I grew up in America and have dual citizenship (US and Ireland). I am a professor (in literature and film) who lives in Dublin during the summer and winter months and will return here year-round for good soon. I am single. I have no kids but have many interests and am well-traveled. Unfortunately, I read a lot and greatly enjoy going to the movie house or theater. My twin brother was a very good painter. He forever insisted that being—or believing oneself to be—an artist was easy. Remaining one wasn’t. Sadly, though, he died over a decade ago. A significant personal loss, but I am forever showing off his paintings. We grew up, primarily, on a dead-end street. About halfway up, on the north side. In a house of four bedrooms and three other siblings. I shared my bedroom with my twin. We attended a catholic grade school just across a dusty soccer field from where we live, and every day after school, we had to hang up our school uniforms: black pants, a white shirt, and a snap tie of purple and scarlet plaid. Attending such a school did me little harm, forced me to learn my geography, and left me permanently cured of Catholicism. I eventually went to college and studied English literature as an undergraduate. I then followed this by earning an MFA in creative writing (fiction).
Two trees feature prominently in my memory of growing up. The one in the backyard was a weeping willow that seemed to grow amazingly tall in only a few short years, only to have been stricken with some disease. It barely survived the disease, only to be struck by lightning one stormy April. With what remained, my mother, being both practical and unsentimental, used it as one end of a clothesline, those times the electric dryer went out. The other tree was in the front yard. A beautiful magnolia that bloomed gorgeously every spring and, surprisingly, again in the early fall. Its blossoms were white and had thick, smooth leaves, and it grew slowly, but steadily, enjoying a long life until the people who bought the house after my mother’s death cut it down, presumably because it blocked the view of the street from the front living room picture window.
I’ve spent much of my life betting on the dark horse: literature—no doubt, many believe–to my detriment. Roberto Bolańo is a writer I am forever rereading, and I admire him tremendously. He wrote once that “books are the only homeland of the writer.” I agree. I also believe that literary movements and commitments are mostly the providence of the young and are always destined, for good reason, to end in spectacular failure eventually. But these brilliant failures are what count. I’m lucky, I suppose, in that literature is my inexhaustible commitment. More literary movements will come. More movements will fail. And always, the next generation will surprise us. Luckily, there will always be infinite rabbit holes to fall down, where we forever end up in places we’d never thought or imagined possible.