Making Hay While the Sun Shines

Apologies for silence and lack of updates. Writing, writing. Writing. Must make the best use of the summer to work on The Monkey Helper after a marvelous first spring term teaching at Kenyon College during which I simply didn't get very much work done on the novel.

The West Cork Landscape

I am in Ireland at the moment, in the West Cork village that inspired my second novel, The Music Lesson (which I am pleased to report will be republished in a nice new paperback edition by Three Rivers Press in January).

Because I didn't want to identify the village where we spent our honeymoon in 1976 and have owned a cottage since 1986, I didn't consider mentioning one of the most prominent and identifiable features of Glandore, the Drombeg stone circle. But I regret not setting a scene there. A country mile from my doorstep, the Drombeg stone circle, one of the most intact in all of Ireland, is an uncanny place where a sense of the past looms very large. Ireland has many pasts, from the mysterious culture that built these circles to the maiming hatred that has kept the troubles simmering for nearly a hundred years.