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IN 1972 the Irish poet Seamus Heaney drew a line under Northern Ireland, moved south to the Republic, and settled in a cottage in County Wicklow. From his expe…
J. R. Patterson
Parliament building, Victoria, BC; with inner harbor summer activities underway all around IN 1907, NEWLY gilded with the Nobel Prize in Literature, Rudyard Kipling traveled…
Photo Courtesy of Stanfords, 7 Mercer Walk, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9FA AS A GENERAL RULE rule, I’m happiest in the countryside. The noise, the crush, the spee…
THERE ARE SOME moments in life when, upon entering a room, you realize you have stumbled upon that disturbing border where passion rubs up against obsession. In Baku, Azerbaijan, th…
“African Renaissance Monument” by pennstatenews is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 LIKE A PILLOW that has burst its seams, Dakar overflows with an excess of life. The resultant drift…
July 20, 2021Photo by slgckgc / Flickr Returning home to Manitoba, J. R. Patterson finds writer Jim Harrison’s meatballs are the comfort food he needs. There’s nothing quite like di…
BOOKSTORES ARE OFTEN pegged as refuges, sanctuaries, havens, and the like, but they behave more accurately like consulates. With their filing systems, scuttling attendants, and all…
Photo by David Norman / Unsplash A writer with Scottish ancestry traces the life of Scottish Gaelic and assesses the current state of this “intangible heritage” now placed at…
Photo by Artur Kraft / Unsplash GLASGOW IS NOT SO MUCH OF A CITY of books as a city of stories and storytellers. In the years I lived there, the stories I heard reflected the truly w…
Photo by Hussein Alazaat IN THE BONE-CRACKING ARIDITY of Jordan, civilizations are still born from, and borne upon, water. On the poppling wellsprings found on the hills and…
Photo: Porto, Portugal by Daniel Seßler GRIPPING THE STEEP BANKS of the Douro like a pile of haphazardly shoveled rocks, the city of Porto feels only one pebble’s slip away from tumb…
