Irish Poet and Novelist Pays a Visit to RHS Students

Irish novelist and poet Geraldine Mills paid a visit to creative writing students at Rockville High School on Tuesday.

Mills has two published collections of short fiction, "Lick of the Lizard" and "The Weight of Feathers."

Her fiction has won the OKI Award, the Moore Medallion, the North Tipperary Award, the South Tipperary Award, and the Aspire Short Story Competition.

She was named the Millennium winner of the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune New Irish Writer Award. She has three published collections of poetry with a fourth one coming out in the fall.

Her monologue, “This is From The Woman Who Does” was produced by the Provincetown Theater Playwrights’ Festival in 2004.

Mills worked with students on a variety of topics, including:

• Creating a safe atmosphere for students to explore their own ideas.
• Locking the critic outside the door.
• Building self-esteem.
• Every person is unique with his/her own story to tell.
• The importance of getting that story down on paper.
• Exercising the writing muscles. Confidence-building exercises to do so.
• Seeking your own world through words using simple fun, exercises.
• Exploring imagination, inner world, emotion, verbal facility.
• Bringing the world alive for the reader with the use of the senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste.
• Discussion of poetry, fiction or essay as a way of capturing a memory.
• Exploring possible ideas for writing using photographs, postcards, and everyday objects.