“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." - William Butler Yeats.
Explore the folk and fairy tales of the Emerald Island (Dublin, Galway, Doolin) while writing a few of your own. Banshees, Pookas, Pirate Queens, Selkies, Giants, Red-Caps, and Wee Folk. Join Rutgers creative writing instructor Alex Dawson, best selling Irish fantasy author/Dr. Who scribe Dave Rudden (Knights of the Borrowed Dark, Sister Wake), and eight Irish Creative Writing students for a two week fable-fueled collaboration with Dublin City University.
Mon. June 9 - Sun. June 23. Dublin, Galway, Doolin. APPLICATION LINK SOON!
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| The Book of Kells, Old Library, Trinity College |
While in Dublin you'll stay in the oldest part of DCU, All Hallows (350 years old and haunted!), eat breakfast in the dining hall, attend workshops/lectures on campus, visit sites of literary interest (the Book of Kells, Dublin Writing Museum, James Joyce Centre) and have dinner discussions with celebrated local authors (incl. Sophie White, who just won the Shirley Jackson award, and Eoin Colfer, who wrote the bestselling Artemis Fowl series) in variety of evocative restaurants (like the eclectic Brazen Head, Ireland's oldest and most haunted pub, and Johnnie Fox's in the foothills of mythic Wicklow Mountains).
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| The Brazen Head, Dublin's most haunted pub. |
The second week, we'll travel west, across Ireland, to Galway (Ireland's cultural heart, home to Finvarra, king of the Faeries); we'll have dinner with Patricia Forde, the seventh and current Laureate na nÓg, Ireland’s Children’s Literature Laureate, and take a Dark Tour of Galways's haunted history and baleful back streets. Then it's on to the Wild Atlantic Way, with a ferry ride to Inishmore, the biggest of the Aran Islands (known for its cliff top fort of Dún Aonghasa, its seal/selkie colonies, its bounding hounds, and its mythic Dragon's Lair/Worm Hole), and a four night stay in Doolin, a tiny coastal town in County Clare, the real world setting for the video game Folklore, known as the home of traditional Irish music, where we'll explore Doonagore Castle, the stunning Cliffs of Moher (aka the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride) and the otherworldly landscape of the Burren, with its many fairy forts, said to have inspired Tolkien's Middle Earth.
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| The Cliffs of Moher ("The Cliffs of Insanity" in The Princess Bride) |
Finally, it's back to Dublin for two nights, with a hike up Montpelier Hill, where sits a ruined hunting lodge with a supernatural history (known locally as the Hellfire Club), and a highly publicized group reading at DCU. And so much more!
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| The haunted Hellfire Club atop Montpelier Hill. |