excerpt from my journal:

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“I think there’s really something magical about folk music. I’m sitting in Connemara in a pub and there’s these 3 guys just chillin’ with a few traditional instruments (staples. guitar, accordion, folk guitar, mandolin i think…?). Every time I listen to this stuff I get swept away to another world and time, where people performed to share and to keep things alive — when stories were told instead of written… when stories were sung and danced instead of told. Why does this idea hold so much power for me?
Perhaps because I am a writer. I write stories down. I want folklore to be squeezed into 2D, but no one can quite seem to manage it — there’s an element of human flesh and blood and experience in it deeper than anything that can be nailed down on a page in black and unmoving white. The whole give-response mechanism is truly different. Utterly different. It cannot be flattened — it IS music. It flies through the air and buries itself in people’s hearts, and people’s hearts give back… The nature of this creating is continual and communal. An holistic expression of Heidegger’s ‘Being’… ha! I love it.
Joy.”

c. Mary Kathryn Gough, spring 2006, clifden, connemara