First Tree: Great Beech, Fagus Sylvatica, Non native, Seeded around 1860
Writer: Olive Broderick
The Trees of Kilbroney Park is a publication of Light 2000. A copy was mailed to self in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig by her friend, poet Csilla Toldy, who edited the book.
Stay tuned.
Self is closing out 2017 with Tana French, and she is also reading Kelly Creighton’s Bank Hurricane Holiday, a super short story collection set in Northern Ireland.
Place is everything in the writing of these two women. She isn’t finished yet with Creighton’s book (just out from Doire Press) but she finished her first Tana French, earlier today: Broken Harbor. And she’s just started reading The Trespasser.
She’s very late in coming to Tana French, but why. She’s been coming to Ireland for years, if she’d had enough sense, she would have read Ms. French years ago.
Self loves mysteries. She especially loves the mysteries of: Henning Mankell, Morag Joss (only one book), Ruth Rendell, and Karin Fossum.
She thinks her love of mysteries in foreign landscapes began with Peter Hoeg’s mesmerizing Smilla’s Sense of Snow. (And now she writes dystopian fantasy set in snowy landscapes, what a coincidence)
p. 4, The Trespasser:
Who doesn’t know Dublin Castle. Tourist mecca. Now, in her mind, Dublin Castle is the home of the Dublin Murder Squad. Love.
On to p. 5.
Stay tuned.
For this challenge, show us something . . . put to new use.
— Krista, The Daily Post
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
This week’s Daily Post Photo Challenge is DANCE.
And it just so happens that self was having a conversation with a member of her writer’s group, about Diary of a Wimpy Kid and other childhood classics, which led her to remember:
Rostrevor, July 2015.
She was a guest of Csilla Toldy, a poet she met in Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. On her first day in Rostrevor, Csilla took self walking along The Narnia Trail, which led through a magical wood. At intervals along the trail were these strange twig creatures, each caught in the middle of doing a silent dance:
Aren’t they fabulous?
C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He would have loved this trail.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
From Krista on The Daily Post:
To stay optimistic at -30 degrees, I try to imagine spring in full detail: tiny perfect oak leaves sprouting, bird radio increasing in volume, water lapping on red granite as the ice rots and recedes . . .
So, here are three more examples of Optimistic:
David is about to slay Goliath. Self would say that’s being VERY optimistic.
Sign sprouting above self’s head. Indicates the direction she is headed.
Florence was a trip that called on self’s low supply of OPTIMISM and increased it 10-fold (Yes, dear blog readers, it IS possible to begin a trip with low energy and end it with energy to the nth power)
Finally, Csilla Toldy hosted self in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, July 2015. Csilla is a poet, novelist, and documentary filmmaker. We first met at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, 2014. She has written a novel and a collection of poetry, as well as filmed a documentary on the celebration of Bloomsday (June 14) in Dublin and Hungary.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self enjoys doing Photo Challenges. Since she began doing the WordPress Photo Challenge, three years ago, she’s derived much pleaseure in sharing her travel photographs with blog readers. Photographs can say so much more than words can.
This year, she also became an occasional contributor to the Sylvain Landry Photo Challenge. This week’s SL prompt is TRANSPARENCY. Self thought that theme would be a piece of cake, but it wasn’t. She had to go through all her Florence pictures, all her pictures of the Mission in San Francisco, all her pictures of London, until she finally found this picture of a room in filmmaker and poet Csilla Toldy’s house in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland. Self visited Csilla during the Fiddler’s Green Festival, July 2015. It was a lot of fun:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self has never read C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
She has visited Rostrevor, in Northern Ireland. Which, according to Csilla Toldy, a Hungarian poet who lives in Rostrevor, was a place particularly close to C. S. Lewis, a place Lewis has said was the source of much of his inspiration.
The day self arrived in Rostrevor, Csilla took her to The Narnia Trail. This is the first time self had even known there was such a thing.
First, Csilla and self walked through a dark wood.
Then, a great expanse of meadow:
Then, the door of a wardrobe suddenly popped up out of nowhere:
And a number of trees with tiny doors:
And — voila! — Narnia!
Beautiful trail.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
It is high summer in London. Streets awash with tourists. Self is walking around, trying to find pictures for this week’s WordPress Photo Challenge: HALF AND HALF (“This week, share an image that has two distinct halves”)
Incidentally, self was very inspired by this blog today, which has a very long name, in French.
And this is a picture she took when she was in Rostrevor:
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 