Long-winded thoughts on the Red Line Book Festival

October 20, 2014 Karen Huber

I’m just coming down off the high of meeting a few local authors during the annual Red Line Book Festival hosted by the South Dublin Libraries. Last week was filled with readings, lectures and workshops, and while I was only able to attend three of them, the benefit far outweighed the personal cost of venturing out in the wind and rain to obscure libraries with a slight chance of losing my way in the dark and never making it home. (This is an actual fear of mine; hidden street signs and Google Maps have been known to lead me astray.)

Apart from the fear of getting lost, I’ve found there are three things that usually keep me from attending things with the words writing, book or author somewhere in the title.

God Loves Uganda :: Questions on Culture, Context & Power

September 17, 2014 Karen Huber

Our friends at ACET graciously loaned us God Loves Uganda, a film tracing the relationship between the atrocious (and recently overturned) Ugandan "death penalty" bill for "repeat practitioners" of homosexuality and the imported evangelical missions movement.

I'd heard bits and pieces about this film for awhile, with slight interest, as it followed a fringe megachurch* on the outskirts of my hometown, but I honestly didn't pay much attention when it was released. Everyone knows this group is a little wacky, I thought. It never occurred to me it might have any bearing on or relation to our work, or my hometown, or the American evangelical community at large.

But I was wrong. And even a couple of months later, I'm still struggling to put words to my thoughts. I mean, who can really touch on all this is about, the complexities and the history and the trauma? Or even our own complicity?

Sort it all out

January 21, 2014 Karen Huber

There's so much yelling upstairs and I'm just letting them do it, the clock blaring 8:39pm. I'll give them and myself five more minutes to sort it all out. Our evenings are sometimes like this, when Matt is working and the three wee ones and me are so tired it all...

The chipper

October 21, 2013 Karen Huber

My love affair with Irish food can be encapsulated in two words: the chipper. The chipper, or the chippie or the chips shop (or any other such nickname) is short for the local fish and chips place. This is common to the UK, as well, though I'm not sure where else in the world (New England, maybe?) the chipper exists.

Chips here are what we yanks might commonly refer to as "french fries," but this in itself is misleading, as chips here are thick and hearty and taste great sprinkled with vinegar. I'm serious. Vinegar.

Now here's when you may say to yourself "Chips I can get behind, but I hate fish." To which I reply, "Good on you!" for I, too, hate fish. But the chipper is so much more than fish.

Sundays with the poets

October 20, 2013 Karen Huber

Everything in me
Wanted to bow down, to offer up,
To go barefoot, foetal and penitential
And pray at the water's edge.

from Triptych III At the Water's Edge, Field Work by Seamus Heaney

This October I'm writing every day on being at home in Ireland. But on Sundays I'll be sharing the words of others... with pictures that, of course, will never do their words justice.

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from Triptych III At the Water's Edge, Field Work by Seamus Heaney

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