Low Rate of Irish Divorce. Is Austerity a Factor?

Opening Night of  Love & Marriage Revisited 

The Merriman Summer School, 2015.

     Former Supreme Judge, Catherine McGuinness,  blamed her love of the Culwick Choir - in which she continues to sing alongside the publicist for the Merriman Summer School - and her former husband’s association with the Merriman, for her invitation to Open the 2015 School last night, at Glor Theatre in Ennis, Co. Clare. Her commitment to working towards divorce legislation over a sustained period was mentioned twice from the floor - to applause from the audience. Those members staying in the Old Grand Hotel will be able to update their knowledge of the bible, she quipped, as there is a related seminar on offer there. She got a further laugh when she quoted the Church of Ireland Gazette, saying she is member of that church, 'I know you all read it weekly!'

      The first law allowing for Maintenance for women whose husbands are no longer with them was passed in 1976, the year after I graduated as a social worker. Listening to her mention of other laws passed, after long and arduous campaigns, was like listening to the social history of my lifetime to date. By the time the second Referendum on divorce was passed in 1995, by a small majority,  most of the legislation needed to sustain separated couples was already in place.

    This may account for the significantly low rate of divorce in Ireland. Tom Fahey, Professor of Social Policy at UCD School of Applied Social Science demonstrated that the peak came in the first few years afterwards. If the people who had already separated by the time divorce was available here were the only ones to have divorced since, it would account for the figures.

    Along with Spain and Italy, we are the only country to have a two-step process to divorce. The requirement that couples be separated first for a period of at least four years may be a deterrent. In the first instance because Separation Agreements need to be made (although they are not legally required) to enable couples to put some sort of arrangements in place for that period. They may not wish to re-visit those often hard won agreements lest conflict re-emerges and unnecessary difficulties are raised. There may be no real need for divorce until one party wants to re-marry, Judge McGuinness suggested.

    Members of the audience pointed out that the economic difficulties of recent years make it extremely difficult to contemplate divorce, or even separation. Living apart may not be a viable economic possibility. Another indicated research suggesting that austerity is putting severe pressure on marriages in Ireland. As the legislative details of divorce law were put into the Constitution rather than allowed for in accompanying legislation they would be very difficult to change here. We do, however, have a fairly liberal law – no-fault divorce – once the long separation period been seen through. Professor Tom Fahey pointed out that findings in relation to the reasons for such a low divorce rate in recent years are ambiguous. It is hard to ascertain the reason, particularly in the context of International comparisons. Italy and Spain have low rates also.

    I was sorry to hear, from a local Co. Clare solicitor trained in Mediation, that a lot of couples still do not go for mediation before engaging in what inevitably is an adversarial process once both parties have their separate lawyers. My own separation was amicably agreed with my former husband. We waited till quite late on to engage the advised separate lawyers (to ensure neither could later claim later they weren’t advised) and move on to arrange a divorce to ensure we didn’t get adversarial – at least until our children were further grown up. It worked for us but it’s not ideal. Once a third party – a potential new spouse for one partner is involved – things could get more complicated. The divorcing spouse wanting to re-marry could find themselves with conflicting loyalties. Mediation is by far the best route to follow if at all possible.

     Dr. Linda Connolly is Director of this year’s School. She is Chair of the Irish Social Sciences Platform and  a member of the Royal Irish Academy Social Sciences Committee.  She is a Sociologist and Director of the Institute for Social Science in the 21^st Century  (ISS21) at UCC.

     The Merriman School continues until Sunday to consider the topic Love and Marriage Revisited through literature, sociology, history and music. You can attend individual events or join the school. 

You can book at www.glor.ie . 

More information  is available at: www.merriman.ie / eolas@merriman.ie

Rising to the Challenge of Summer.

Solos – whether living, working or otherwise alone - need to be just as creative as parents occupying children, double as much if you’re child-minding alone as well.

At the gates of a play-school last year I met a Grandmother, child-minding for the summer. She was visiting from England and lamenting the absence of activity groups to join. ‘Every group I contact has stopped for the summer months.’ I recommended investigating the Meet-Up site online but, living alone myself, I fully appreciated the challenge she was facing. At least her adult family would return home in the evenings but they’d have their own commitments. She needed a life of her own – temporarily in suspension across the Irish Sea - to complement child-minding and acting adjunct to her younger family, so busy themselves they’d be unlikely to fully appreciate her difficulties which could lead to problems. She could quickly find herself isolated, or at odds with the family she had come to assist with little left to contribute in terms of company after a day of child-minding alone.

Solo, whether through living alone, working alone from home, recently: retired, widowed separated, with a spouse working away or simply absent with their own activities – is a challenge to rise to if you are not to disappear into yourself and feel body-less. Without the synergy of engaging with others, as interested in you as themselves as you collectively engage in a shared enterprise, it takes a lot of creative energy to simply keep on track. Don’t dismiss that as valueless. This creative engagement can have you more consciously weaving life than those who are more engaged. It would be worse were there no challenge to keep you creative. This realisation is a good place to start.

Setting up a structure that works for your day and week, once you’ve practised it for a while, will save you from wasting energy. President Obama bought suits of only two colours, with matching ties for each, when he began his presidency. He wouldn’t have the time or energy to be daily deciding on clothes. I’ve also taken this advice from a seasoned solo traveller heard on radio before I took my first trip away alone to Rome a few weeks ago. ‘Decide beforehand what you will do when you get there, give yourself an itinerary -otherwise, when you arrive, you won’t bother and find yourself wandering aimlessly’. It worked a treat. Tired from simply getting there, it was great to have sought out the city tourist travel bus before I’d even left the station on arrival and to take it up next day without effort. All that was left to decide was where to get off and when to get back on!

Exercise needs to be part of your structure. A daily walk, tai chi or yoga exercises or whatever you fancy yourself. At the worst of times: movement of any kind is a first step back on track – even if it’s walking across the kitchen and stretching before you put the kettle on. Already your brain is re-activated. I love Julia Cameron’s idea of Artist Dates – from the book The Artist’s Way. Choose to visit or do something you wouldn’t normally select and go there, or go somewhere that will stimulate your creative side - and don’t think about creativity as something that is only for artists, it is not. Engage in a project: make something or learn. Wellbeing research indicates that anything that absorbs you to self-forgetfulness leverages happiness and August is a good time to visit special events and put a toe in new waters.

‘Power poses,’ I’ve been known to chant as a mantra on occasions. The research indicating that people who have taken power stances before interviews – hands on hips, leaning on a table with your hands, or punching the air – instead of only sitting curled over to surf the internet on a smart phone before being questioned, not only performed better in their interview but felt better too. Their cortisol levels, associated with stress, were down and testosterone levels up leaving them more sense of agency and action.

Smile, it changes your brain chemistry and there is something to be said for the old adage about the world smiling with you but I wouldn’t rely on it. You need company and it is good to do everything you can to find it but failing that there’s a lot to enjoy and, meanwhile, you’re building resilience, toning muscles readiness to rise to your next challenge – maybe the new group you’ll join in September or the skill you’ll take to the next level when you add it to the familiar friends and activities you enjoy during the rest of the year.

The Honouring of Poets: Derek Mahon

     I was listening to poet Derek Mahon’s controversial biographer, Stephen  Enniss, last night - as he was interviewed by Vincent Woods on  Arts Tonight on RTE Radio 1*. Savouring the pleasure of hearing Derek Mahon himself, in excerpts from previous interviews and hearing him read a few of his poems. Stephen Enniss acknowledges that Mahon and Seamus Heaney were good friends but also, inevitably, rivals. He linked the withdrawal of Derek Mahon from the public sphere of poetry, including his refusal of an OBE from the Queen of his birth-place, Northern Ireland, to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Heaney. The wisdom of which withdrawal Enniss absolutely regrets and he hopes his book will provide a counterbalance, keeping Derek Mahon’s poetry closer to the foreground of international attention. It will be good if it achieves that although the poems speak for themselves.

     Whatever his own reasons, such as he knows them, Derek Mahon himself, however, has not only done the right thing in withdrawing but given the greatness of his commitment to serving poetry; he has, arguably, taken the only possible option open to him. This is, I predict; what the greats of his generation, his early friend Evan Boland, perhaps, and friends Michael and Edna Longley - along with other present and future great writers will say, or may have already said privately or in public.

     There is a paradox at the centre of a culture of awards and prizes. True poetry and art is beyond such things – there can be no single winner, given the diversity of poems and poets  - yet they are crucial to maintaining a framework that ensures it can continue to be formed. The humanness at the centre of it, also paradoxically, requires sufficient recognition to battle on in the face of few material rewards. The greatest prize in literature was awarded – to Heaney.  The only thing left to a true poet and candidate of similar stature is to transcend that culture, put himself beyond the question of current acclaim and leave it to history.

     It is important that Seamus Heaney was awarded and accepted the Nobel Prize. It was important that in the year of his seventieth birthday the laureate could be heard on radio at the centre of Irish life reciting his poems - in the midst of the collapse of so much. He held, and held us, to poetry.  It is equally in the service of Irish and all poetry that Derek Mahon has not second-placed himself by accepting less prestigious awards, however honourable in themselves, but rather holds for us the space in poetry that is beyond all such.

    In the greatness of time in Northern Ireland it will not be the creeds and identities of the relatively petty wrangling that will be remembered but the bloodshed. Neither will it be awards of literature, whatever gratefulness is felt that the artist received recognition in their time. It is poetry that endures. The words and the due honour inherent in the manner it has been served.

Reference & Link:

Book: After the Titanic: The Life of Derek Mahon by Stephen Enniss. Gill & Macmillan.

*http://www.rte.ie/radio/utils/radioplayer/rteradioweb.html#!rii=9%3A10440736%3A1538%3A%3A

*First broadcast Autumn, 2014

.

Postcript and Prelude

An Apprentice Verse-Maker’s Take on the Exhibition -

Postcript: Visual Artists Respond to Seamus Heaney’s Poem.              

Transfixed, I was listening to the radio in my kitchen when I heard the Chair of the Irish Countrywoman’s Association, Bridin Twist, say that she was in favour of legalising divorce. There was now every chance something heretofore unimaginable could happen. I was reminded of that as the votes were counted in the recent referendum.  It was one of those heart-stopping moments when time is suspended and you know the landscape has irrevocably changed. A few years later I met my hero in her home The Burren Holistic Centre below Mullaghmore Mountain, where I was to facilitate a workshop.

Bridin, who sadly died a few years ago, brought my attention to the poem Postscript, by Seamus Heaney.  I bought a copy from the Kinvara shop named after the poem and had it hanging in my own house afterwards.

On Saturday evening last in the Russell Art Gallery, just north of the flaggy shore road that inspired the poem, I attended the opening by Micheal O’Suilleabhain of ‘Postscript: visual artists respond to Seamus Heaney’s poem’ - an exhibition curated by Tim Emlyn Jones. Introducing Micheal, Tim spoke of the transformative powers of the Gallery space where, if you stop by for a cup of coffee before walking the flaggy shore, anything can happen. You can even find yourself agreeing to curate the exhibition to which you had agreed to contribute!

The response of the artists he invited was so generous that the Burren Art College is now going to host more of the exhibition. It will be formally opened there by Fintan O’Toole on Thursday 9^th July at 7pm. Both sections of the whole exhibition will continue until the end of July. Just over a week later, on Friday 17^th July, The former RTE radio producer, John Quinn, will introduce and present “Remembering Seamus – interviews & correspondence,” a selection of radio interviews with his friend.

The RHA artist, Donald Teskey’s Longshore II - a wild seascape created in mixed media, waves crashing the rocks of the shoreline, immediately grabs attention on entering the Russell gallery space. To the left of that is an exhibit where lines drawn in black interact with thick white paper, drawing attention across the waves to the horizon and the sky’s lines above. This picture had me smile without quite knowing why - the horizon, with its persistent waves, its sense of timelessness maybe. It is the work of Tim Emlyn Jones himself and there is a smaller similar piece of his further along the wall, with more variety in the waves and light. The juxtaposition of colour and black-and-white is striking in the montage of images in mixed media in Judith McKimm’s work, while The Blue Flower, in oil, by Nick Miller and Geraldine O’Reilly’s work give a more immediate take on the Burren landscape - as does RHA Charles Harper’s, striking piece Burren Day highlighting mountain and flagged Burren landscape – although in a very different style. I was also particularly taken by the abstract work of the other artists: Ann Quinn, Lorraine Wall and David Ferry.  Conor McGrady’s ‘Borderland 1’ and 2, undertaken in Gouache on Paper, revealed to the returning eye of this observer a zen-like sense of stillness. I wondered was the artist influenced by Japanese landscapes: a black sun above a strong I Ching-like line was suggested to this novice when I reflected further. And the placement of the scene on the paper in his second piece, reminiscent of rocks planted in the Japanese landscape – timeless and natural, yet carefully placed, this time here in Co Clare, suggested it further. The blurred boundaries of the gouache medium somehow only strengthen the outline. Again, there’s the suggestion of a here-and-there-ness.

The boundaries of the exhibition itself are blurred in the Gallery. Hunting for treasure, glance moving from catalogue to walls, it became clear all the paintings on the walls are exhibits. The other work, enjoyable for itself any other day and propped on shelves among exceptional craftwork, cards and jewellery that, one suspects, assist the gallery to host such exhibitions – they have related books too – inevitably distract somewhat from the exhibition.

‘Heaney’s “…neither here nor there” might be taken as an insult but it also reveals something of poetry’. ‘It is the place where poetry meets you’, Micheal O’Suilleabhain suggested as he reflected on Heaney’s lines. ‘Everyone should have a flute carrier’ he remarked as the young man kneeling at his feet unbent himself to extend the instrument. The musician did not want the audience to be trying to imagine wild swans or any such – ‘we’ll just see what happens’ and the notes trickled and danced.

Across the road, as I left, across the fields and the grey sea in the bay the white and yellow light was highlighting dark edges in the white clouds. Silver glanced the arms of the wind turbines lit from the disappearing light behind them as they turned on the hills – straight across from the place Heaney visited and wrote, in Postcript, ‘You are neither here nor there,/a hurry through which known and strange things pass/As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways/And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.’

Relevant links:

Russellgallery.net

http://visualartists.ie/listings/exhib-munster/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art-and-the-russell-gallery/

aica.ie/postscript-group-exhibitions-at-the-burren-college-of-art... 

How is Money, Money? Bitcoin and Other Currency Questions.

I was on holiday in the 1970s, on the Ring of Kerry, when the recently graduated husband of my friend from earlier days, shocked me into thinking differently about my bank account, then happily in credit despite its low value. I was reminded of this, on Monday 18^th May, at the UCD workshop on Gaming Money.

‘I threatened to move my loan to another bank,’ he said. Far from feeling himself at the mercy of his bank because of the significant loan he had had to take out to equip his dental surgery he realised that the interest he would be paying on the loan for a long time to come made him a valuable customer. It was the first time I realised that my careful ‘staying in the black’ strategy was only that and not necessarily the best one. Credit is valuable. A credit history can be valuable too, if you want to take out loans in future. Banks sell loans to us and to each other and in the process create more money. Contrary to what is often thought to be the case, most money nowadays is created by commercial banks rather than Central banks.

The ‘nice’ history frequently taught in College courses on Economics describing the humble beginnings of money as token object used as substitutes to barter, is only one way of looking at the money story. Another begins, by seeing money as credit – debt. As money becomes increasingly complex exploring the stories and histories that best describe how it works may be the most realistic way to understand it.

How is money, money? No longer backed by gold (Nixon fully and finally removed it from the Gold Standard in 1971), with only a fraction of the value of credit given, or ‘money’, backed by reserves of savings it is no longer accurate – if it really ever was – to think about money as a thing. All of this was the starting point for ‘rules of currencies, and how they are and could be twisted by digital currencies’. The Workshop was part of the UCD Centre for Innovation Technology  and Organisation’s (CITO) research on coding value. The invited speaker, Professor Ole Bjerg from the Copenhagen Business School, explored the question, ‘How is Bitcoin Money? He finds the question ‘How is money?’ more effective than ‘What is money?’.

Bitcoin is growing in significance. It is the best known of digital currencies using block-chain coding – a kind of linked computer coding that is considered to be particularly secure. The European Union takes it seriously enough to have brought out a report last year advising Central Banks as to important considerations to bear in mind when considering it.

Author of Making Money, Bjerg employs a model from Lacanian Analysis to propose three overlapping circles one of which he calls ‘Real’, placing within it an image of a house - but it could either, arguably, be a block of gold bullion. The second one he labels, ‘Symbolic’ and places within it a hundred euro note. That note, or any such, is backed by Nation States and has ‘sovereign power behind it.’ In the third circle, titled ‘Imaginative’ he puts a Visa card. In this circle money is credit. ‘The banks owe us a lot of money and that is what we use as money’. These overlapping circles give the fuller picture of how money is.

Professor Donncha Kavanagh – at UCD, proposes a further circle he labels ‘Shambolic’ to include  ‘excess’ – the value added by leveraged derivatives and more. Kavanagh considers stories and mythologies useful aids to better understand business: his paper, with Majella O’Leary (2004), considers heroic leadership styles within business organisations in the light of Irish Legends -The Tain and Chu Chulainn. Think of the myths about alchemy, the eternal search to turn base metal into gold – powerfully symbolic in our collective imagination.

Bjorg points out that Bitcoin, although it can’t be held in the hand, has similar characteristics to gold in that its story includes ‘mining’. Would be miners have to spend considerable time on a computer bank on which they have to rent time on very expensive powerful computers, or pool resources with lots of other miners if they want to get themselves Bitcoins. Most will, instead buy them from those who have already done this.

A member of the audience high-lighted the significance of this difference: the distributed power is in the hands of the miners - and much is made of this de-centralised, democratised, non-State power  (‘Symbolic circle’above) backing the digital currency - and not with the majority of holders of Bitcoin who are more likely to have bought or exchanged the ‘coins’.

The second guest speaker was Nigel Dodd, who talked about ‘Origins and Utopias of Monies’. He is a sociology professor from the London School of Economics who has made the sociology of money the focus of a long career. He talked about local currencies, such as the Brixton pound in England: they definitely add value to local economies; it is best argued that they add resilience to the greater picture by being currencies within the framework of other currencies.

The workshop suggests that so far the most valuable aspect of digital and other forms of currency may be the way they force and assist us to think further about what and how money is.

Fat is Not Immoral and Those Who Claim the High Moral Ground Are in Danger of Bullying.

I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was.

Fat is no longer ‘a feminist issue’ alone. It’s a health and fashion issue - for all. It always was. Face facts: fat is most associated with having a low income, although genetic make-up and many other factors play their part; once it has been put on, the body has an in-built tendency to return to its former highest weight. This is why many who diet fail to sustain their weight loss and why attacking those who have weight on is inappropriate and counter-productive. To demonise those putting on weight, or their parents, is to bully those often already suffering.

You may have a lean mean physique. You may work hard to keep it that way, sweating the calories off in the gym or on the road. Well done.  I celebrate your success, health and wellbeing. If you also need to hit out at the less fortunate then I question your motivation. You want to add moral high ground to your accolades? Is your self –worth so low? Is it built on body image? You are then about as unwell as the rest of us.

All the indications are that we live in a society with an eating disorder. Magazines sell best, now that Princess Diana is gone, when they have something about weight, fat or food on the cover. We have anti-weight campaigns and more cooking food programmes promoting sugar and fat ingredients than ever before. See-saw weight gain-loss and an obsession with food are clear indications of addiction. We photo-shop images that no-one can live up to because they are not real and then we make them an ideal to fail to live up to. It makes sense to be obsessed with food when it is genuinely in short supply other than that, we have to ask: what else is going on.

The short answer is that an industry is going on, an industry with as many charlatans as academic experts. The second answer is that industry as a whole needs more output from fewer workers to keep the economy going. 

Last Sunday,10th May, 2015, the retired broadcaster Derek Davis contributed to a conversation on the Marian Finucane Show about Obesity Policy, This week we are mourning his death. The panel agreed the focus needs to be on prevention, starting with children. Children need to be allowed to play. They need to be given space to run around and allowed out to safe-enough spaces we need to ensure are created. We do need to exercise. We also need to get out more. We need to address our false fears of the world out there. Having been a pscychotherapist for many years I want to say that many of those are generated by fear in here – internal fear generated by the false myths we need to stop promulgating. We also need to face the fact that life is uncertain: we can contribute to outcomes but we can’t control them. Counteracting obesity begins best with breast-feeding which brings us back to the question of work lifestyle balance and the need for companies to be more conscious that mothers need to breastfeed and that companies need women if they are to succeed best so action is needed here too.

I never thought I’d write on this issue. I didn’t want to join the obsession. It is a tragedy that in the last week of Derek Davis’ life he had to say, ‘I am sitting here getting angry…’ as he listened to Sinead Ryan, introduced as the Consumer and Property Analyst from The Irish Independent, who had castigated the parents of overweight children. Davis talked about what is known as Fat Guilt and how G.Ps. and others are ‘not up to speed on obesity.’ It is ‘profoundly anger inducing …only feeds the so-called fat industry’ including its' charlatans’. 

We owe it to the memory of a generous man to deal with our communal addiction: face our fear and address best eating and exercise habits in a way that is both fair and respectful. I wish I could be as smart as Derek Davis was. I loved hearing a replay of him talking about books to George Hook this week. I wanted more.

http://www.rte.ie/radio1/marian-finucane/   Sunday 10^th May. Click on Obesity Policy

http://www.newstalk.com/podcasts/The_Right_Hook/ click on ‘Remembering Derek Davis’

Cupcakes, Blogging, Poetry and Sleep – Build a Sustainable Blog and Lifestyle.

Notes from An Apprentice Verse-Maker (4)

We may not all want – or have the expertise and experience – to blog about cupcakes and style, however we may enjoy both or either.  But Jeff Haden’s interview with Emily Schuman, author of the highly successful business that her Cupcakes and Cashmere blog has become, has a lot to say to anyone seriously interested in writing a blog and building a sustainable following.

If literature and poetry is your thing, Cupcakes and Cashmere may seem a little frivolous and the best-selling book of the same name further evidence that a large Market Share is inevitably not for you. An argument I dispute – at least to the same extent it is held to be true.

Best-selling poetry Anthologies such as those edited by Bloodaxe UK publisher, Neil Astley, are among the poetry books that have given the lie to the suggestion that poetry isn’t for everyone or won’t be loved by many who haven’t yet found it accessible. By accessible I don’t mean easy to understand, I mean the poetry flag found and followed because it stands out among the clamour of flag-flying products and services vying for attention. There is always poetry easy to understand amid the intrigue of greater challenges. In the midst of all the clamour poetry is a refuge you can bring home – more immediately accessible (time-wise and geographically), by click, purchase or browse than the restorative power of any Spa, beauty product, cupcake or other splurge - although it can as equally complement as provide an alternative to all of those.

The poetry anthology or collection by your bed is the best night-time dip you’ll find on those nights sleep is determined to elude you or your mind is humming with events properly belonging to day-time. One sound, image or penny-dropping melt leads to another. You are diverted and captivated. How come, someone has captured in a few lines the distress you’ve been secretly hoarding, or your obsessional hidden desire? How do poets do that?

If that doesn’t do it, you can give your attention to learning a few lines by heart. You’ve toned your brain, given your imagination a quick fix and taken ‘time-out', it’s probably  time to settle down and go back to sleep. Those lines repeated to yourself, an oasis you instil in your brain for the future as you drift away, will easily win out against counting sheep.  Even better, a poem or two before bedtime can become an essential de rigueur transition between digital drives, the obligations of daytime and night-time peace. There cannot be a better way to obey the strictures of sleep experts and build a bed-time routine that prepares the body for sleep. If the pages do become a little damp and curled because you can’t resist dipping while in the bath then, there is nothing to worry about. Any book is better damp than dry-leaved and closed.

Emily Schuman adjures bloggers hoping to build a successful business to

       ‘Be patient…success will most likely come slowly, if at all’.

       ‘Be authentic and learn to differentiate yourself’.

She reminds her audience that

        ‘…creating original talent…will take a lot of your time’.

Warns against

     

        ‘...sacrificing quality over content. Your audience will be built on trust and the entertainment      

        value you provide. If your quality slips, so will they.’

Warns against,

        ‘…taking every offer that comes your way. (Advertising offers! You wish.) At first it’s very

        tempting to accept ….ultimately, it degrades your credibility if you become an advocate for

        anyone willing to pay you.’

Now, why does that sound more convincing coming from that source than it did when I heard it from poets and artists?

Start Blogging, Start a Business, and Build an Authentic… - Inc.com

Bestselling author and successful entrepreneur Emily Schuman of Cupcakes and Cashmere on building a thriving business.

An Interview by Jeff Haden

Is at  www.inc.com/jeff-haden/start-blogging-start-a-business-and-build-an-authentic-brand.html.

Other relevant websites are:

cupcakesandcashmere.org

bloodaxebooks.com