwood, Oak, Laurel, Manzanita, Pine
Thanksgiving was just a week ago. I served brined turkey with oatmeal rolls and my special fig-and-rice stuffing.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
2 Comments
October 11, 2018 at 2:44 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Places, Traveling, Women Writers)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, inspiration, Ireland, seasons, Tyrone Guthrie Centre
10 October 2018
4 Comments
October 11, 2018 at 12:52 pm (Explorers, Filipino Writers, plans, Traveling, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Annaghmakerrig, artists residency, Bellingham Review, fantasy, inspiration, interviews, Ireland, short story, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, work-in-progress, writing process
Map of Oceania
Self began this story on her very first visit to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig and has added to it, bit by bit, over the years. She was in Unit # 4 and there was an old maritime book in one of the cupboards.
She doesn’t worry about finishing this story. It will always be “in progress” — it will always exist in middle time, like her visits to this part of Ireland and beautiful Annaghmakerrig.
Here are the opening sentences:
There is something singularly impressive and affecting to the imagination when, in a perfectly calm tropical sea, under a vertical sun, one is able to look down through a depth of thousands of fathoms of clear water and see on the ocean bottom glimpses of the City and all its strange and wonderful objects. The discovery of a populous City existing under fathoms of ocean is an occurrence with no precedent in the annals of exploration, one that overshadows even the discovery of the Americas by Columbus.
Self’s stories are always birthed this way: with the opening sentences. No matter how many drafts her stories go through, the opening sentences never change. If the sentence is strong, it is like a fine, big engine that can power her through — even 20 or 25 pages later — all the way to the end. See the interview she gave to Bellingham Review, the Contributor Spotlight that accompanied their publication of self’s story, Ice. (The first four or five paragraphs of Ice were unchanged from first draft)
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Leave a Comment
« Older entries
