Tag: History

Madeira Mondays: Climbing Arthur’s Seat (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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Arthur’s Seat is an iconic local landmark in my city. If you’ve ever been to Edinburgh, you’ve definitely seen it. Rising above Holyrood Park, this ancient extinct volcano – with its craggy cliffs and verdant green slopes – is a memorable sight and it definitely adds to the city’s unique majestic, almost magical, feel. (Though the fact that we’ve also got a castle here, and a palace, and some of the most beautiful historic buildings in the world doesn’t hurt either!)

Once described by Edinburgh local and famed author Robert Louis Stevenson as “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design”, Arthur’s Seat has been featured in books, movies and TV series past and present. Off the top of my head, I recall scenes in the recent Netflix adaptation of Dave Nicholl’s iconic love story One Day where the couple hikes up there for a graduation picnic. There’s also a very memorable and spooky scene in James Hogg’s wonderfully weird and compelling 19th century novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

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Madeira Mondays: “No Man is an Island” by John Donne

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Howdy folks! It’s been a couple of months. I was surprised to see that my last post was in March. It’s now June. Oof, time flies. There’s been a lot on my mind, and I’ve been meaning to post, but, between teaching responsibilities and working on a new novel, I just…haven’t.

I must admit: the year started off a little gloomy for me. Back towards the start of the year, my sci fi novel almost sold…then it didn’t. This, in and of itself, was disappointing. Hopefully the book will sell to another publisher. My agent is confident; I am optimistic. But my personal disappointment was compounded by a general feeling of malaise, even helplessness, at the political situation in my home country of the US. Sometimes I still feel shocked, or speechless, at all that’s happened or that I fear might happen (just now as I write this in a coffee shop: there’s a table next to mine where they’re discussing the administration’s recent moves to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students).

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Madeira Mondays: Meeting the mummies (Bordeaux, France)

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Mummies are a staple in Halloween movies. I remember a particular episode of Are You Are of the Dark? (a spooky kids’ show in the 90’s) that featured a centuries-old mummy accidentally brought back to life! The concept was never particularly frightening for me, and I wasn’t riveted (as some kids are) by adventure tales of exploring ancient tombs, pyramids, and the like. Though of course I saw the Indiana Jones movies and The Mummy (1999), for some reason it didn’t ignite that spark of imagination inside me. However I was still curious, when we recently visited Bordeaux, France, to check out an exhibition at a local museum: Living and Dying in Egypt. Apparently, they had real mummies to see!

And what I found wasn’t a spooky experience but more of a spiritual one. I really enjoyed learning about death rituals in ancient Egypt and getting to see a mummy up close wasn’t scary, but oddly moving.

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Madeira Mondays: Sights from Edinburgh’s Past and Present

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I have seen a ghost.

Well, not literally – but I’ve come pretty close!

Recently I’ve been teaching a creative writing course I designed at the University of Glasgow which is all about ‘time travel’. We looked at a few straightforwardly sci-fi books about characters actually traveling backwards and forwards in time, as well as poetry, memoir, and historical fiction books that invited us to think about memory and imagination as forms of time travel too.

Teaching this class made me think of a walk I took a few months ago with a dear friend of mine, Alan, who I met while volunteering at The Georgian House. We walked around the Canongate area of Edinburgh (near Holyrood Palace) and he showed me some photographs of how the streets looked in times past. It was almost spooky to see the black and white images of the chaotic shop fronts, the women in their wide-brimmed hats full of flowers, and then look up at the very same street today.

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Madeira Mondays: A Visit to Kulturen Museum (Lund, Sweden)

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As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m absolutely fascinated by how people lived in the past. It’s one of the reasons I read and write historical fiction, it’s why I volunteered as a historical guide at a restored 18th century townhouse and it’s why – whenever I get the chance – I love visiting historical buildings and museums.

My favorite type of museums are open-air museums (or ‘folk museums’) where you get to go inside a collection of historical buildings, which are usually full of objects and sometimes even costumed guides. These are my favorite museums because they are immersive and really give you the feeling of ‘stepping back in time’.

I’ve been to Skansen in Stockholm (the world’s oldest open air museum, opened in 1900), Colonial Williamsburg in the USA, and even an open-air museum in Transylvania (though that’s a story for another time!). Longtime blog readers might also remember The Highland Folk Museum. Earlier this month I had the pleasure of traveling to beautiful southern Sweden (my partner’s brother lives there). When we found out there was an open air museum – Kulturen – located in the nearby university town of Lund, we knew we had to go!

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Madeira Mondays: A Visit to a Georgian Dining Room

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Longtime readers will know that I often spend my weekends volunteering as a costumed historical guide at The Georgian House here in Edinburgh. It’s a beautifully restored 18th century townhouse, where you can visit and see what life was like for the family who owned the house, and their servants who kept it running, in the late 18th/early 19th century.

I’ve written posts inspired by several spots in the home already: including the bedroom, the parlor and the drawing room. BUT I don’t think I’ve done a post yet about the dining room, which is often a favorite of visitors when they come to tour the house. I was in there last weekend telling people all about dining and food in Georgian Edinburgh so I thought this would be the perfect time to spotlight the dining room on the blog.

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Madeira Mondays: A Visit to Skara Brae (Orkney, Scotland)

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Orkney is unlike any place I’ve ever visited before. It’s a wild, somewhat desolate island, with jaw-dropping views of windswept cliffs and rolling hills dotted in ancient stone circles. It’s a peaceful place that feels like it’s at the edge of the world, and where, if you’re lucky, you might catch sight of a giant or a fairy or some other type of mythical creature. While I didn’t see any of those, what I did get to see, on a recent trip there, was Skara Brae, the best preserved Stone Age village in Europe. Over 5,000 years old!

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Madeira Mondays: Marie Antoinette (2006) revisited

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It’s hard for me to describe how excited I was when I first saw the trailer for Marie Antoinette directed by Sofia Coppola. I was about 15 when the trailer came out and I was riveted: cool punky modern music mixed with 18th century fashion and this glamorous story about a doomed queen in revolutionary France. Sign me up!! Remember, this was many years before Hamilton and while I totally found the 18th century cool and exciting and hip, I don’t think that was the consensus and a lot of period pieces I’d seen felt really staid and kind of stodgy. The idea of a fun, edgy, period film with a rock-and-roll vibe about, and presumably for, young people was really, really exciting.

When I saw the film though, I was disappointed. Assuming my expectations might have been too high, I watched it again a few years later: still didn’t like it. Now, when I was at home sick with a cold (not Covid btw if you’re wondering. I tested a lot), I decided that I’d give it a THIRD try, over 15 years after its original release, to see if the film, which had failed to win over fifteen-year-old Carly could win over thirty-year-old Carly. The answer was, sadly, no. It didn’t.

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Friday Finds: American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld (book review)

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Welcome to the first Friday Finds: where I share mostly book recommendations (or recommendations of other cool things I’ve come across). For this week I wanted to chat about American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. This book came out in 2008 and it’s a novel inspired by the life of the former first lady Laura Bush. A friend of mine handed me the book when I visited York recently and while I was initially a bit unsure – I have no particular interest in Laura Bush and I don’t read a lot of political biographies or autobiographies – once I started it, I was totally swept away. It reminded me more of a sweeping 19th century novel – something like Anna Karenina maybe – that encompasses a coming-of-age story, explorations and reflections on love and marriage, a good bit of melodrama and tragedy, a smattering of politics, and a whole lot else in between.

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Madeira Mondays: Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens (book review)

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A few weeks ago, a billionaire went to space in a rocket. I’m really not impressed. What does impress me is the work that scientists and actual astronauts have been doing for years to map the heavens and better understand our place in this vast, incomprehensible universe. On that note, I wanted to recommend a book which I read last summer that combines two interests of mine: history and outer space. It’s a non-fiction book about the first ever global scientific collaboration conducted on Earth, which actually happened in the 18th century!

The book is Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens by Andrea Wulf. It has adventure on the high seas, it has danger, it has rivalries, and best of all it has international cooperation (something that we could use a lot more of these days).

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