PRAISE    FOR    ”LOVERS’ HOLLOW ” &   “A DANCE IN TIME”

  • “Beautifully realised… Ross is an evocative writer.” (Irish Times)
  • “Wild..gamey… John McGahern meets Maeve Binchy.” (Irish Independent)
  • “Crafted with the skill of a veteran…the suspense is built with perfection.” (RTE Guide)
  • “Infinitely rewarding…superb.”(BOOKBAG.CO.UK)
  • “A riveting story…vividly brought to life.” (EMIGRANT ONLINE)
  • “An incredible debut that will have the reader absolutely enthralled.” (BIBLIOFEMME)
  • “A Haunting Tale… a gripping story…brilliant.” (EVENING HERALD)

    • “”Hello. I’m Orna Ross and I write novels and nonfiction – books, essays, features, poems and, most recently, blogs and tweets.

    But mainly novels.

    I consider fiction to be the finest artform, endlessly malleable and capacious.  I believe the lies of an invented story are, somehow, what take us closest to truth.

    My novels are big, fat reads that weave past and present, fiction and real life into family murder mysteries.  The first took as its background the Irish Civil War, the second the realtionship between the poet WB Yeats, his muse Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult.

    Creative Intelligence

    This website brings my various activities under one cyber-roof, including the Creative Intelligence Blog. This is not just for writers and artists but for everyone who values the power of the human imagination.  Everyone who knows that imagination is not the icing on life’s cake but the oven in which it’s baked.

    ‘Western’ society in the middle of a creative revolution — akin to the industrial revolution of the 19th century and the information revolution of the 20th – and understanding and expanding our creative intelligence is becoming a requirement.

    Schools, organisations and workplaces are struggling to keep up.  After centuries of suppressing creativity, they are now trying to graft it on to conventional structures, resulting in confusion and overwhelm.

    It’s easier for individuals — once you understand that creative intelligence operates quite differently to how you’ve been trained to meet the world.  The Creative Intelligence Blog aims to deepen your understanding, and experience, of the creative process, not just in writing or art but in all of life.

    To enable you to consciously bring the flashes, flux and flow of creative inspiration to everything from relationships to money.

    The blog offers tools and tips, advice and assignments, ideas and insights — and you can sign up to have it directly delivered to your email inbox: here.

    As a welcome gift, you will also receive a beautifully illustrated, 64-page e-book: Inspiration Meditation: A Guide — for Writers, Artists and Everyone.

    Connection

    All the advice and opinion here is meant to be provisional, the starting point in a conversation.  I distrust dogmatism. I don’t believe in the Author as Oracle.  And the older I get, the less convinced I am by the sound of my own voice in my own ears.

    So I have no wish to raise my own practices into principles for others — only to make available what I have gathered in twenty years of following what I once heard a (very oracular!) writer describe as “the way of the word”.

    I hope you find something worthwhile to take away with you and do call back again – there’s always something new in the blog.