Poets and Poems: Ailbhe Darcy and "Insistence"

We live in a time when the boundaries between the public and the private have blurred. Wittingly or not, we’ve surrendered traditional notions of privacy to the large social media platforms, not to mention the assorted activities we undertake daily in e-commerce. Everyone, it seems, is in the data collection business – our data. 

Similarly, the lines between the public and private spheres have blurred as well. Politics have reshaped friendships and family relationships. The great issues of the day seem to demand that everyone must take a position and private actions to solve public crises. We hear that immigration, environment, climate change, populists vs. elites, health care, and more require our committed response and action.

Ailbhe Darcy is an Irish poet currently living in Wales. She was educated in the United States and spent time in Germany. She’s attuned to the issues on both sides of the Atlantic. In her new collection Insistence, she’s asking questions. What do these issues mean for my private life? What is my responsibility as a poet? What is my responsibility as a mother of a child?

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Authority, Responsibility, and Dancing Prophet

More than one reader has pointed out to me that Dancing Prophet, the fourth novel in the Dancing Priest series, seems to be talking about the Catholic Church, even though the church is never mentioned in the book. And did I unfairly transfer the Catholic Church’s abuse scandal to the Church of England, even done for a fictional story?

And my answer has been yes, you’re right, but only partially.

I’ve noted before that the original impetus for the story that eventually became Dancing Prophet was the 2008 arrest and conviction Michael Devlin, a pizza shop manager who kidnapped and abused two boys, one of them for years. Devlin lived in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood; his apartment was on my route biking from my home to the beginning of Grant’s Trail. I cycled past the apartments hundreds of times. I likely saw one of the boys on his bike.

I was horrified. The only way to deal with it was to write a story, about 25,000 words, inspired by but unrelated to what happened in Kirkwood. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Michael Beckwith via Unsplash. Used with permission.