Abstract
On a fine June day in 1995, Ruth Carr, an Irish poet and editor, picked me up at the Belfast bus terminal. As she patiently cradled her seven-month-old baby, Amy, I argued with the counter clerk about where to store my bag. Not in the station, he assured me, because, Ye just don't know what's in a wee bag, now do ye? My duffel finally landed across the street at the Europa, the most frequently bombed hotel in Europe. This was not my first confrontation with lingering traces of the bloody, thirty-year troubles, the contemporary cap on centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Yet I kept expecting rifts to heal before my eyes. This was the fabled first summer of peace, following cease-fire declarations by both the Irish Republican Army and Protestant Loyalist/Unionist groups. I'd arrived in Ireland several weeks earlier for a six-month residency at the Verbal Arts Centre (VAC) in Derry, an ancient walled city on the country's northwest border with the Republic.' With a grant from the British Council, I'd come to research women's lives, but I had no plan for what that might entail. From my childhood in Philadelphia to my adult home in the Pacific Northwest, I had learned Irish history and literature through men: Michael Collins, Robert Emmett, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Contemporary news coverage of the conflict in the North gave us notable names like Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley.
Published Version
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