The Sigla Blog

I love that quote from William Zinsser. It sums up in a way, a craft that is very hard to define. I think about writing - short stories, a novel, poems - 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, but still it doesn’t quash my damned procrastination. Sometimes I excuse this by telling myself […]

I’m sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that I’m another year older today, but personally, birthdays have always come with a certain amount of existential angst and a big mortality slap in the face. For some people this is a “what am I doing with my life?” or “I’m racking up […]

I finally got around to watching the BBC4 documentary When Toby Met Julie last night. Toby is Toby Young who now writes restaurant reviews for the Evening Standard. Julie, is of course, the inimitable Julie Burchill, doyenne of the British Press since her days as The NME’s star writer in the 1970s and former Guardian […]

Today, if you don’t know it, is Bloomsday, the fictional day on which the action in James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ takes place in 1904. I wonder if this year, at anniversary 101, it’s all a bit of an anti-climax for Joycean scholars and lovers after last year’s centennial hoop-la. For anyone who despise the […]

Last night, myself and some sigla folk headed along to the launch of Furnace Magazine. It’s put together by this year’s MA in Journalist at DIT Aungier Street. One of the key people - and Deputy Editor - is Markham Nolan, who has written for and logs his year of sobriety over at […]

I wasn’t in Dublin at the weekend, so I only got around to reading Saturday’s Irish Times today, and there was a pleasant surprise in the Opening Lines section of their Magazine, where Belinda McKeon wrote the following:
Online magazines may be two a penny by now, but there is more to creating a decent read […]