Find My Muse

To go along with the challenge of the week…

You might have guessed that snakes is this week’s challenge subject because tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day. I’m not Irish, but I claim honorary clan membership by dint of spending my formative years as a member of St. Patrick’s Parish and my elementary school years under the rule of the nuns who taught at St. Patrick’s Parochial School… not to mention having been raised by an Irish stepfather, marrying an Irish husband and having Irish children. If all that doesn’t qualify me, I don’t know what does.

Heritage is a powerful musebait. If you’re stuck on writing, take a web-tour of writings by poets and authors who share your heritage. Let the words get into your blood. For those who have a symbolic (or real) link to things Gaelic and Irish, I highly recommend Seamus Heaney, winner of this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature (among many many others). Read a review of Heaney’s latest book of poetry, District and Circle, by Stephen Burt, and listen to him reading from his work at the Poetry Archives.