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“The Last Lines of Henry Thoreau and Yeats’ Ring-Stained Copy of Walden”
For the month of July, here on Trasna, we will be highlighting some of the literary and artistic events cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In early July of each year, The Henry David Thoreau Society holds its Annual Gathering. This year’s theme was “DIVERSITY.” While an ever-important subject, it could hardly have proven more timely. Ibram X. Kendi, a leading scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America, was to be the Keynote Speaker. Trasna editor Christine O’Connor was scheduled to deliver a paper on Thoreau and the anti-Irish views of the 19th century. The following essay, however, is about what ties us together, the commonality of our experiences, and the impact writers…
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“The Painter on his Bike” and Other Offerings
by Enda Wyley This month Trasna is featuring writers participating in Words Ireland National Mentoring Programme. Every year, 22 emerging writers are selected for the program in the areas of literary fiction, creative non-fiction, children’s/YA fiction, and poetry. Each writer is paired with a mentor. Featured this week is poet Enda Wyley, an accomplished Irish literary figure, who served as a mentor for Martina Dalton in the Words Ireland Programme, 2019. Of participating in Words Ireland, and mentoring Dalton, who appeared in Trasna earlier this month, Wyley writes: “‘Martina Dalton is possessed of her own distinctive poetic voice, which is intelligent, imaginative, often surreal – and always driven by a fierce commitment to the poem itself and the journey…
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Even the rainbows are social distancing
by Alan McMonagle May 22, 2020 With wry humour, Irish novelist Alan McMonagle writes of the challenges of living through COVID-19. Somewhere in Bedfordshire, England a ninety-nine-year-old man is hobbling lengths of his garden to raise money for the UK’s National Health Service, and here I am, sitting on my backside, staring at my fingernails and wondering where I’ve left the bar of soap I bought. There must be other ways to stop myself going out of my mind. And I can’t help thinking that old codger in Bedfordshire, England has the better idea. So far he has raised eleven million. Eleven million. In nine days. All I’ve managed to…
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Pasteur and Uncle Paddy
by Margaret O’Brien Trasna editor Margaret O’Brien’s timely piece,“Pasteur and Uncle Paddy,” is about a deadly virus, her great-grandmother Mary, and one of the world’s most famous scientists. Today the world is in the grip of a pandemic because of COVID-19, the deadly Coronavirus. Although it has claimed many lives and disrupted economic and social life around the globe, it is not the deadliest virus. That distinction goes to another, the bullet shaped rabies virus, which kills nearly 100 percent of its hosts, both human and animal. Unlike the Coronavirus, which spreads by droplet, the rabies virus needs a host animal and it must cross from animal to human through a bite. ~~~ It was Ireland in the summer of 1898. After…
