Becoming American Then: the Boston Irish in 1853

I finished my book Finn’s Clock shortly before our country’s latest immigration debate flared into an ideological riot. At the first mention of a border wall, this tale about a young Irish immigrant working on Boston Harbor in 1853 acquired a deeper resonance. It’s impossible not to compare our current situation to the actions of that era’s anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party, and to the dogged resilience of the novel’s hero, Finn O’Neill, determined to make a place for himself in this “land of the free” despite the odds. On Wednesday evening, November 20th, in the CATV studio in White River Junction, I’ll present “Becoming American Then: the Boston Irish in 1853.” The combination reading and presentation explores the origins of Finn’s story – the choice of the book’s setting and period, the research that revealed the changing economic and social structure of Bostonian culture, the overwhelming effect of the Irish potato famine Read More […]

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Finding Finn

How research into the germ of an idea revealed my character and his story. (I’ve developed a reading-plus-presentation on this topic and have been taking it to libraries and historical societies across Vermont and New Hampshire. Here are the basics.) I spent more than two years researching and writing the first draft of Finn’s Clock, a fact that never fails to surprise the students I speak to as a guest author in their English classes. Now, every novel requires research, even if the story is a complete fantasy. My first novel, Sky Carver, is a good example. It’s not set in any country that I know of; it’s certainly not on the Earth we know. Instead, Carver’s World is an amalgam of river valleys I’ve visited or read about, with the additions of a city of canals and a wide bay marked with an archipelago of tall sea stacks. My research Read More […]

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