Megan Findlay, an Ottawa writer, visited Thunder Bay for the writers festival and recently wrote me about it.
Dear Joan, I'm sorry to hear there is not Sleeping Giant Writers' Festival this year! Was it lack of interest? Being there meant so much to me at the time. And seeing you again. I still have fond memories of that whole weekend, and of watching The Last Station and eating a real Finnish breakfast. What fun.
Her essay The Lone Wolf Gets the Moon to Himself was also published on her blog
http://megfindlay.wordpress.com.
The Lone Wolf Gets the Moon to Himself.
by Megan Findlay
Lone Wolf Euphoria: I knew it most acutely in Dublin. I ate penne pasta under a blue awning in Temple Street. The waiter pitied me; I saw it in his eyes, but I didn’t mind. For the first time I was the one with an accent. I had just finished reading Edna O’Brien’s biography of Joyce, and the day behind me had been spent chasing the end of his rope around Dublin.
I was on the edge of a Joyce obsession. Ulysses weighed on me, though I only understood as much as my professor could explain to me across a classroom table from 5 to 8 on Wednesday nights. I had no business being in Dublin. The week before, I’d given a paper at a conference in Belgium. Montreal’s Centre for Irish Studies, where I worked, had bankrolled my trip. I felt that I owed them something more than a thank-you note dampened by the sweat of a Stella bottle (brewed in the Belgian conference’s host city). I owed them something absurd and precious, like a stone polished by the Irish sea. This is what Europe, or thinking about Europe, does to me: it stamps out reason and inflames romanticism.
So I took one of those mythologized one-dollar flights on an airline no one had heard of from Leuven to Dublin and found myself in a hotel with a view of the Liffey, all the conference jitters and self-fulfilling anxieties of everyday life blinking at me from far, far away.
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