It was inevitable that I would end up living and writing in Ireland. It was kismet. I’ve had a handful of literary awakenings throughout my life — all of them involving Ireland. My first awakening was as a ‘Junior Year Abroad’ student from Boston studying at The School of Irish Studies in Dublin. This was in 1975. Who among those 20-odd, 21-year-old Americans will forget Professor Jim Mayes’s final exam question on Joyce? “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”  Discuss! Somewhat mutely, I passed. My second awakening came 5 years later when I returned to Dublin to do a Master’s in Anglo-Irish literature. From Molly Keane to Samuel Beckett. From Elizabeth Bowen to George Moore. From Maria Edgeworth to James Joyce. I did my master’s thesis on an Irish writer not well known at the time, John Banville, who went on to win the Man Booker Prize in 2005. My third awakening followed soon after when I fell in love with a writer, a Dubliner. Between the jigs and the reels, and as luck would have it, we eventually moved into a rustic and vacant cottage in the west of Ireland where my grandfather had been born. The last Breen had left 5 years before we moved in.

In this quiet, rural place in west Clare I have lived for 30 years. Raised my children, and untangled a garden. I’ve learned about cows and hens and horses, and muck and rushes and couch grass, and rain and wind that steals your breath. This quiet place has demanded a survival of self-exploration and examination and expression, and, finally, after making a family, and a garden, and co authoring four non-fiction books, this expression eventually evolved into a novel. My debut, Her Name is Rose, was accepted for publication in the US during the same year that my husband, Niall Williams, was long-listed for his novel History of the Rain for the Man Booker Prize. Luck of the Irish cuts both ways and this time we were lucky. For luck is surely involved, it catapults the hard work above the parapet.

In Kiltumper, where we live, there are no cafes where we might meet a fellow writer. There are no launches or bookstore readings. Very few invitations arrive in the post-box at the bottom of the garden and when they do the invitations are for events in Dublin or London, a world away from here. It’s like we’re an island on an island. An island marked off by crossroads and townlands with names like Kiltumper and Clongiulane and Greygrove and Cahermurphy. So in our green quiet we continue to write and garden. My husband is writing screenplays and working on his tenth novel. My second novel is in the works and although the year of my debut, 2015, was challenged with cancer from which I am recovering, my next novel continues to evolve, albeit slowly. The first quarter of 2016 has dropped into the post-box at the bottom of the crooked path a Polish edition and a Turkish edition of Her Name is Rose and in a few weeks I will take up a two-week writing residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annamaghkerrig, County Monaghan to continue writing the new novel, Two Blue Moons.

In this leap year, there’s a half moon rising on St. Patrick’s Eve. May the luck of Irish may well be upon us…all.

O Come Ye Back to Ireland — the first of the Kiltumper books is available as an ebook.