Pippa slattery

writer

About

From Donkeys to Dreams: A writer's journey towards her debut novelI first identified as a writer at the age of six, when I self-published a rather scruffy four-page book about Don the Donkey and his friend, Snowy the white rabbit. Bound with sellotape and scrawled on blue scrapbook paper, it was a modest debut—but it lit a fire that never went out.
Life, of course, took its detours. I built a career in publishing and radio in the UK before moving to Ireland in my twenties. I raised my children in County Cork, ran an equine livery yard, made fudge for sweet shops, trained in alternative healing, and cared for my ageing mother. Writing became something I squeezed into margins—short articles for village magazines, the odd scribbled thought. It was always there, just not centre stage.
A few years ago, I returned to Tipperary, to my mother’s old holiday cottage overlooking Lough Derg, and ran a healing retreat centre. I had a story published in a Limerick Writers’ Centre anthology, attended workshops and literary weekends, but still felt I’d left it too late. That I was too old.
Then came an unexpected invitation: the Dromineer Nenagh Literary Festival offered a series of workshops and the opportunity to share work publicly. Something shifted. Sitting in the audience at the Nenagh Arts Centre and Dromineer Yacht Club, listening to writers speak, I felt a deep, urgent ache—not of doubt, but longing. I wanted to be the one behind the mic. The storyteller. The writer. The author.
I didn’t walk away. I applied for the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick—and was accepted. I graduated with First-Class Honours in 2021. Since then, my writing life has blossomed in ways I never imagined.
Although I have had my stories and poems appear in various anthologies over the past few years, had my flash fiction featured by Books Ireland, and have been honoured to receive recognition for several of my stories, a story far closer to home kept me up at nights, hammering at the door of my consciousness and it was during the MA that I took my first attempt at the writing of it. To explain its background, I have to go back to when I was sixteen months old, when my maternal grandmother died in the house where we were living. Believe it or not, from the moment she died, I could feel her, sense her and hear her. My mother hated my connection with her mother’s spirit, and I was often chastised for it and told I was making it all up. So, as any child would who was being punished for something very real to them, I took it inside of myself, internalised my relationship with my grandmother, and as I did so, the connection grew stronger and more real.
I did not know then that what I was doing was mediumship. I didn’t know I was a medium, or anything about clairvoyance. I just knew I could talk to my grandmother and never thought more about it. Or at least, not until I was in my 40’s. To cut a very long story as short as I can, I had a few spontaneous outbursts of spirits communicating through me, giving very detailed and accurate messages to various clients and friends. Finally I trained as a medium, went to mediumship circles and started working as a medium. My grandmother never left my side through all of this – I just felt her more strongly and she truly became the most important guide in my life for many years.
I always thought I’d become a novelist and learn my trade and that writing my grandmother’s story would be the swan song of my life. However, she had other plans for me. She would not let me alone until I wrote her story. Every time I tried to write about other topics, there she’d be in my ear, saying, ‘write about us dear. Write about us!’
At the start I thought I was writing one book, but as the work developed my tutors at college and my beta readers insisted it was too big a story for one book. I have revised all my initial plans for the story, and it has now turned into three books, consisting of two novels and a collection of short ghost stories. Book 1 in the series is now complete and my current WIP is its sequel. I am writing her story not as a biography, but as a novel, based on her life, to give me more creative freedom.
My grandmother really was a very remarkable woman and her story complex. Born Ella Mary Campbell Robertson (1888–1962), but known as Doone, she was rejected by her own mother as a child and dumped with unkind relatives in Scotland but went on to become a novelist and short story writer, as well as an actress, travelling throughout the Far East with her husband in the 1920’s with a theatre company. She was also a psychic. In her writing she was a true pioneer and the first women to write in the genres of psychic fiction, science fiction, and horror — all traditionally dominated by men. Though largely forgotten for decades, her work is now slowly being rediscovered and reprinted, and she’s finally gaining the recognition she always deserved. She wrote under several pseudonyms but is best known as Ella M Scrymsour.
This first book in the series is my debut and sits as an intergenerational family drama that spans from 1896 to the present day. At its heart are two clairvoyant women — Doone and her granddaughter, Sara — whose lives are deeply intertwined across time and weaving themes of loss, voice, faith, clairvoyance, and womanhood.
I often wonder where Don the Donkey is now. I hope he’s somewhere peaceful, chomping his hay and nodding in approval.

My debut novel

Ella M Scrymsour 1888 - 1962

I'm currently writing a series of books inspired by my extraordinary grandmother, Ella M. Scrymsour (1888–1962) — a novelist, short story writer, and actress. Ella was a true pioneer: one of the first women to write in the genres of psychic fiction, science fiction, and horror — all traditionally dominated by men. Though largely forgotten for decades, her work is now slowly being rediscovered and reprinted, and she’s finally gaining the recognition she always deserved.The first book in my series is also my debut novel: an intergenerational family drama that spans from 1896 to the present day. At its heart are two clairvoyant women — Doone and her granddaughter, Sara — whose lives are deeply intertwined across time.An excerpt from the novel:You wonder what he will look like, don’t you? You want him to be damned, I think. Twisted-faced, fork-tailed. You want him to scare you so that you can feel something. Anything. Your life dragging timelessly as you watch through downturned eyes. I don’t think you have any idea what you are about to do. I know you can hear me, and I know you can’t understand why I’m so scared of this fascination of yours. You don’t know how this will affect all our lives, this simple thing of yours. Turning the handle on this door will reverberate through time. The guilt, the shame, the prejudice, the dominance. The choices that will be made in the future and so many lives hurt. You have been blamed, lambasted through the years, for this one move. I beg you, just turn back now.
‘I can’t,’ Doone breathed quietly. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to see him for myself. I have to know.’ Time slowed then and the town square fell silent. The only sound she could hear was the drubbing of her own heart, but she refused to run.
Biting her lip once again and tasting the fresh blood pool on her tongue, she placed her hand on the door’s iron latch, feeling the cold of it in her palm. The door creaked as she pushed it open.
Inside, unaware of her visit, was the Devil, and with that thought, she felt the stirrings of absolute panic.It was not at all what she had expected. The entire Cathedral was made of corrugated iron. Candles were lit along every wall; the flames refracting on the metal surfaces. High above her, the ceiling glinted with shards of rainbowed colours. The juxtaposition of arched wooden beams and silver held an indelible beauty, the likes of which she had never seen before. Craning her head upwards she examined the strangeness of the place. An immense statue of Jesus on his cross was suspended from the roof beams. The two Marys stood at his feet, resting on the wooden arch which crossed the transept, separating the nave from the altar. She stood for a while, mesmerised.
Creeping up the aisle between the rows of wooden chairs, she slipped into a seat where she had an unobstructed view of her surroundings.
‘What’s the Devil doing in a place as beautiful and as strange as this?’ she murmured. Then she closed her eyes and waited.
Footsteps echoed around the walls. Clasping her hands together she kept her eyes scrunched closed, praying for once that she really was invisible. The sound drew closer.
‘Hello there,’ said a voice. ‘Are you feeling quite well, Miss? Is there anything I can get for you? You look very pale.’
‘Oh God, the Devil is talking to me. Oh, dear God, please protect me,’ she whispered.
‘What did you say?’ asked the voice. Doone noticed at once that the voice was not particularly Scottish in its countenance. It sounded slightly English, albeit from the North of England, not the South and she wondered why that mattered to her. ‘May I get you a glass of water?’ the voice continued. ‘You look quite faint?’
Doone squinted just a fraction, expecting to see a monster. She had heard once, that if you look the Devil in the eye, you turn to stone. Wondering if opening her eyes might be the last thing she ever did, she did just that.
But she saw no horns. No forked tail.
(c) pippa slattery

Short stories

Rag Doll
(c) pippa slattery

Dull thwacks of stone hitting stone. Little boy’s shoes clicking hopscotch squares. Squeals of delight. If she concentrated hard, she could hear those sounds still. Feel the cloth of her rag doll tight in her hand and smell the sweet aroma of freshly baking biscuits floating through the open window. Her mother’s voice a soft melody, joining in unison with songs on the radio.
The girl, age-laden for her six years, intensified her grasp on her reality. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands, keeping her eyes tight shut. The smell of biscuits; the click-clack of her brother’s shoes; her mother’s voice. Click clack. Tra-la-la. Biscuits to make her mouth water. Songs she knew some of the words to. Click clack. Click clack. Tra-la-la.
She sat on the steps outside her house. If she kept her eyes shut she could still imagine all the houses on her street. She would keep them safe, her mother, her brother and her. If she kept her eyes shut. Click clack. Tra-la-la.The bombs clattered all around her as the girl slipped back through time, unable to stop the illusion breaking. In the end, it was the smell of diesel fumes and burnt-out tanks that woke her. It shattered the smell of biscuits and made her vomit. Her mother’s voice no more than radio static. The screams had died out long before, in the darkness of the night. They had grown incoherent. Then mute. The silence and the dark wrapped her in memories of yesterday, keeping her safe. She still held the rag doll in her hand.With the violet dust of dawn, the girl opened her eyes. Her world, once innocent, now turned upside down. Plastic, caught on rolls of barbed wire, flapped like birds caught in nets and frightened her. Fences, formed from nowhere, barricaded her in, or out, she could not tell and the dust-blown ravages of space, of time interrupted, seemed incomprehensible to one so young. Her unblinking eyes caught the shadow of movement; a terrified fox, once urban, frantically running for the wilds.
A second shadow loomed, then shielded her from the warming sun. A man’s voice. Hands pulled her rag doll from her fingers. She clutched it tighter, for it was her only hold on what was real. The more resilient hands won. She glanced down at what she was relinquishing, but it was no longer her rag doll, just part of her brother’s t-shirt that was left, as the blast had wrenched him from her. The universal child, deep in rubble, lay a few meters away. One little shoe sat beside her rag doll on the steps. The shoelace, she noticed, the one she had tied herself in another place, another time, still holding tight to its bloodied foot. But nothing more.
“My name is Iola,” was all she said. Her name a replication of the still violet dawn.
Then she went quiet, unable to utter another sound; a silent witness to the decaying world, that was once her home.

Mother Earth as Dragon
(c) pippa slattery

Mother Earth as Dragon by Pippa SlatterySara watched dawn unfold as they drove through the outskirts of the remarkable mountain city. She was leaving. And she was glad. Her taxi driver did not speak any English and Sara did not speak any Hindi. But that was ok. She didn’t feel like speaking. She just wanted to drink it all in. The leaving behind of the yoga group she had been part of. The dawn. India. She had hired the private taxi to drive her through the foothills of the Himalayas, from Rishikesh to Chilianaula. She was going to an ashram dedicated to the guru Haidakan Babaji. It was a three-hundred-kilometre journey and taxi was the safest way to travel as a single woman in this part of northern India. It was not just the safest way to travel, it was really the only way to travel through these mountains.
Knowing that they had eight or nine hours of driving ahead of them Sarah soon found a comfortable comradeship with her driver, through their enforced silence. For the first hour they did not say anything at all. The shadows of the early morning light metamorphosed into sacred cows lying in the dust. Old men were hunched over small fires at the edges of the road, warming their lost dreams. On and on, the city sprawled into smaller towns, the traffic and the people never ceasing. As soon as the sun was fully up, and life was busy on the roads, Sara’s driver pointed to a building up ahead.
‘Chai.’ It wasn’t a question. It was a matter of fact.
They entered a very basic cafe. The building made of corrugated tin. Four tables. A few chairs. No menus. Sara presumed the driver would sit with her. She was disappointed when he left her sitting at a table all alone and went to sit with other drivers outside in the sunshine. She would far rather have been with them, for it was lonely in the café and she was the only person sitting at a table. A few waiters stood around watching her. She was ravenously hungry but did not know how to ask for anything and the lack of menus made her task impossible. She ordered and drank a very hot sweet black tea and returned to the car. It wasn’t the best start to her independent travelling.
They drove through mile upon mile of farmland. In the fields either side of the road, sugar cane was being harvested with teams of local men felling the crop with murderous-looking machetes. Oxen lined the roads, pulling huge carts that towered over the small taxi as it swerved in and out between the beasts on the road, avoiding the carts, bicycles, children, dogs and monkeys that were running alongside the wagons. They passed three elephants lumbering along the road. Tourists piled high on dilapidated baskets on top of the wretched-looking animals. It was the only time Sara had seen this spectacle since she had arrived in India. Many years before she had been guilty of taking elephant rides with her children in Thailand. That was before she realised the extent of the cruelty used in the training of them. She still felt a thud in her stomach when she thought about it. Each time she wished she could turn back the clock and make a different decision. No elephant should have to live that life. Here on the side of the road she witnessed three and wondered what lives they had, if any. She turned her eyes away. She did not get out her camera. There was nothing she could do but stay in her taxi and continue past. Sara wished them a happy life, prayed for their rescue, closed her eyes.
Soon the air grew cooler as the taxi began to leave the towns and cities behind them, climbing higher into the mountains. They drove for hours through the Jim Corbett National Park and Sara gazed out of the window, longing for a glimpse of tiger and leopard. None were visible, but she felt them. The presence of the large cats prickled her neck around every corner. Instead, she had to content herself with monkeys. Everywhere. Sitting on village walls like old men. Scavenging the rubbish like thieves. Watching the taxi pass by with rude indifference. A lone sacred cow stood among the rubbish outside one of the towns, munching on a heavy-duty plastic bag as if it were toughened grass, oblivious maybe, of her impending death from a stomach full of plastic that was not food.
A baby monkey held tight to a plastic bag that once held cheap crisp snacks and tried to stuff the bag into his mouth while his older siblings and cousins chased him through the traffic to grab and claim his prize. This one piece of trash, one in a million of the other pieces that were scattered around them. A stray dog was pulling garbage from a larger rubbish bag, in the hopes of finding something to eat and leaving the contents strewn, for no one to clean up. The trash wound its way up the mountain like an inanimate snake, all reverence to Mother Earth a parody to the poverty Sara could see from her window as she was driven past. It galled on her. Humans; cows; monkeys; dogs; living on the edge amongst this Armageddon of impending environmental collapse. It was not what she thought the Himalayas would be like.
Sara and the taxi driver began to communicate with gestures of the hands, the odd word, a smile. They shared food - Sara breaking bits off her protein bars and passing the mangled chocolatey wedges to him. He, breaking apart large bunches of grapes from a huge paper bag at his side and passing them to Sara. She worried for a time about them not being washed but hunger won over hygiene. They stopped again at lunchtime and this time Sara didn’t mind eating alone - a simple meal of chapati and lentils. She was so much more relaxed than at breakfast chai and she watched the other diners animated in the act of eating, with their friends and families. She was the only European. She didn’t mind. Everyone smiled at her. Acknowledged her. Left her in peace to eat. She realised how much more relaxed she was than when travelling with the yoga group in Rishikesh. She liked the freedom of it.
Bloody hell! I’m doing it. Here I am, on my own, making my way through the foothills of Himalaya. I feel so very much alive.
All Sara’s heaviness of heart was left behind in Rishikesh. She was breathing freely as the layers of constraint of the previous two weeks fell away. She had felt a mantel of judgement from the group she had been with and from the wannabe guru running the retreat. Now she was free, and her spirit was learning how to dance again. She could feel the change coming over her. An expectancy niggling at her senses. A waking up.
They climbed higher into the mountains. Traversing each hairpin bend gifted Sara with spectacular vistas. The impossibility of nature caught in her breath, as trees grew fearlessly out of the rocks, horizontal to the road. Bare roots clinging to the rocks in a desperate bid for nutrition; the mighty trunks, ninety degrees out of kilter and flourishing despite of it. Each one a travesty of natural law. The scenery was like Sara had never seen before as they wound up and down through the mountains. Ragged peaks spread out ahead of her in a never-ending blue grey mantle which seemed to grace the heavens. Her eye unable to ascertain where the earth stopped, and the sky began; the summer haze smudging the edges of shape and form as they drove. Around one corner Sara saw ahead of her little more than dust and rock, held together by roots of trees, barely able to call itself a road, and somehow, it hung on and supported them. Around the next corner came a myriad of colour as they passed a mountain farm. Graduated terraces, hand dug hundreds, if not thousands of years before, with their irrigation canals snaking down amongst the crops, brought a life force and a green hue to the otherwise barren environment. Terraces were covered in a rich diversity of their traditional crops, interspersed with green leafy vegetables that Sara could not identify. Herbs, flowers, pea vines and blotches of root vegetables all worked themselves into a patchwork of texture and colour; a cow or two munching on the rough grasses framing the edges of the picture postcard view. They passed families walking along the road. Sara noticed a school in the middle of nowhere, smiling faces leaning out of glassless windows, all the children waving as they passed. A herd of goats taking themselves to new pastures. Stray dogs. More monkeys. A gasp uttered from Sara as they turned another bend, and Himalaya in her full glory was spread out before them. The mountains reached lazily ahead. Rearing up, challenging the sky, dominating the horizon. The glistening sun reflected back from the bracelet of white from the higher peaks, just an eagle’s flight away.
Another corner and all colour faded back into greyness. A single piece of corrugated tin, balanced on top of two large rocks right on the edge of what was supposed to be road, was a home. To a family of mountain people. The rusting corrugated tin, the roof. The rocks, the walls of this rudimentary home. A mother squatted in the dust, with a baby swaddled on her back. She was stirring whatever was in her singular pot, with a stick, over a sad looking fire. Her husband, if there was one, was nowhere to be seen. Two children played at the side of the road with a stick, a stone and an empty food tin. Their torn clothing and grubby faces just a mask for the humanity within. As Sara passed by, the mother and children looked up at her and smiles spread wide across their faces in genuine greeting. They waved with an innocence that was unbearable to witness and Sara felt ashamed. Too privileged to be alive. For being witness to this level of poverty. For doing nothing. For passing on by.I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
See the woman squatting there,
three children, two at play;
one on her back, still fully trussed.
A rotten stick in hand to stir the single pot.
One silver piece of corrugated
their only shelter, propped on two large rocks.I see her too, as the wind blows through the land,
dust swirling like a dervish
in some sad demented dance.
Her eyes find mine and my heart disbands.
No meeting of our worlds can I comprehend,
No words can travel through.
The difference in our circumstance I simply can’t defend.I close my eyes to blank out what I see
but no void rewards this impassivity.
I ask the driver of my shiny car,
chances of survival in these Himalayan wilds.
‘Rock falls are common and the leopard
hunts quite free.’ The sound of my anguish
echoes long, after losing sight of that wretched family.There is not even silence in the mountains.Sara had travelled to India and to many places around the world. She’d watched the world pass by from train windows, over lands never visited from high up above in airplanes and out of bus and car windows. She had swum in the azure waters of the Aegean Sea and skied down slopes of new white snow in the Alps. She had flown in a four-seated plane across the southernmost mountains of New Zealand and sat in a steaming hot geyser in Iceland. Sara had been alone, albeit only for a few minutes, with a brown bear and her cub in the Poconos mountains in the USA. She had felt alone in the most crowded places in the world, yet Sara had never known the isolation that this woman must feel, alone with her children, against the backdrop of Himalaya. Did the woman fear the loss of her children at any moment? From a snake bite in the rainy seasons, or from an attack from the leopard who waited for his meal with an arrogance of a predator untamed. She would have been born there and was destined to die there and her children would be no different. She lived on the edge of the world under her single sheet of corrugated tin with her children and yet her smile had penetrated Sara’s heart, as she passed her by. Sara doubted that she, or her children, would ever leave that place.
She had met another mountain woman, who had sat next to her on a bus during a day trip from Rishikesh. The bus driver was giving her a lift down to a hospital. The woman was terrified and was clutching chest x-rays to her stomach. She hunched beside Sara with tears running down her age- and weather-worn face. They had held hands. Sitting side by side in the bus. Two women with a chasm between them, yet they managed to give each other comfort for a while. Sara had squeezed the sick woman’s hand and leaned into her more closely as the woman’s tears had flowed freely. She had hoped to give comfort, but found herself seeking absolution from the stranger, yet having no idea what she needed absolution from. Maybe the absolution was for this moment. For driving past this woman on this mountainside, who lived with a piece of corrugated tin as her home. And she had driven past. She had devoured her own humanity in a swallow of nothing more useless than shame.‘What’s that ahead?’ Sara mimed to the taxi driver, as around another corner they saw dense plumes of smoke ahead. The driver just shrugged his shoulders and continued driving. Sara did not think he had the words to explain. The seeming smoke grew denser. Covering the side of the mountain in a giant blanket of grey, the visibility deteriorated but the taxi continued to drive into it. The driver started to wind up his window and pointed at Sara’s urgently. She did the same. She watched his face for signs of alarm, but he said nothing. A dusty rather than acrid smell was invading the car. It certainly had no sense of heat or fire. Around another corner workmen were waving flags to signal them to stop. To the left, a steep cavernous wall of rock reached up beyond Sara’s sight. Shrubs and trees clinging as usual to the impervious greyness of their host. Six feet, at a push, of sandy sort of road. To the right, a sheer drop to nothingness where Sara’s stomach found it difficult to return from the looking. Ahead? Ahead was tens of thousands of tonnes of rock that had just avalanched down from above and was sitting on the road, blocking the travellers’ way. The smoke? There was no smoke. They had been driving through a dust cloud created by the falling rock. The side of the mountain was still smoking from the disaster, Sara’s and her driver’s eyes barely able to adjust between mountain, cloud, dust and rock. The sun was no longer visible.
A low groan. A scraping thudding sound. More clouds of dust. The driver handed Sara a cloth to protect her nose and mouth. Men were running backwards, but towards the car. A question rose in Sara’s mind as to whether it would be a good time to panic, but it stuck in her throat. For out of the greyness, loomed a monster. A machine giant awaking in their path. Ahead of it, scraped and pushed along, was many tonnes of stone. Heading Sara’s way. The stone ripped and tore at the surface of the road. And just as she wondered if the driver of the monster had actually seen them, the headlights of the yellow beast turned direction and headed straight for the edge of the road. With a roar of freedom, the rock and stone went over the edge, tumbling, crashing, hurtling towards the valley. The beast retreated behind the corner of obstinate rock and Sara could hear it revving up for another assault on the fallen stone. She and her driver watched it for what seemed like hours. It was as if half the mountain was being thrown over its own edge. Crumbling in on itself. Mother Earth continually in motion, never changing her nature. The mountain will always exist, she thought. This part of it, changing its form in a moment of time.
Sara looked at her companion questioningly. He smiled.
‘Many die.’
His body language showed rocks falling, taking cars with them down into the valley.
‘Oh. Right.’ Sara tried not to look.
Eyes watering and rock dust smothering their lungs, the road cleared after an hour of waiting and the road men waved them on their way. Sara was about to ask if it was a frequent event in these mountains, but there was no need. The road they were travelling was negotiating a pass right on the edge of a mountain and Sara could see miles of road ahead, snake like, winding its way down to the valley. Two more clouds of rock fall were ahead of them. Monster machines already working. Men already waving flags. Seeing it from a distance, the rocks fell like huge waterfalls off the sides of the vulnerable road as they were pushed. Sara wondered about the lives of the animals, humans and plants below. What ab

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Co Tipperary, Ireland