Thursday, July 12, 2012

Living and Learning

This week is the 14th West Cork Literary Festival, being held in Bantry. Since Bantry is just about ten miles from Glengarriff, we decided to partake in some of the offerings.

On Monday, we attended a free workshop called "Write That Letter." Dava Sobel was the presenter. She is the author of "Galileo's Daughter" which is transcribed (from Italian) letters from his daughter, who was a nun. The purpose of the workshop was to encourage the art form of hand writing a letter and everyone was offered paper and pen and envelope and encouraged to write a letter right there. They even mailed them for us! It was very interesting, and a lot of fun.

I recently participated in a swap on Coach Creative Space (www.coachcreativespace.ning.com) in which each participant wrote a letter to three other people. It was really fun to write the letters, but even more fun to receive some in my mailbox. Handwriting tells so much about a person, and what they chose to write about opened up a piece of them that I did not know.

After attending this workshop, I think we are going to make one night a month a "letter writing night" and each write at least one letter to a friend/relative. We all love to write, so this will fit in with our life perfectly!

The other workshops we attended were "The Shadow of the Titanic" (we bought the book, and I cannot put it down!) and "Not My Type: The History of Fonts." Such interesting perspective on one's choice of font and how it affects those reading. Very interesting, and definitely a book we'll look for when we get home.

And now for some photos from the week.

This is Edith, the daughter of my cousin Deirdre.
They live in Eyeries, and we celebrated Jonathan's birthday
with them at a Chinese restaurant in Castletownbere.

Sunset on Bantry Bay

Me and Jonathan at Mizen Head

This photo is from the cemetery at Kilcatherine,
which is on the grounds of the ruins of the oldest
church on the Beara Peninsula. Many of my
ancestors are buried here, and we are going to
leave a bit of Katie here before we go home.