On Saturday, October 3rd I will read from my debut novel Kilpara at Connolly Books, a bookstore and small theatre now based in the tenement building on Essex Street where I was raised until I was seven years old. My brother, two sisters and I lived in a two-room flat back when Essex Street was the playground of a child’s curiosity. I accepted that neighbours behaved like extended family, always watchful and ready to correct our behavior. That every child had an Aunt Kitty next door who lent a helping hand. That every primary school was like St Michael and John’s with a headmistress named Miss Holey.
We left Essex Street for a new housing scheme in upper Ballyfermot and a house that seemed enormous after our tiny flat. Behind the house stood a farm and fields that stretched to the canal and the Dublin Mountains beyond. The front fields at the end of the road were used for playing hockey and football. Most families couldn’t afford cars so the concrete thoroughfare became an extended playground for jump-rope and hopscotch. We twisted ropes round lampposts for swings. Ballyfermont was a place to explore, hike, play games and make friends. Like me, the girls I knew read Enid Blyton and Carolyn Keene books and dreamed of having adventures as interesting as the characters we read about.
Careers were not something we thought about as kids, but they began to filter into our consciousness as teenagers and as our horizons broadened outside our small circle. Education was key, yet popular thinking was that it was more important to educate boys. Girls got married and raised children; boys had to support families.
Fast forward and I found myself married to an American. This occurred after I became fluent in Italian and fate landed me in Venice, Italy. I came to the US to live in the mountain state popularly called West (by God) Virginia. If given a choice, this was not a place I would have chosen to live my adult life. I preferred cities and the ocean to mountains and rural terrain. But I came to love West Virginia dearly because of what it provided me; my children, a college education, sense of history, natural beauty, and people who supported me and became my friends along the way. The sight of deer munching in the yard while I mowed grass took a bit getting used to – and this is in town.
Few Irish live in West Virginia, but there are many Irish descendants whose ancestors settled here and never returned home. The Irish legacy is felt in West Virginia most poignantly through Appalachian music and in the history of coal mining. My son and daughter are West Virginians to the core. They are every bit as Irish and ease into Irish life when they return home with me.
After I adjusted to life in West Virginia, it occurred to me home can be anywhere as long it provides the life you value. My thoughts, however, turned to difficulties faced by previous generations of emigrants as I started writing Kilpara back when I was studying creative writing at West Virginia University. A lifetime occurred from the time I began the novel and its completion, with snatches of writing and revising in between. Then came the moment when I made up my mind it was now or never. After a lot of missteps, Denver-based publisher Bygone Era Books and a man named Daniel Willis, who believed in my efforts, published Kilpara.
So my education at West Virginia University coupled with a trusting publisher allowed me to share a story dear to my heart about an emigrant family in the 1800s that was forced out of Ireland because of economic conditions. After a lifetime in the US, the matriarch of the family, Ann O’Donovan, decides to return home to end her life there. She convinces Ellis, one of her four sons, and the only one unmarried, to take her back. The story has its sad moments but it does end happily.
I feel proud and nostalgic that I will read from Kilpara in the very tenement building in Temple Bar that holds my childhood memories. Through coincidence it has become Connolly Books and the New Theatre Bookstore where another kind gentleman named Eugene McCartan has agreed to let me share the story of Kilpara in the same place where my life literally began.
Kilpara is available from the publisher, in book stores, and on Kindle and other electronic book sources.
