An Idyll
By Mo Conlan
A certain Professor L’Orange
lived quite surrounded by bogs
and hillocks in western Wales
studying flora, fauna, and snails.
He had no nearby kin nor wife,
truly a strange and solitary life.
His hair was chestnut, unruly,
but not unduly; his cheeks
rosy from weather, he was
stooped, not by age, but passion
to study each fern and feather.
L’Orange arose in his self-built hovel,
each morning, toting shovel,
magnifier, other digging tools
and bags...
One of the funniest authors I know, maybe THE funniest, wittiest, best is P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse was prolific right up to the end of his long life. I like to go to sleep listening to his Jeeves and Wooster stories on my computer.
Wodehouse sets many of his stories in a bygone era when upper class young British men had valets and spent time at their clubs avoiding gainful employ and marriage. But the humor and the characters he creates are timeless.
Wodehouse creates fully realized worlds...
They were thrown out of their homes, off their lands – starved out, beaten out. For many, it was leave or die and those healthy enough and brave enough made the journey to America. The Irish.
In the middle to latter decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th, more than 7 million Irish came to American. Their descendants number more than 40 million.
The coffee table book “Out of Ireland – The Story of Irish Emigration to America,” by Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, published by...
I look out my window at the beautiful snow on the ground, falling flakes light as confectioner’s sugar.
I have loved this wintertime with so much snow. Seeing photos online of snow scenes from around the country and the world. Snow everywhere.
I love how sunshine paints blue shadows of trees on the snow canvas. I love my trees as if they were people – nice, wise people with only good intent.
Still, I wonder why this snow- so heavy, so cold, so everywhere this particular winter. Recent winters...
I belong to an online writers class, UnMute, taught by Ann Randolph. I meet other writers from around the world there. (Next session begins Jan. 12) The class manifesto is supportiveness for the writer, for the writing, and for growing your creative voice. One exercise we do is to write a kind of pep talk to ourselves at the final class of a session. I think this is a good idea for any writer at year end. Become a cheerleader for your writing!
Dear Mo:
You decided to not be afraid of your...
Writing a novel has its own pleasures and pains. It takes a long, long time. I relished writing my novel The Lost Books-Romance and Adventure in Cornwall. I’m having a harder time with its sequel. Poetry is not necessarily easier, though it is much shorter. One reason I am so fond of poetry is that it can tell a large “story” in just a few stanzas.
I once interviewed poet and novelist Marge Piercy (prolific author of many books of both genres.), who told me she writes poetry to discover what...
It’s hard to get back into writing my novel while I am at the cottage in Michigan. Partly I am procrastinating at writing a difficult scene – but mostly I want to breathe in Michigan.
The air smells of nothing false. The wind shushes through the trees, a musical backdrop; no other sounds, nothing but nature. Birds chime in with chirps and cheeps and sounds without names. One is a dolorous bell chiming. The owl that lives in the woods nearby?
Into this nature wonderland has just come a...
I will look for that new moon outside my bedroom window tonight. A new Moon even as I grow old. Old in numbers, that is. Inside I am still much as I was, blessed by the writing that flows through my life and connects the younger me to now. A river of goodness and “me-ness.”
Old in the sense of being long-lived brings more experiences and wisdom to write about – lost loves and broken hearts, bottom-of-a crumpled-paper-bag despair. And triumphs.
One thing old does not mean is stopping. Not...
Author’s note: I have done research using todays’ tools, including Wikipedia (to which I contribute) and Google AI as well as print history books, etc.
The Tudor Era was both the best of times and the worst, to borrow lines from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.
The Tudor era saw a British Renaissance, with advances in farming and other technologies, the arts, shipbuilding and empire-making. It was a time of new thinking about what it means to be human and what it takes to be in harmony with God....
I wrote this in honor of my granddaughter Sydney, who this week begins her first teaching job with Teach for America, in an inner-city school in Chicago.
A teacher brought us to America… Our great-something Grandfather Stephen Cook was a Hedgerow Teacher in mid-19th century Ireland. This was a terrible era for the Irish. England had subjugated them to an extreme degree – even forbidding them to educate their children, or to wear their national color green. How mean could they be!
Men and women...
I have a new website up and running! https://moconlanwordsandart.com
And I have a new audio edition of my book "The Lost Books-Romance and Adventure in Tudor Times."
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Books-Romance-Adventure-Tudor/dp/1639888004
(You can also listen for free on some sites, including Hoopla.)
I got to this high point with a lot of help from my friends. Author and fellow member of the Monday Morning Writers Group in Cincinnati Richard Hoskin, (...
I could say I do not wish to be famous as a writer, but that would be a half-truth. Growing up I kept my brighter lights under a bushel barrel – middle of a “gang of seven” siblings.
I was the quiet one. Maybe I was a bit famous for that. My father saw me as I was – a quiet one, smart, a voracious reader. With affection, he would sometimes call me Little Mouse.
Inside my mouse-ness, unrecognized by me, I was burning for recognition I believe. So when I extricated myself from my brown wool...
It was by accident that I wrote a novel set in the Tudor era. I was a member of an online writers group, called Unmute – which I recommend.. The prompt was to write about a holiday song. It did not interest me. Too serious.
Then I had a second thought: instead of dreary as piped-in Christmas music, maybe I could make this a fun write. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” came to mind. It was already fun and silly.
I imagined a scenario where a suitor sends over-the-top gifts to his beloved. She...
I am a poet, and a novelist; but I also am a journalist, and sometimes these literary impulses do not jibe. The poet wants beautiful language and metaphor. The journalist wants simplicity, clarity, facts. The novelist wants to take a long scary journey into Story, find her way out again to produce a book.
Recently, I wrote an essay about a prose poem, a prompt in my writing group. The poem reads, in part: …He said, every object sings. He said, if I built a room it might give me an A-flat and...
