My natural habitat...

A cosy armchair, a laptop balanced precariously and near a power outlet because my laptop is so old that the battery is clapped-out. If the daylight becomes too strong, then I can't see the screen on my laptop. Hands thoroughly greased in hand lotion because I type so incessantly that the skin on my knuckles breaks, coffee coating my throat and messy hair.

The Herbalist's dark art

Having blogged about meeting The Herbalist when I bought the book, I found a rendering of the real life man who inspired the character in The Irish Independent  and his blood-spilling secrets. 

Niamh Boyce, author of The Herbalist, the new novel that paints a shocking picture of abortion in rural Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s, has revealed that the book is based on real events.

The novel, which is now moving up the bestseller chart, tells the fictional story of an exotic foreigner who arrives in a midlands town and starts selling his potions and lotions in the local market.

The women of the town all seem mesmerised by this visitor who appears to have a cure for all their ills. In fact he does so well that he decides to settle in the town.

But the herbalist has a dark secret – as well as herbal cures, he is providing abortions.

The novel deals with this shadowy side of Irish life at a time before abortion was legal in the UK and has a special resonance now because of the current abortion debate here.

Although the midlands town is not named in the book, the story is based on real events that took place in Athy, Co Kildare, in the 1930s.

Boyce, who was the Hennessy Writer of the Year last year, says she discovered the story when she was doing archiving work during computerisation at the Leinster Leader newspaper.

She was looking at papers from the 1930s when a short report caught her eye.

"It detailed a charge against a 'coloured man' for an offence against a girl. His name was Dr Don Rodrique de Vere," Boyce says.

"I found further articles, which were just as vague but added that the man was a herbalist, and the offences were 'immoral'. The charge changed from 'girl' to 'girls'. I kept an eye out for these short reports on the case and read finally that he was found guilty on six counts.

"He was sentenced to 18 months' hard labour in respect of each of these charges, to run concurrently.

"Years later I found out more. It was through a column by historian Francis Taaffe called Eye On Athy that ran in the Kildare Nationalist. It turned out that De Vere came to Athy in 1935, set up his herbal stall in the market and his home in a disused shed. As he became more popular, he moved into a terraced house and bought a motorbike.

"He sported a Panama hat, a gold tooth and was an 'impressive dresser'. It seems he was shunned by the locals when he returned from prison."

Boyce also found De Vere's original notebook in which he documented his treatments. The notebook is now retained in the National Archive and, disturbingly, it still has bloody fingerprints on it.

John Spain, books editor

Irish Independent

Summer's ripening breath

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,

May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Yeats: When we had all the summer-time

We sat under an old thorn-tree
 And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
 And when we talked of growing up
 Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
 O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!
And she had all the spring!

A Man Young And Old: VIII. Summer And Spring by William Butler Yeats

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Percy Bysshe-Shelley: 'all things rejoiced beneath the sun, the weeds, the river and the cornfields'

To simultaneously celebrate summer and poetry, I am posting poems that will tempt our creative powers and prompt us to reach higher levels of literary greatness. Do you have a favourite poem about summer?

Have you met The Herbalist?

Here I am, in Easons Dublin, meeting The Herbalist

Irish author Niamh Boyce has just published a spellbinding novel. When turning the pages, you will turn back time and enter an older Ireland. You will find yourself in a 1930s small town in the midlands. Here is the place where without warning, a mysterious and exotic foreigner walks into the lives of the provincial town folk...

"He just appeared one morning and set up shop in the market square. It was drizzling. Everything was either a shade of brown or a shade of grey. He was the lightest thing there, the one they called the black doctor. He wore a pale suit and a straw hat and waved his arms like a conductor. The men spat about dark crafts and foreign notions but the women loved him. Oh, the rubs, potions, tinctures and lotions he had, unguents even. I went to the market the first chance I got, to see past the headscarves, but all I got was a glimpse of a bottle held high, and the gold ringed fingers that gripped it. The women crowded around his stall."

Sinéad Gleeson of The Irish Times wrote about the real life events that inspired the novel. When she was 19, Niamh discovered a tiny newspaper report from 1942 of a court case concerning a “coloured man arrested for serious offences against girls". This planted a seed in Niamh's imagination, which over 20 years grew into a whole character.

Niamh did an interview with Theresa Milstein on how she evolved from writing short stories to discovering that she had enough material for a whole novel, "there were several false starts at novels that petered out at 10,000 words. I harvested stories from some of them. It didn’t bother me too much, these poor fledgling novels that went nowhere.  I went back to writing stories, and when the character of the herbalist appeared in one of them I thought nothing of it. When he appeared in another, and then another, I realized if I were to write a novel, it would have to be about him."

The Herbalist was published by Penguin Ireland and agented by Ger Nichol.

Short story competition hosted by Penguin Ireland and RTÉ Guide

Hat-tip to Louise Phillips for promoting this short story competition. The closing date is 5th of July.
The deadline is 6pm on a Friday in July so that you can finish writing the story, send it off, and then enjoy a long summer's evening in the company of your friends, sipping a well-earned cocktail.

Before you raise a glass to celebrate that you have entered the competition, you might bear in mind... 

Thems The Rulez

1. All entries in the 2013  RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland Short Story Competition must be original, unpublished and previously not have been broadcast.

2. Written in English and of 2,000 words or less.

3.  The short stories must be typed, not handwritten and will not be returned.

4. Enclose your name and contact details (address, phone and/or e-mail) on a separate page.

5. Anyone from any place on mother earth can apply.

6. You may send your entries to RTÉ Guide/Penguin Short Story Competition, PO Box 1480, RTÉ, Donnybrook, Dublin 4. Or, you may e-mail rteguide@rte.ie

Love for Beginners has just been published!

Love for Beginners is available here.

You may get it here.

This is the official cover, created by artist Chiara Castagna.

You can make a smaller book cover image to use as your blog background

You have found the right artist to design your book cover. You debate the characteristics of the cover. Sketch follows sketch until you get the perfect cover. They send a file with the cover. You think it would be a great asset in marketing the book if you were to put the cover as your blog background. But your blog provider tells you that your file is, ‘too big’.
1. Use the Resize function in Windows Paint to create a smaller size version of the book cover image for the blog background.
2. You’ll want the maximum resolution that Blogger allows for quality purposes.

Here is some relevant info from the Blogger Team: “If you want a full-screen background, we recommend using an image that's 1800 pixels wide and 1600 pixels high, so that the background image can fill the entire screen even for the readers with large monitors. To make sure your blog loads quickly, background images must be small in file size. As the maximum file size you can upload is 300KB, you may need to reduce your photo’s file size using Photoshop, Mac OS X Preview, or one of many free online tools. You can also tile a smaller image, but keep in mind that patterns work better than photographs, which can make your blog look cluttered.”
The point about photographs applies to more generic blogs that use a lot of photos in their posts and thus there is confusion between the posts and the background. This may not apply to literary blogs that have more text than visuals in the body of the blog.

Earlier Sketch of Book Cover designed and executed by Chiara Castagna

Thank you to technology-expert Alex B for your advice in making a cover smaller so that it can be used as a blog background.

Love Sketches. An early cover for Love for Beginners

A very talented artist friend of mine, Chiara Castagna has been doing sketches for the book cover of Love for Beginners. Here is one sketch of Anna-the-main-character, which really captures her warm, open and generous personality. The final cover will be revealed nearer to the book's publication, later during this month of June. Also, I've been trying to use this cover as a background to my blog, but the good people at Blogger tell me that it's 'too big'. Does anyone know anything about making the file smaller? A type of make-a-file-smaller-for-beginners, would be much appreciated.

See This Post for modifying a book cover image so it can be used as a blog background.