Writing Portfolio

I’ve done a fair amount of writing online, much of it blogging for hire. I write about food, wine, beer, technology, books, literature, science. I’ve linked to some samples of my paid blogging here. You can see a “mini blog,” where I’ve aggregated some posts here.

I have a number of personal blogs. You can see them listed in the sidebar to your right under the My Sites heading. I’ve linked to some sample posts from a few of those blogs below.

Bridget Cleary: Fairy Intrusion in Nineteenth Century Ireland

Are you a witch?
Are you a fairy?
Are you the wife
Of Michael Cleary?

—Children’s rhyme from Southern Tipperary, Ireland

I promised in my first post on fairies as other to look at a fairy intrusion in nineteenth century Ireland, specifically, the fairy burning of Bridget Cleary.

In March of 1895 Bridget Boland Cleary was a trained seamstress, with a good eye for fashion, who owned her own Singer sewing machine. She lived with her husband Michael Cleary and her father Patrick Boland in a small cottage in Ballyvadlea, Tipperary, Ireland. Michael, like his wife, was atypical in that he could read and write; he worked as a cooper. In 1895 they’d been married about eight years; Bridget was 26, and Michael was 35. On the fifteenth of March, Michael Cleary, believing his wife Bridget had been taken by the fairies and that they had left a changeling in her place, having spent three days in various rituals that were intended to force the changeling to leave and bring his wife back from where the fairies had taken her, set fire to her. He and nine others of Bridget Cleary’s relatives and neighbors were tried for her death. More . . .