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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 the U.K. (1928), got banne
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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 slammed to rel
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Unnatural (Braided Essay)

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This essay was first published in The Lowell Review , 2023.     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.   *** Unnatural  The Aran jumper is a style of  jumper   (sweater) that takes its name from the  Aran Islands  off the west coast of Ireland . . .  The Aran stitches have a multitude of interpretations and symbolic meanings.  1   In that tiny room, Sister G. said, “Now, I’m really worried about you two.”   As she said it, I could smell the nun's breath—that sugary, confectionary smell that, every lunchtime, wafted from the kitchen windows of that small-town convent in south County Mayo.  It was 1976, and “you two” were my best friend Pauline* and me.  At 14 and a half, I was a year-plus younger than all of my convent-school classmates. Now, standing there in her navy-blue school uniform, Pauline cocked her chin and sai
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