Rainbow Journeys launched!

Vision Impaired Writing Group take colourful journey through the past.

A new CD launched by a group of writers who are blind and vision impaired provides an opportunity to listen to unheard voices, as their personal reflections on real-life events take you through their “Rainbow Journeys” from past to present. Available to buy here.

The CD, entitled Rainbow Journeys, is a compilation of stories by a group of people with sight loss who got together through NCBI, the national sight loss organisation. Although they formed as a reading group, their interest soon moved on to writing and a class was facilitated by NCBI’s Niamh MacAlister, who stated:
“Most of the people NCBI works with acquire sight loss during their lives, and many as they get older, so reading and writing can suddenly become big challenges. NCBI works with people to find practical solutions to the challenges of sight loss but we also wanted to look at creative outlets. Creative writing was new for the 13 participants, all of whom have impaired vision. The goals of Rainbow Journeys were to write about our lives, the paths taken, the revelations, the lessons learned and bring to light the everyday wonder of our lives.”

The stories, which were then read by the writers and recorded, will take you on a ship from South Africa to Dublin, to the East Wall bomb of the 1950s, right through Europe on motorbike just after the Second World War and even getting caught skinny dipping by a priest! All are real-life events written and read by the participants.
May O’Brien, who is 82 and from Donnybrook, lost the sight in one eye in the 1990s and since 2006, has very little sight in her other eye. May believes that the group played an important supportive role for the participants.
“When we met as a reading group were just sharing views about the books, it was nothing personal. So when we began sharing our personal stories in the creative writing course it changed all of us. We built up confidence and trust and we supported each other. There was no façade where you pretend not to have a disability. And then you are accepting your disability, but also acknowledging that you still have a brain that needs a creative outlet.”

Rainbow Journeys was launched on Friday 17th October in Dun Laoghaire Town Hall as part of the Dun Laoghaire / Rathdown Social Inclusion Week.
NCBI would like to thank photographer Anna Nowakowska for volunteering her time to take part in this project. Find out more about Anna Nowakowska Portrait Photography. 

Launch Photos:

 (Anna Nowakowska)

 (Simon Robinson)

 (Simon Robinson)

 (Anna Nowakowska)

 (Anna Nowakowska)

Rainbow Journeys

 

Delighted to launch Rainbow Journeys at Dun Laoghaire Rathdown Social Inclusion Week at 11am Friday 17th of October in the Concourse of Dun Laoghaire town hall.

Rainbow Journeys, is about getting an opportunity to hear unheard voices. It began life in May 2014 when a group of eager and intrepid writers came together in the NCBI office in Dun Laoghaire. The goals were – to write about our lives, the paths taken, the revelations, the lessons learned and bring to light the everyday wonder of our lives. There were thirteen brave service users in all. Unfortunately one of our team passed away during our journey, Anne Barnes, and we proudly dedicate the CD to her.

 

Produced and Edited by Niamh MacAlister,

Co-ordinated by Aleksandra Okupinska,

Sound Engineer: Alan White,

Photographer: Anna Nowakowska



Writing and Walking

Taken from the New Yorker

 

Why Walking Helps us Think by Ferris Jabr

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”

Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources than man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.

Windsor

 

 

London town

A visit to London town is always busy. Its a case of cram it all in as quickly as possible. I always breath a sigh of relief when I step off the plane back in Dublin. As nice as London is; its hard work.  After arriving at a ridiculously early hour and dropping our bags at our digs it was breakfast at Borough Market. I chomped down on a sausage bap  for my second breakfast of the day. Then it was onto the V&A. A quick look around the photography and the fashion room before I had the worst coffee I've ever tasted.  Back out on the street we didn't really know what was going on. Police and army appeared from no where with helicopters looming over head. To be honest my first thought was 'has a bomb gone off somewhere?' Paranoid much? Later on we discovered it was a Pro-Palestinian protest about to make its way around the side of Hyde Park. We settled ourselves and headed for The Photography Gallery. With enough energy for one last stop we made our way to the John Soane Museum. He was an architect and collector. He left his house and estate to the State instead of his children. I'm sure that went down well. So fitting that A Rake's Progress by William Hogarth is part of his collection.  Defeated we returned for naps before dinner. And oh what a dinner it was! My sister works at The Garrison. To say that we were looked after would be understating it. The service was fantastic, the food impeccable.
The photo of the Shard above is the view from my happy dinner perch. With just enough room (I decided not to dessert for this reason) we headed to The Hide for cocktails.

With the cocktail residues still merrily making their way around my system I woke up nice and early. I had a people watching coffee and croissant back at Borough Market as I waited for the troops to convene and then it was around the corner to The Tate Modern. The Malevich exhibition was my destination. Would have checked out the Matisse too except for we ran out of time and had to high tail it across town for Sunday lunch at Brawn. And what a f#*%ing lunch it was too. I have two words only: go there. I rounded out the day with dinner in Pizarro watching the last of the rain and  stragglers making their way down Bermondsey Street on a lazy Sunday evening.

One last cultural hurrah at Sotheby's for the Unauthorized Banksy Retrospective. I couldn't quite figure out who was taking the piss out of whom?! But the snobby girl at the door made it all worthwhile.

Thursday and the recovery continues ...

Fish Short Memoir Competition 2014 Long List

I was bored on Sunday night and started poking around the internet looking at competitions to enter and competitions I didn't make the cut for. At least I thought I didn't make the cut for. I entered the Fish Short Memoir Contest earlier in the year and promptly forgot about. I subsequently deleted the email announcing the winners of the competition. My only thought on that is I must have been having a bad day! So I was really surprised to see my own name on the long list as I scrolled down through the list of writers and their stories. I'm particularly delighted to make it to the list as its the first time I've had a non-fiction piece recognised. There's no greater impetus to keep on going!

Liberty Silk by Kate Beaufoy

Another Tuesday, another book launch in the Gutter Bookshop. Liberty Silk by Kate Beaufoy was delightfully introduced by Ciaran Hinds. Yes, that Ciaran Hinds!
Kate Beaufoy is the new pen name for Kate Thomspon. If you recognise the name its probably because you have either seen Glenroe or read one or two of the eleven books she has written.  
Kate was also the first VIP guest author for the NCBI and Childvision's annual Readathon in 2008. She kindly returned to help us celebrate its five year anniversary last year.
The idea for the book was born from letters her grandmother wrote after the first world war - all of which feature in the book. The story's breadth stretches from Paris 1919 to Hollywood 1945 to 1965. It is "an evocative story of survival, betrayal and the invincibility of love." Available in all good bookshops now.