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Can Books Convert Us?

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  For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her  author website .  © Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission.  *** Can Books Convert Us?   I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I lost my homophobia. It was 1983--three decades before my native and adopted countries both achieved historic marriage equality victories. It was a Saturday morning.  I was lying in my single bed in a third-floor bedroom in my rented flat over the town butcher shop in the Irish midlands.  A year earlier, at age 20, I had graduated from college and moved from my Dublin campus to that one-street town and my first "real" job as a primary school teacher.   That flat was always freezing, so that Saturday, I snuggled under my duvet to finish my current library book, the “ The Well of Loneliness .” “The Well” is an autobiographical lesbian novel that, once published in ...
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A Faithful Heart - An expressive writing micro essay

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  Photo Credit: Šárka Krňávková on Unsplash This expressive writing piece was published in "Who Am I Today?" The book is an anthology of 40 women's writing from the Women's Writing Circle, Center for Health and Human Rights, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts.    For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her  author website .  © Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission.  *** A Faithful Heart  Today I am sitting on the sea wall watching four swans and watching the hours and minutes until it’s time to drive my husband to the hospital for another outpatient surgery. A new swan glides into view.   Now they are five. Today will be the fifth hospital trip. From those other visits I remember silly things, like that Saturday-night ER waiting room where none of us met each other’s eyes. Or that snack machine where the potato chips jammed and that I body s...
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London A - Z: A Memoir (Hermit Crab Essay)

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  This essay was published in New Hibernia Review,  Volume 27, Issue 3, 2023.  A previous, shorter version was published in Litro, UK.    For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her  author website .  © Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission.  *** London A - Z: A Memoir   Alsation.  That first night in London, you opened your bedroom door to find a dog lying on that landing, just beyond the threshold. Alsatian . As you stood there in your floral nightie, the doggie breed name dinged through your sleepy brain, conjuring those photos from your old school textbook chapters on Nazi-occupied Germany.   Bladder. This dog thing happened in autumn 1986, just after your twenty- fourth birthday. Even though you were in your nightie and your bladder was full, this wasn’t really your bedroom. Instead, that second-floor...
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