Friday, February 14, 2003
Despite nine years in Dublin, I’d never sat down and read a long account of the Famine. Good thing too, in many ways. After a couple of days trawling through the horror stories, I came to the conclusion that any book on emigration would only be about death, poverty and pain. That visiting Saint John in New Brunswick or Grosse Isle near Quebec City would feel like a trip to the morgue.
Fortunately, things looked better in the morning – those who arrived in Canada in the late 1840s might have had few options, and many died trying, but it behoves the survivors (and their descendants, myself included) to live on as large as we can. And write about the good stuff and the bad stuff side by side.
Spent the afternoon wearing my hack’s hat, researching a newsletter on web content. A feast of interesting websites, information architecture blogs and some mad vocab. After work on the book, it feels like another world, but it’s one I’m pretty familiar with, too. A weird collision.
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