My first memory is of standing in a hospital cot at night, looking over the cot bars to a rocking horse on the other side of the ward. There were coloured rings over the ward door. Utter silence, though there must have been the hum of traffic from the Holloway Road in London. The...
Did I ever tell you about the time, when I was two going on three, I fell out of my crib, in this case a plywood tea chest, and banged my head against the concrete floor? Everyone agreed there was no harm done, but if you have doubts about me or my writing I...
I grew up on the edge of a wetland meadow or Callows. The Callows was a wonderful place to get away to, a kind of outback where I felt I could hear myself think. I could reflect on my surroundings, try to understand the mystery and the magic. Poems only came later, in my...
I was born in Monaghan and grew up in a bewildering land of many-sided political opinion. On the one hand, the ‘North’ lay just seven miles away, but on the other I was rooted in the Irish Republic, the putative ‘South’ of many writers’ dreams. An ability to look both in two directions at...
Marion was born into the heart of Sliabh Luachra, County Kerry. The visiting customs and traditions of her family and neighbours stimulated Marion’s curiosity for the written and spoken word. The memory of these rituals in the Parlours of her youth was reason enough to re-create a similar atmosphere some twenty years later in...