I recently got back from my fifth trip to Ireland (the fourth year in a row I’ve spent part of my summer there). Like last year, I was primarily there to attend the Blas International Summer School of Music and Dance at the Irish World Academy, part of the University of Limerick. Last year was a great experience that really confirmed my interest in choreography. I knew immediately that I wanted to try and come back this year. I’d only…
Combining my blogs was meant to increase the number of times I’d post each month, but I clearly failed epically at that, as predicted. Ah well. Here’s a bookish post for you today, though, since I can do those here now. I thought I’d give a roundup of what I’ve been reading in May and what I thought of them. 2019 hasn’t been a super productive reading year so far, at least compared to the last few years, but May…
Given that I claimed my main reason for blogging so infrequently was that I didn’t have anything to say, I feel a little bad that I’ve had two planned posts for the last couple of weeks and have yet to write either of them. So here goes! Nearly two weeks ago now, I went to the Tales and Transmission conference organised by the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic department at Cambridge. It was a conference looking at Irish and Scottish Gaelic…
As part of my ongoing blogging existential crisis, today I decided that I’ll be merging my book blog with this blog, effective immediately. I already talked about this on my book blog itself, but I thought I’d post about it here so that you know what to expect. What this means: I will no longer be posting book reviews at Miriam Joy Reads, although given that the blog has been on indefinite hiatus for six months, this isn’t a huge…
There’s a particular kind of impostor syndrome that comes from being English in Celtic Studies, as an academic field. No matter how many qualifications you get, how hard you work on language skills, how much you know, you can’t change the fact that the stories you’re talking about aren’t your stories, that the landscape it describes isn’t the country you come from. I call it Sasanach Syndrome. It intensifies acutely every time I tell somebody what I studied and they…
Many of you commented on my last post with lovely, encouraging remarks to the tune of, “I think you’re interesting!” which I really appreciated — thank you. My blogging existential crisis continues, but I have a slightly better idea of what people are expecting from me. I’m leaning more towards the idea of combining my book blog and this blog into one amalgamated mishmash, but it’ll take a little while for me to figure out the practicalities of doing that,…
I’ve been finding myself in a weird space with regard to blogging recently. My posts have become more and more infrequent over time, and while part of that is that I’m easily distracted and frequently lose track of my ideas before I have a chance to put fingers to keys, it’s also because my relationship with social media has been undergoing a metamorphosis of sorts. I live on the internet, to an extent that’s probably somewhat unhealthy. I’ve become uncomfortably…
I used to be a bully. Adults around me said that I was ‘bossy’, but really, I was controlling. I liked having power over people. I saw friends as people who were supposed to do what you wanted them to do, which tended to mean I gathered friends who were shy and retiring and then bossed them around a lot, until inevitably they learned how to stand up for themselves and found friends who were more chilled out. There was…
If you’re reading this post, it means the URL change didn’t break my blog subscriptions completely. Hooray! If that’s the case, I’d be grateful if you’d pop over and leave a comment so that I know that it’s all working, especially if you’re reading from an email subscription. I know it can be a pain to comment if you’re on mobile, but it would mean a lot to me to be sure that I haven’t broken my blog. (The whole…
February and March always seem to be difficult months for me, when it comes to mental (and physical!) health. I have no explanation for why my shoulders seem worse at this time of year, although that’s been a pattern for a few years now, but it’s easy enough to see why my mental health might take a nosedive. There’s the seasonal aspect, and the lack of sunlight; there’s the fact that by February I’ve usually failed to follow through on…