When a friend tells me they’re going to Portugal and asks for my Portugal travel tips, an hour passes by before I take a breath.…
During five days in Northern Ireland, you can drink an Old Fashioned in a snug that has outlasted bombs and wars and the turn of…
While at least one other bar (Brazen Head in Dublin) claims the title, all available evidence to date supports Sean’s Bar in Athlone as Ireland’s…
I have started making literary pilgrimages. Last September, I went to Archer City, Texas, to see Larry McMurtry’s Temple of Books and the landscape that…
Laurel Villa: A Night in the Seamus Heaney Room Laurel Villa is a family-run guesthouse. Ring the doorbell when you arrive. You’ll be greeted warmly,…
“A poem is, among other things, a process of coming to for the first time in a place which nevertheless feels like home ground.” –…
We arrived in Belfast late in the afternoon, on the first Sunday of November, after a busy day along the Causeway Coastal Route. Hotel Europa’s…
Titanic Belfast offers a full story, from the shipyard where the world’s most famous ocean liner was built to the recovery of parts of the…
Why Reserve a Snug at the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast? I learned what a snug was in a college English Lit class while explicating…
Monthly Literary Date: Acorn Bookshop & The Finnish Bistro Life is short, so I have decided to live out part of my dream existence by…