ORNA ROSS

Historical Fiction

Poetry

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To Sligo for St Patrick's Day

It looks like I'm going to be moving to London in the summer.  I have lots of places I want to say ‘Goodbye' to in Ireland before I leave. Tomorrow, St Patrick's Day, I'm off to Sligo.   Yeats country.   Sligo became very important to me over    the past few...

On Book Titles

I learned this morning, while reading the preface to Ayn Rand's Anthem, that its original title wasThe Ego.  Apparently Rand always took   a working title that was blunt and explicit, one which, for her own clarity, named the central issue of the book. I like this...

Here

I've come here for healing. I always have even when I was better than I am now. Here I am twice-times ill: the cancer they cut out, the treatment they say will be my cure. Nausea fatigue, and breathlessness — numbness in my fingers and my feet and beyond, or...

Ocean Pulse

Rising, curling, foam unfurling, waves of cold Salema sea, Next one coming, meet it running, plunge into the safe beneath.    Behind crashing, hard sand-smashing that could knock me to my knees, Here you hold me – Look! I’m floating! – blood-beat drumming...

How Free is Your Thinking?

I love the term Freethinker.  It's the name that most closely approximates my own approach to matters of meaning but I'm leery of the associations it has gathered in around itself. A freethinker, according to Dictionary.com (rapidly replacing the OED in my affections)...

Interview by Susan Daly, Irish Independent

  By Susan Daly Áine McCarthy who writes under the pseudonym of Orna Ross, has a knack for unlocking hidden potential. As a writing teacher, she developed a method to help her students tap into their deeply buried creativity. As a former journalist, she pushed...

Questioning the Answer

Gertrude Stein's famous quote – “There ain't no answer.  There ain't going to be any answer.  There never has been an answer.  That's the answer.” – has long been a favourite among non-believers, most lately appearing on the cover of The...

Good Things from Cancer #2

We're all going to die, we all know it.  As Mary Oliver puts it in her poem, The Summer Day, “Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?” Hell yes, Mary, yes. The poem then asks: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious...