On a Tuesday in October last year, I sat with Father Mike Cussen in his Toyota. We were in a parking lot near my school, the University of Limerick. Cussen, a silver-haired man in his 60s, wore a gray quarter-zip sweater and had brought with him books and folders stuffed with papers describing the history of the church in Ireland.
I was meeting with Cussen to record an interview with him about the dwindling number of priests in Ireland. In the 1970s, when Cussen first attended seminary, more than 30 other people were also preparing to become priests for Limerick County’s diocese, where Cussen now serves.
“Now, there’s nobody, except one person,” Cussen told me, as I clutched my recorder.
Drawing on this interview and others, I eventually created a podcast episode for my Intro to Broadcast class about the changing role of the Catholic church in Ireland. In particular, I highlighted a program in Limerick county that trains lay people to take on ministry roles traditionally performed by the clergy. This was one of many instances last fall in which I was able to get to know Limerick and Ireland through my journalism.
The fall semester for my masters of journalism course encompassed both audio reporting and news writing; in the spring, we’ll be focusing on narrative writing, visual storytelling and other skills. Besides writing about the church in Ireland, I also wrote local news stories for the Limerick Voice, UL’s student-run newspaper, and I submitted freelance stories to a couple U.S.-based publications, including a profile of an Irish actress for The New York Times and stories about religion in Ireland for Christianity Today.
Being able to report from Limerick has helped fulfill a lifelong dream of mine to be a foreign correspondent. I’ve had this dream ever since my parents moved our family to Tianjin, China, where I grew up for 17 years. There, learning about foreign affairs was as simple as a stroll through the local market or a lively conversation with a taxi driver. During taxi rides, I would chat with drivers about their views on Obama and Xi Jinping, or hear older women griping about the rising cost of living while shopping at the open air market. Every summer, I returned to the U.S. with my family, where I told stories of life in China to friends and cousins, attempting to translate my world abroad into terms they would understand. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was already, in some small way, acting as a foreign correspondent — engaging in the fundamental journalistic endeavor of mediating between the world of one’s readers and the world one sees through reporting.
After college, my interest in foreign affairs journalism is a part of what led me to apply for the Mitchell. Reporting on Limerick has brought me in touch with Father Cussen and with a host of other characters, and it has helped me understand the community in new ways. My reporting from Ireland also helped me win an award from the Overseas Press Club, which will provide me with funding to further continue reporting from overseas even after my Mitchell year has ended. I’m excited to tell more stories about Limerick and Ireland this spring!
Five years ago, my colleagues and I stood outside, excitedly holding a handmade banner that read: TO SAFEHOUSE WITH LOVE, BOSTON.
February 27, 2020, when I was working as a Harm Reduction Specialist at BHCHP
What had brought us together was the anticipated opening of America’s first overdose prevention center (OPC). Safehouse was set to launch in Philadelphia in February 2020, following years of legal battles. Its debut signaled a promising new era—one that valued the lives of people who use drugs and embraced evidence-based harm reduction strategies to combat the overdose crisis. But the celebration was short-lived. As community resistance intensified and the building owner withdrew the lease, Safehouse was forced to retreat. To this day, it remains unopened.
It was my dream to work at the first overdose prevention center in the United States. When Safehouse’s plans fell through, the question of which state would claim that milestone was unclear. (It ended up being NY in 2021). Who could have imagined that five years later I would find myself working at Ireland’s first OPC, known here as a Medically Supervised Injecting Facility (MSIF)?
Even before I submitted my Mitchell Scholarship application, I had been manifesting the chance to work with Merchants Quay Ireland (MQI)—the organization behind Ireland’s first syringe exchange program and MSIF. As luck would have it, just hours after arriving in Dublin for the first time, I had my interview for an MSIF Project Worker role. By the end of that week, I learned I’d secured a spot on the inaugural team. From the moment I stepped into the space, it felt like home.
Three weeks ago, we officially opened our doors, and it has been a whirlwind ever since. We’ve had over 100 clients, all of whom are kind, funny, creative and endlessly grateful. I share this gratitude. The space itself is remarkable. The booths are huge (I’ve volunteered at the MSIF in Mexico, and three of their booths could fit into one of ours!), we have a fancy vein finder, and compassionate staff who not only provide syringes and walk clients through the injection process but also make a great cup of tea.
Rainbow outside MQIView from the Injecting RoomPracticing using the vein finder!
It’s just the beginning, but the opportunity to be part of this has been an incredible complement to the Addiction Recovery course I’m taking at Trinity. Trinity, much like MQI, has made me feel at home. Every day, my classmates bring snacks and sweets to share with one another. Just today, I was offered tangerines, biscuits, chocolates, and rice cakes. I will certainly miss this when I return to academia in America.
I’m also constantly in awe of the expertise and passion my classmates bring. Each of them is actively working in the field of addiction and their drive (both mental and physical) is inspiring. One classmate, for example, commutes from Belfast and stays in a hostel on class days just to participate in the program. Let me emphasize that. She commutes from another country to attend class. That shut me up about my 1-hour Luas commute really quick. She also frequently speaks and writes in Irish with all of us, which I love. Today, I was thrilled to correctly recognize when she asked my friend to pass her the milk (bainne)! It seems my Duolingo lessons are finally paying off.
Sometimes, on my way to work or heading to class, it’s easy to forget I’m in Ireland. My noise-canceling headphones and frequent daydreaming often take me elsewhere. But then I’ll look up and spot an Irish flag in the distance or take off my headphones and hear the unmistakable lilt of an Irish accent. In those moments, I’m reminded of just how magical it is that I ended up here.
I knew I wanted to study in Ireland when I learned of Frederick Douglass’s visit here in 1845–46. A student of Civil War–era U.S. history, I had read about events like the New York City draft riots of 1863, a series of violent anti-Black attacks led by working-class Irish Americans bridling at the possibility of conscription into the Union army. So it surprised me to discover that one of the foremost Black American abolitionists would have made a point to visit Ireland, which I naively assumed to be a hotbed of proslavery sentiment (as were certain parts of England that thrived on slave-grown cotton). Douglass’s Irish tour—as well as Daniel O’Connell’s refusal to accept donations from slaveholders in support of his Repeal campaign—were my first clues that there existed a deep tension within the Irish diaspora over the issue of slavery. Since coming to Belfast, I’ve had the chance to learn a great deal more about Douglass’s time in this city (and even to write a paper about it!), so I thought I would share a few interesting findings.
Douglass was in Ireland to sell copies of his recently published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. When the young abolitionist began lecturing in New York and Massachusetts shortly after escaping his bondage in Maryland in 1838, audiences found his oratory so eloquent that they refused to believe he had been enslaved. In his Narrative, Douglass attempted to prove his credibility by providing details of his enslavement, including the names of his enslavers, the Aulds. As Douglass was still a fugitive, this amount of identifying information exposed him to huge risk, and so he fled to the British Isles for a nearly two-year tour to raise money and avoid recapture. In Belfast, he publicly referred to himself as a “mere fugitive slave, liable to be hunted down” by the “bloodhounds of the white man.”
The experience of touring abroad was personally transformative. According to historian David Blight, Douglass was steeped in the “political liberalism” and “laissez-faire individualism” of progressive nineteenth-century elite circles. Douglass argued to audiences in Belfast that slavery was wrong not only because it was cruel and exploitative, but also because it stripped enslaved people of the ability to work for themselves, which he thought a necessary component of the self-fashioning of all liberal subjects. In Ireland, the orator was able to free himself both of the looming threat of re-enslavement and of the at-times peremptory presence of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, who guided his affairs in the United States. Enjoying newfound autonomy and celebrity, feted by leading Belfast men, and earning money hand over fist from the sale of his Narrative—his very own intellectual property—Douglass grew in confidence as a speaker and strategist. Soon after returning to the States, he would begin to distance himself from Garrison.
Douglass provoked controversy in Belfast over his stance toward the Free Church of Scotland. In 1843, a group of Evangelicals led by Thomas Chalmers broke from the Church of Scotland to form their own entity independent of the state, the Free Church, or Free Kirk. To fund their new congregation, the Free Churchers solicited donations from American slaveholding Presbyterians. This incensed but also intrigued Douglass, who, upon arriving in Belfast in December 1845, wrote that the city was “the very hot bed of presbyterianism and free churchism, a blow can be struck here, more effuctually [sic] than in any other part of Ireland.” Borrowing a tactic from O’Connell (whom he had met earlier during his sojourn on the island), he demanded in his lectures that the “unanimous cry of the people of Belfast, to the Free Church of Scotland . . . would be, ‘Have no communion with the American slaveholders;’ and that the next thing the Free Church should do would be to send back the blood-stained money which they had received.” Interestingly, Douglass was careful not to espouse Repeal, promising not to “speak of O’Connell in connexion with any other subject than” anti-slavery. Yet his attack on the Free Church and his implicit association with “The Liberator” was enough to alienate a segment of the city’s Presbyterian elite, many of whom favored continued union with Britain. The result was a string of invective newspaper editorials that echoed many of the critiques Douglass faced in the States, accusing him of being an “impostor” who lacked “integrity” and perhaps had never really been enslaved.
Ever the political strategist, as he prepared to cross the Irish Sea for a tour of Scotland and England in early 1846, Douglass would nonetheless include a written testimonial from a sympathetic Belfast Protestant minister in an updated edition of the Narrative. This addition angered Douglass’s Dublin-based printer, Richard Webb, a friend of Garrison who privately described Douglass as an ill-mannered “savage” and “wild animal,” apparently offended by the orator’s growing self-confidence. (One cannot help but note Webb’s use of the long-standing racist trope of the uncivilized African brute.)
Douglass was deeply impacted by witnessing Irish poverty and the beginning of the Famine. At the outset of his lecture tour, Douglass consistently chided Irish listeners for likening their relationship to Britain to that between enslaved people and their masters, arguing that such a comparison “did not sufficiently distinguish between certain forms of oppression and slavery.” Yet by the end of his tour, he would recall in a letter to Garrison the “human misery, ignorance, degradation, filth and wretchedness” he had observed among the Irish poor. Particularly horrifying to Douglass was Dublin, where ““the streets were almost literally alive with beggars.” Reflecting on this penury, he softened his stance on the question of “Irish slaves” somewhat, concluding that the Irish were
in much the same degradation as the American slaves. I see much here to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. He who really and truly feels for the American slave, cannot steel his heart to the woes of others; and he who thinks himself an abolitionist, yet cannot enter into the wrongs of others, has yet to find a true foundation for his anti-slavery faith.
Statue of Frederick Douglass in central Belfast, designed by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest and erected in 2023.
This is just a small sample of everything I’ve learned so far! As I begin my dissertation research, I’m looking forward to uncovering much more about the transatlantic connections between Ireland and the United States in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Some books and articles I’d recommend if you want to learn more about Douglass’s Irish tour:
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster, 2018.
Chaffin, Tom. Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
Fenton, Laurence. Frederick Douglass in Ireland: ‘The Black O’Connell.’ Collins Press, 2014.
Ferreira, Patricia. “All But ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine.” American Studies International 37, no. 2 (1999): 69–83.
Jenkins, Lee. “Beyond the Pale: Frederick Douglass in Cork.” Irish Review, no. 24 (1999): 80–95.
Kinealy, Christine. Black Abolitionists in Ireland. Routledge, 2020.
Maclear, J. F. “Thomas Smyth, Frederick Douglass, and the Belfast Antislavery Campaign.” South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 4 (1979): 286–97.
Murray, Hannah-Rose, and John R. McKivigan, eds. Frederick Douglass in Britain and Ireland, 1845–1895. Edinburgh University Press, 2021.
Quinn, John F. “‘Safe in Old Ireland’: Frederick Douglass’s Tour, 1845–1846.” The Historian 64, no. 3/4 (2002): 535–50.
Ritchie, Daniel. “‘The Stone in the Sling’: Frederick Douglass and Belfast Abolitionism.” American Nineteenth Century History 18, no. 3 (2017): 245–72.
Rodgers, Nini. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612–1865. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
And of course: Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845.
Currently living in Ulster University student accommodations on the north end of City Centre, I frequently ride the Glider Bus to visit my cousins in Poleglass or eat lunch and study at Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich. Along the way, stops in City Centre are announced only in English until the bus crosses into the West, where each is then listed in English and Irish. As the bus drives down Falls Road, I see a number of commemorative murals for the Blanketmen and H Block Hunger Strikers out the windows. In these moments, I recall how these prisoners, covered in their own excrement and with only a blanket as clothing, learned and taught the Irish language as a means of struggle against British policies of criminalization. This history is reflected in the modern work of Irish language schools across the North of Ireland, many established following the prison struggles of the 1980s.
Bobby Sands Mural
My cousins who teach at an Irish language primary school inspired me to learn Irish over the past year. Being in Belfast as a Mitchell Scholar has enabled me to take weekly classes in-person at An Droichead. As I walk to class on Tuesday nights and cross past the Sandy Row neighborhood, marked by a King William mural and lined with British flags, onto the Lower Ormeau Road, a Catholic area of Belfast where the school sits, issues of nationalism, cultural hegemony, and conflict transformation abound in my mind. Although the Northern Ireland peace process centers around respect for difference and parity of esteem between Unionist and Republican communities, the language of one nationality still does not have the legal and cultural protection afforded the language of the other. This is not only present in matters of signage around City Centre and on public transportation, but also in the allocation of block grant subsidies towards Irish language schooling. Although there is a statutory duty for the UK government to support the development of Irish medium-school education, Irish language medium-schools do not receive the same funding as English language medium-schools.
Since I arrived in Belfast, it has been interesting to discuss these matters with Irish language activists and learn how the Irish language has become a force for positive community change in the North despite the lack of abundant resources. Over twenty-five years since the finalization of the peace agreement, Irish language programs offered by groups such as Glór Na Móna offer pathways for young people to peacefully play a part in the cultural restoration of Belfast and Northern Ireland as characteristically Irish. Additionally, events such as Féile an Phobail promoting the language have helped decrease the incidence of sectarian bonfires in Catholic neighborhoods during the summer months.
While there is still antagonism towards the Irish language in some unionist communities, there is a growing non-sectarian interest in the language, evidenced by the opening of an Irish language school in East Belfast and an increasing number of people in Protestant communities learning Irish. Over the next eight months, I’m excited to continue learning the language not just so I can speak fluently with my cousins in our ancestral tongue but also to understand more about how cultural activism can help build peace in divided and criminalized communities.
Before choosing Queen’s, I was really torn between Belfast or Dublin. I’d been to Dublin before. I knew I liked it. But something in my heart was pulling me in a different direction. I can’t really explain it. I had never been up north at all. I had really no reason, only a hunch, a suspicion that there was something special going on up there and a desire to be a part of it.
Turns out, I was right.
Belfast is one of those cities that sneaks up on you. Every day, I stumble across some kind of reminder that I’m in the right place. It surprises you. Just now, I walked into the Seamus Heaney Centre to write my blog, and one of the PhD students let me know that a certain singer of a certain brown eyed song would be visiting shortly. Very likely, by the time I finish writing, I’ll have waved hello.
These are the kind of surprises I’m talking about. Back in November, I was talking about my songwriting process with a friend at Write Night, when a girl I’d never met before asked if I was a musician. I told her I was, and then she invited me to a women’s music session. This might seem like a kind of natural social interaction, but if you know me, you know this is a dream come true. I’ve been making music for years and saying, “I just wish I had a group of girls to play with.” Of course I have girl friends who are musicians, but it’s rare and it’s special to live in the same place, to come together in a circle and make music together, ceremoniously, every Wednesday at 7.
My women’s music nights are a huge Belfast highlight. These girls have brought out a musical confidence I didn’t know I had and introduced me to an underground music scene that is frankly spilling over in Belfast.
A similar thing happened when I was out for a drink at Maddens one night. The bar manager, Bernie, overheard me talking about music and invited me to one of his Monday night jams. These jams have introduced me to some truly incredible musicians. I’m learning so much, and every week I leave filled up with a sense of possibility and enthusiasm.
The arts scene in Belfast reminds me of New Orleans in a way, my favorite American city. Both places have been through a lot, and I’ve found that where there is pain, there is art and there is healing. Of course there’s art in a lot of places, but it’s these places where you find the best kind of art. The kind that speaks truth to power. Just think of Kneecap.
And while we think of Kneecap, I’ll tell you about another little surprise. Last March, after winning the Mitchell Scholarship, I attended the Oscar Wilde Awards in Los Angeles. There, through the masses of people, I happened to meet Rich Peppiatt and Trevor Birney, the writer and producer of the film Kneecap. A few months later I saw the movie in theaters and internalized it as another little sign. If people are making movies like this in Belfast, then it’s the right place to me. We met up for a drink when I arrived and now, somehow, I landed a job at their film company, Coup D’état. I’m reading scripts and doing research, and I honestly couldn’t be happier or more grateful.
In 2022, after spending my first two years out of undergrad working in TV production in California, I took a big chance on authenticity. I left to move closer to my roots: indie film, music, literature, theatre. I had no idea I would find all that in Belfast.
I’ll leave you with one more highlight. A few months ago, I joined a local poetry class. I’m not particularly ambitious when it comes to my poetry, but I think writing it is important for any artist. It keeps things experimental, cuts the fluff, and brings us back to the point.
Anyway, I show up to this class, and it’s a small class, only 4 of us, and there’s this older woman who is just so wonderful. So funny and warm and endearingly modest. Instantly, she reminded me of my Nana. Then she said her name was Pat, my Nana’s name. After class, she drove me home, and we’ve since formed a friendship.
The best thing about Belfast is its people. I feel so lucky to meet them.
I’m not sure what it was that originally drew to me to mandolin. I had never even met another mandolin player when I bought my first mandolin. I’ve always enjoyed learning how to play a variety of instruments ranging from the typical piano to the obscure dulcimer. With all the instruments I’ve learned, mandolin has always held a special place close to my heart. When I heard I won the Mitchell Scholarship, I was excited to explore the world of Irish mandolin. I was a relative beginner, and most of my experience was with American bluegrass—so learning Irish jigs seemed like a fun and natural way to expand my repertoire and to learn about traditional Irish music.In fact, I learned the University College Cork had a traditional music society that met up weekly to play traditional Irish tunes. It felt as though the stars were aligning.
Still a beginner mandolin player, I decided to stop by the pub where they met up to check out one of their sessions and chat with some of the members. Unfortunately, I quickly realized there was a barrier to entry—you need to actually know traditional Irish music, or at least be able to pick it up quickly. I asked one of the fiddle players after the session what some of the songs they normally play are; I was determined to go and practice as much as possible so I could show up the next week. The response, however, was not what I expected: “I’m not really sure what they’re called, one person just starts playing and we all jump in.” It was so perfectly natural for these musicians to play together in this way, many had been playing these exact songs on their instruments since they were just kids. Apart from the skill issue, I realized that there was a cultural divide that I didn’t have the experience to cross. So, for the time being at least, I went back to playing my bluegrass music and learning a couple Irish tunes one-by-one with the hope of improving enough to return on a later date.
A question was then prompted by my precarious position. Where do I, an American temporarily in Ireland, fit into the cultural equation? I’ll be in Ireland for a year, longer than your typical vacation, but with a definite end date. I don’t want to be the culturally oblivious tourist, but I’m also not struggling with the same worries of cultural preservation as immigrants. I didn’t grow up learning Irish tunes on the concertina, but should I ditch my bluegrass music to learn some Irish jigs? How do the traditions I bring with me fit into the traditions of my temporary home?
I don’t have an answer for the what exactly a person should do to reconcile two different cultures. However, in my own specific experience, it seems like there is room for compromise—embracing new traditions while still making space for old ones. Over the course of my first semester at UCC, I became more acquainted with Ireland. I made some Irish friends, learned some of the slang, and could consistently split the “G” on a pint of Guiness. As an aside, my mother wasn’t even impressed when I told her I could consistently split the “G” on a pint of Guiness—quite the opposite actually. But at the same time, in exchange for being introduced to naggins, I taught my Irish friends how to shotgun a beer—a truly cultural experience. I didn’t get a chance to celebrate thanksgiving with my family as I usually do, but I got to share a meal the following Saturday in Dublin with my fellow Mitchell scholars and our lovely Irish hosts. I even, albeit unwittingly, brought a “celebration caterpillar” and learned about the wonders of children’s birthdays in Ireland. The traditional music society hasn’t worked out yet, but in the meantime, I found a place more suited to my mandolin talents—the UCC orchestra. I may be the only mandolin player to the orchestra, but I brought what I am to where I was—and the violin section appreciates my enthusiasm. We are playing a medley of Pirates of the Caribbean tunes.
As we stood in the shade of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna, my roommate posed a question: why do we travel? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Why travel? Why study abroad?
Since I first found out about the Mitchell, I’ve been daydreaming about exploring Europe. I suppose that’s only natural—a rose-tinted, romanticized image of Europe is baked into so much of the media and literature I grew up with in America. After four months of living in Ireland, I’m no longer idealizing European life or travel, but visiting different cities is still a major priority for me this year. It caught me off guard that, when asked, I was unable to articulate exactly why I feel so strongly about it.
In fact, it’s easier to think of reasons not to travel. Travel disrupts my studies, messes with my (already hopeless) sleep schedule, and drains my savings account. It also exposes me to some degree of danger, as my parents are constantly reminding me in cautionary texts with links to news articles about pickpocketing, kidnapping, and plane crashes. And in my opinion, despite how it may sometimes be discussed or perceived, being well-traveled is not a virtue. I’ve also been struggling with the feeling that maybe I’m not accomplishing enough this year. Although I’m excited about my master’s thesis project, I’m spending a lot of my time exploring and relatively little time building, volunteering, and researching, compared to past years of my life. I’ve been having a lot of fun. But have I been doing a lot of good?
Despite all this, I’m planning on doing a lot more traveling in 2025 and spending more of my Mitchell stipend on RyanAir flights, train tickets, and hiking gear. There are plenty of good reasons to justify this. Visiting new places introduces us to people, sights, sounds, foods, languages, and cultures we’ve never encountered before. Still, I don’t think “cultural enrichment” fully captures why I was so eager to apply for the Mitchell, or why I’m still so keen on traveling.
The day before my flight back home for Christmas, after a grueling finals season with five written exams (each worth 60-80% of my grade) spaced out over the course of three long weeks, I took one last walk around Cork City while listening to a podcast about the neuroscience and health benefits of experiencing awe. A soundbite from a Hank Green video about the James Webb space telescope caught my attention:
“I personally believe that there are two ways to make the world a better place. You can decrease the suck, and you can increase the awesome. It’s clear that decreasing suck is extremely important – probably, in the end, more important than increasing awesome. And thus, when I talk about the space program, people are always like, ‘NASA’s money could be better spent on services for humanity!’ And to them, I say: I do not want to live in a world where we only focus on suck and never think about awesome . . . We have to try and prevent bad things from happening, but we also have to make good things happen. And that is why I love the James Webb Space Telescope.”
I think that this is a fun and valid point in favor of investing in space (and ocean) exploration, but also a pretty good guide on how to live to the fullest—and a good argument for why travel is so valuable. Decreasing suffering and solving problems is important, but experiencing awe and wonder make life worthwhile. When we were walking through the Louvre, my little sister commented on how “extravagant and unnecessary” the excessive gold decorations and carvings in the Galerie d’Apollon were. Surely all that wealth could have been used to feed the people of France? She had a point, but the gallery was truly awesome to behold. I’m so glad to live in a world where people do extravagant, unnecessary, and awe-inspiring things, and I’m grateful that I get to see them. Traveling reminds me that the world is a vast and awesome place! I’m pretty easily enthused, in general, but some of the things I’ve seen and heard this year have left me stunned.
So, I think it’s alright that this year is more about exploration than productivity for me. I want to maximize the awe and wonder that I feel in my daily life! I think that this pursuit has driven all of my best life decisions, including my career path, the friends I’ve chosen, my hobbies, applying for the Mitchell, and going on so many trips this year. I want to be amazed and delighted by all the beautiful art, music, inventions, and nature in the world. And, somewhat paradoxically, these are the things that inspire me to want to do research, make cool stuff, and be “productive” anyway.
My favorite word is wonderfilled—a made-up word from an Oreo commercial featuring a super catchy original song by Owl City meaning “filled with wonder.” (Not to be confused or interchanged with the word “wonderful,” which I think has been overused to the point of losing its flavor.) Here are a few of the things from my travels that have made the past few months so wonderfilled:
Ocean views from Portugal and a wall decorated with paper sardines by past visitors at the hostel I stayed in:
“Sonic creatures” created in the VR Sonotopia Lab at the unique and highly interactive Haus der Musik (House of Music) in Vienna:
An amazing concert at the Wiener Musikverein Golden Hall! I have no pictures, but here’s the applause after one of the pieces:
The “UFO observation tower” in Bratislava that I stood at the top of, built on a bridge over the Danube River:
My trip to Paris with my little sister:
And the accordionist we heard in the tunnels under the Arc de Triomphe:
It was also great to spend the holidays back home in Oregon with my friends and family. (I miss you guys already!) But it is nice to be back in Ireland. Each time I return to Cork from a trip, it feels a little more like home. I really do like living here, and I’m excited to visit Belfast, Galway, and West Cork later this year.
Finally, although I’m incredibly grateful (and still in disbelief, honestly) that I’ve been able to travel internationally because of the Mitchell, a lot of the things that have brought me joy haven’t been very extravagant. Drinks and jokes with friends, a hot dog drowning in ketchup, street musicians, rain, ice cream. These things exist pretty much everywhere, and I’ll keep seeking them out even after this crazy year of travel comes to an end.
I recently composed this piece for my Music and Media Technologies course at Trinity, and I thought it would be nice to showcase it here. “Walking Home Simulator” is an ambient soundscape written for my Electroacoustic Composition 1 module. For this project, I was challenged to take field recordings in and around Dublin and create a hybrid acoustic-electronic piece that manipulated this original source material to create a tension between realism and surrealism. In “Walking Home Simulator”, I explore concepts of homesickness, belonging, and the conditions that prompt the development self-identity. These themes are very important to me as an artist, but this exercise was an opportunity for me to explore them in an avant-garde style. Unlike my usual work, this is not a pop song or a folk song: it’s an experimental soundscape, and a slow burn to boot. So you’ve been warned! 😉 Program note and audio file attached below.
Walking Home Simulator.
Title Screen
→ Settings
→ Set Walk Time => Abridged
→ Main Menu
→ Run Simulation
Text Bubble:
“Walk Until You Find A Spot That Feels Like Home. Collect the Feeling of Home.”
This composition was developed by cutting, pasting, sampling, editing, and combining excerpts from a large 2-hour recording of a walk from Dublin City Center to Phoenix Park. All sounds featured in this project were recorded on a mid-side stereo microphone pair inside a Zoom H2n recorder.
Dublin is a long way from where I call home. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of people, a lot of *stuff* going on. Every surface and object has a complex sense of function and form. Crammed onto every city block are eight different buildings of nine different architectural styles, each with ten sounds and smells emanating from eleven storefronts or apartment windows.
The one thing there isn’t a lot of in Dublin is… nothing. There’s a distinct lack of still, innocuous, unremarkable nothing. The only one place in the city you can find unadulterated nothing is out in the middle of Phoenix Park. I think that’s why I’m so drawn to the space. Phoenix Park is so huge that it still contains little fragments of undeveloped places. And I don’t mean “undeveloped” in the conventional sense. I mean it in a perceptual sense. There are places in Phoenix Park that are unacknowledged, unconsidered, and wholly unremarkable, simply because nobody’s gotten around to considering them. Back home in Alabama, there’s “nothing” everywhere. Even in the South’s large metropolitan areas, you have to drive through a lot of nothing to get somewhere to do something. Little in-between spaces on your way to work. Long patches of highway median on the commute from Birmingham to Tuscaloosa.
So, this composition is dedicated to nothing. More broadly, it’s dedicated to the little things that feel like Home… the ones that are impossible to search for, because they’re impossible to define. But sometimes you get lucky and find one.
In a world dominated by the visual, beautiful sounds often get overlooked in favor of beautiful sights. For many people, “sightseeing” is synonymous with traveling—we go searching for interesting things to look at and rarely notice the unique noises around us, much less seek them out. I’ll admit that I’ve also scrolled through dozens of Tripadvisor articles (i.e. “THE 10 BEST Things to Do in Ireland, with Photos!”) and travel blogs to find pictures of breathtaking views and “must-see” attractions before going to new places. In this case, the pictures didn’t lie; Ireland is visually stunning. However, I wanted to dedicate this blog post to highlighting some of the interesting and wonderful sounds that I’ve come across during my first two months on the island.
The first weekend after I arrived in Cork, I took a bus out to the coast and spent a day at Fountainstown Beach, climbing rocks, peeking into tidal pools, and searching for critters. I recorded the sound of a wave rushing in to fill a small tidal pool before gently receding. The spectrogram (the plot of the frequency spectrum of a signal over time) of the noise shows the rising and falling of the ocean! Please forgive the wind noise, which also shows up as bright/high-intensity spikes in the low frequencies.
One of my favorite lesser-known attractions in Cork City is St. Anne’s Church, where you can actually play the Shandon Bells by pulling a series of ropes. You can even climb the tower and perch on a wooden beam to listen to the bells up close. The sound is piercing and lovely and lingers in the air long after each note is played. I terrorized the surrounding town with an awful rendition of the birthday song, in honor of my best friend’s 23rd birthday! In the spectrogram, you can see all the harmonics layered in each note. I’ll go back to St. Anne’s and play something nicer someday!
I also went to the Fota Wildlife Park and fed the birds a handful of nondescript bits from a coin-operated machine. The response was very loud and enthusiastic! That was a fantastic day. I also may have witnessed a mass lemur escape? There were dozens of them swinging around in the trees above our heads, outside of their enclosure. I hope that turned out alright.
Lastly, I have a recording of the fireworks show finale from the Halloween Festival in Derry, which I was lucky to attend alongside my fellow ’25 Mitchells! I love the popping, crackling sound and the shrieking whistles that start about 26 seconds in. Those high pitched sounds are also clearly visible in the spectrogram.
For each sonic wonder captured and plotted, there are infinite others that went unrecorded. I’ve heard so many delightful sounds! A gorgeous performance of Les Mis on West End, the metallic screech of the London Underground, the playful tone of a concertina during an Irish trad session, the rush of the river I walk along on my way to class every day, the rhythmic hum of the dryers in the laundry room downstairs, the satisfying hiss of a can of root beer (a rare and precious commodity in this country). Everyday life is full of noises, both commonplace and peculiar. I wonder how many of them go unnoticed when I’m distracted or rushing from one commitment to another. What else am I missing when “being busy” is taking up all my time and attention?
Maybe it’s something about the work culture or the lack of busywork in my master’s program, but I find that I’ve been more able to relax and appreciate the sounds, people, and learning opportunities in my everyday life here. Although I’m applying to PhD programs and thinking intently about my future, I feel more present in my day-to-day life than ever. I’ve always packed my schedule to the brim. Now, my life is thrillingly spontaneous! Each day surprises and delights me. Take the last 24 hours, for instance. Yesterday, after a workshop about auditory brainstem response (ABR) testing for my audiology class, in which I volunteered to be a guinea pig, I peeled the electrodes off my face and headed off to my first orchestra rehearsal. Now, after hours of travel by train, plane, and bus, I’m typing this blog post out on my phone from the backseat of an Uber in Portugal!
I always worry that the joys of life will get diluted if they come too easily or too often—that maybe all this jet-setting will dull my wanderlust, or that I’ll soon get over the novelty of living in Europe. But life in Ireland hasn’t lost its flavor yet! (Even if my fellow Americans might argue that the food here never had any to begin with).
Beyond all the traveling, I’m also very excited about my research project! I’ve started working with a Marine Ecology group to help study the effects of electromagnetic fields generated by underwater power cables on shark behavior. And, back in September, I got to go on a shark tagging trip in the Irish Sea, off the coast of Wicklow.
Overall, I am incredibly charmed and delighted by Ireland and my daily life in Cork. Smiles and adventures come so easily here. I’m incredibly grateful that I get to have this year. It already feels like it’s going by too quickly. I’ll try to keep my eyes, ears, and mind open. I’ve already learned so much from living in Ireland and having conversations with my roommates and fellow Mitchell scholars.
So, 10 more months of this? Sounds pretty good to me!
Bonus Sounds 🙂
While I was out fishing for sharks with my research group, I kept hearing this haunting, whispery high-pitched noise. After some poking around, I found out that it was an Aeolian tone (a sound caused by wind passing over an object) coming from the fishing lines.
Traditional Irish music is also really growing on me! On one of my first nights out in Cork City, I happened across an accordionist and guitarist playing together in a pub. It was an combination of instruments I’d never heard before, but I thought it sounded so warm and lively. All Irish trad music does. Ever since that night, I’ve been battling the urge to buy an accordion or concertina. In the meantime, I’ll keep trying my best to learn folk tunes on my viola.
It has always been fascinating to me the idea of having multiple homes. How often times a traveling mind never settles in one place, but instead creates a map of tiny homes that come together in a beautiful adventure called life. During one of my lectures on Documentary filmmaking at a new flourishing documentary course at Dublin City University, we were tasked to make a short film on each other. Randomly assigned someone’s history, secrets and dreams to do as we please, it was a vulnerable moment for all.
“Would you read a book about your life?,” someone asked to spark our imagination.
It was funny because my motto in life has always been to live my life so that I could write a book about it at the end, with all the pictures, romances, travel and people remembered in it.
Snippets of Dublin -Dublin City UniversityFilming at a park near my homeIn class at the film studio
My friend once told me, our mind is like a house. Each owner of a house arranges his abode in his own way. Someone glues wallpaper; someone fills the library only with the books he has read; some only scrub the kitchen or only have time to make the bed; I also know people who are exclusively engaged in decorating the facade and the yard. Nevertheless, in the course of life we constantly meet potential guests. It is at the discretion of the owner to let them in or not.
“Creating a home in a new place”
But you, I will let in a little closer. I bought carpets to make my room cozy, flowers on the window so their smell fills up the flat. A gorgeous park nearby, right by my window, with sunlight shining through and dogs running around with their owners rushing by. DCU is like a small town that functions on its own – on the left there is pharmacy with friendly Irish staff, walk a little further and you see a big gym with 50 clubs, cycling and swimming pool. Walk a little more and you have tents with organizations inviting students to join (I tried out karting for the first time, and that was a thrill!) Right on campus we have a huge concert hall, and I went to see an a capella group of 4 men singing Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and Frank Sinatra’s songs. You already know that was spectacular!
“And always homemade food!”
I immediately fell in love with my school. A bus ride away from the Dublin city center, DCU feels like a cozy countryside, charming and peaceful. Recently I was chosen to be one of the Post-Grad Ambassadors for the school – a job so familiar to me from the University of Oklahoma- and we are already at task, giving tours and filming promotional videos for my Documentary Practice program.
Last week I went to Dubrovnik, Croatia for reading week with my American friends, and right after to Oxford to film a documentary on Syrian refugees an their relationship with music. For my class I am filming a short film on a Nepalese colleague, who sings and acts and explores his own idea of home. Next week the Mitchells and I are flying to Vienna for Christmas Markets and a concert at Musikverein Golden Hall. I have gone to Irish pubs with live music and singers, and it seems like every corner of Ireland hides brilliant souls, with charismatic personalities, sarcastic nature and welcoming presence. How do you not feel at home in such a beautiful country?
Watching a handful of sheep graze nearby while the rest of our troop huffed and puffed their way up the rest of the path, I was left with that subtly familiar sentiment one finds themselves grappling with having fallen over the cusp of a big life change: if you had told me a year ago, or even senior year of college me, that I would be starting a life in my fourth country in five years, I would have laughed and never believed a word. And yet, here I was, standing on a hill in county Louth – Ireland’s smallest county – watching the sun go down next to my now exhausted companions.
As my peers in my MSc course in Global Mental Health at Trinity sat around me, it appeared that mental fortitude, rather than physical stamina, was our preferred forte based on our climbing performance. We had spent the day on a journey to a pumpkin patch (note: difficult to find in the middle of the Irish countryside) and stopped by Carlingford to make Halloween decorations that evening and were quick to blame the excursion to excuse our poor performance. One of my classmates was a local from the town of Ardee and had invited us for a weekend stay with his family (full Sunday Irish roast, Gaelic football match, chippery and all). Finding myself outside of Dublin for the first time since crossing the Atlantic, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in the first few weeks of settling in.
It’s not that I wasn’t comfortable being in large cities – as a native New Yorker, truly it was anything but. Yet, I hadn’t still fully let myself go since my arrival, almost too aware and conscious of my new Irish surroundings. Did I like it here? Did I make the right choice? Did the people here like me? Was I going to make the most of the opportunity I had been given? Making my way through the busy streets of Dublin, whether on my way to a volunteer shift at the National RehabilitationHospital or meeting friends at McSorley’s for Thursday night pub quiz, I hadn’t given myself the opportunity to slow down and actually form answers to these questions spinning around in my brain.
I’ve always been an overthinker – someone who needs to look at all the evidence, know every potential option and compare them in order to feel comfortable finally choosing a path forward. In many ways it’s served me well, sure, as if I’m nothing if not thorough, with all dotted i’s and crossed t’s. But frankly, this mindset has also removed some of the spontaneity, spirit, and courage that have proved essential and crucial to my life’s most fruitful and fulfilling choices. Even as a man of science, attempting to recognize this by taking the plunge and coming to Ireland was a leap of faith.
And so as I let the full exhale leave my lungs, breath condensing softly in front of me and coiling wispily around my hands, I was struck by the uncharacteristically straightforward nature of my own thoughts: yes. For now, whatever the question was, the answer was yes. While I may have written this entire blog post about a moment composed of only a few seconds, to me it spoke of something greater and more fundamental. Surrounded by new friends in a new and beautiful place, the uncertainty would remain but more importantly would the joy in chances taken, bonds forged, and experiences had. And, even if just for a moment, that was enough for me.
