Local writer releases first publication

AN ARTIGARVAN author has released a new publication, a collection of poems and stories.

Anne McCrea has been writing for many years, but 'Bounds of Strangeness' is her first publication.

In the final story, ‘The Far Hills,’ if they are familiar with Strabane and its outlying areas the reader will recognise names such as Aughabrack, Strabane, Plumbridge and Clady.

This story is about Brian Tully a vet and Second World War veteran who returns to Strabane to set up practice.

The story is interspersed with flashbacks to India and Burma where he served as a vet devoicing mules so that they would go undetected behind enemy lines.

Meanwhile life goes on in 1950’s Strabane and the arrival of a new English lady vet, Helen Grant, gives the townspeople something to talk about.

Animal lovers will be intrigued to hear of the various illnesses and their remedies and the story is enlivened by the inclusion of family photos.

The story itself is fictional but informed by research into Strabane in the early 1950’s and authentic material in the form of army records.

The remaining stories deal with such themes a family breakdown, homelessness, a film crew coming to Strabane and an apathetic Airedale dog which refuses to hunt down by the riverbank in Buxtehude, in Germany.

All the stories are a first foray into prose and fiction for the Tyrone writer.

However, Anne has had poems published in literary magazines such as The Honest Ulsterman, Channel Literary Magazine and Northwest Words.

They range from poems about walking in Donegal, a poem ‘For Ian' the author’s late brother, playing pretend tea parties with the author’s late mother, 'Footsteps of the Camino’ and ‘Lipstick Stained Coffee Cup', the last poem having made it into the anthology of poems in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.

Copies of ‘Bounds of Strangeness’ are available to buy through Amazon, at Artigarvan Spar, J Boggs at Canal Basin, Strabane, while there signed copies to buy from Little Acorns Book Shop, Derry.