“The View from Here”


“The View from Here” gives me a chance to ponder Irish literature, history, landscape, and culture from the perspective of a residency—albeit a short one of only twelve months—in Dublin, where I look out on the city and on Ireland from a southwest-facing window in the Grand Canal Dock area. Over the coming year, I expect everything I think I know about this country to change—or at least to grow new roots and shoots.

This blog is by no means a scholarly text but very much a personal scrapbook of ideas, observations, and images. I also expect it to be a lot about me—that has already happened in the posts I’ve written. Living outside your own country far from family, friends, and daily responsibilities and comforts shakes up your world in interesting and sometimes unsettling ways. No doubt I will have a lot to say about all that, as well. Already I’ve come to love the freedom of the blog form: by nature, blogs are short (compared to other things I write), eclectic, multimodal, and immediate. There is no editor to cramp my style and cut my best phrases, but there’s also no editor to catch my mistakes, so please forgive me in advance. I will include links and a list of websites for those who want to dig deeper.

Above all, thanks for reading.