Thisbe Nissen
Photo © Sandra L. Dyas
From the desk of....



IRISHING

It was nuts! I locked myself in the house for 2 weeks, rented The Commitments, and In the Name of the Father, and anything else Irish I could find, and got the voices in my head. I walked around talking to myself, and my cats, in a brogue! The real problem now is that I can really only do the accent if I get it in my head, and talk that way all the time, so it's impossible to read from the novel and lapse into the accent to read the Irish girls' dialogue—and then out of it for everything else. It's either all-Irish, all the time, or nothing, which might make for some mortifying readings... --Thisbe

Here is a link to link to a great website that Thisbe utilized called The O'Byrne Files—Dublin Slang Dictionary and Phrase-book: http://homepage.eircom.net/~nobyrne/slang.html.

Below are scans of Thisbe's notes from her "Irish-ing" process.



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