An ‘Irish goodbye’ is a colloquial term for ghosting, or leaving a gathering without saying goodbye. Putney didn’t do this; instead, we celebrated our final day in country by giving students time to put finishing touches on their final reading selections, to finally source gifts for those…
Here begins one of two retroactive blog posts to catch you up on the tail end of Putney Ireland 2015! Especially handy if your now-returned students are too exhausted to put all the wonders of their travel into words. Blogging is pretty challenging from Inishbofin due…
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes: “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign,…
Saturday in Dublin calls for an authentic market experience, so we took our gang to the Temple Bar Food Market for a leisurely lunch-stroll through local vendor stalls. Things we ate: giant Irish oysters, pulled pork with roast potatoes and gravy, marinated goat kebabs, smoked…
Today we writers got out of dodge, taking the DART to nearby Howth: a harbor village immortalized by, you guessed it, James Joyce, in both Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses. Fresh air, light rain, incoming tide, swarms of seagulls: just the respite from urban life that our students needed, and a great…
Guest post by student writer Isabel A.: Hi! It is a rainy day in Dublin, but it has been full of writing, walking, and experiencing the city. We spent two hours this morning reading and writing in our workshop groups. Afterwards, we went to an…
How would you spend a rainy day in Dublin? Veronica’s workshop started at the Hugh Lane gallery, home to an eclectic collection curated largely by Lane, including pieces named in his unwitnessed codicil to move works from The National Gallery in London. Students wrote ekphrastic prose and bricolage…
“The mimic warfare of the evening became at least as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they…
Things our students accomplished today, in a form following Lisel Mueller’s terrific poem “Curriculum Vitae”: 1. Maintained morale despite overshooting Glasnevin Cemetery by about half a mile (uphill). Upside: we got to take directions from a very kind Irish man with a sweet German Shepherd. 2. Wrote and shared…
At orientation, we prompt students to consider the myriad differences between encountering a new country as a traveler, versus as a tourist: cultivating receptivity to new experiences, respecting in-country customary practices, minding their often overstuffed backpacks on narrow city sidewalks, etc. Both of our workshop groups…