In 2010 I retired as Director of the Irish Studies Program but “retired” hasn’t meant going away. I helped start the Irish Studies Program way back in 1979, so Irish Studies is “close to the bone,” as they might say in Ireland, and there’s no way I could easily just say good-bye. Thankfully, the Irish Studies Program has welcomed me to teach a course in each of the past two years. It’s been great for me to keep in touch not just with students who keep me young and alive, but with the writers who have brought such richness to my life. What a great gift such Irish voices have been for me for so long. Any time in the classroom with these writers is great fun. Hard to give it up.
How could I not keep listening when Yeats sings,
“Come away , Oh human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand”
And, then there’s James Joyce who keeps challenging me and my students to take chances in his great closing of A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man: “Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
I have a special fondness for Seamus Heaney, like me, the first from a long line of Irish farmstock to go on to the heady world of a university and to study the great writers. Like Heaney,
“Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests,
I’ll dig with it.”
Now that I have more time in retirement, I’ve been doing my own “digging,” trying to get more into some memoir work that’s been itching in the back of my mind for a long time. In 2008, I had some success when “Finding Home” was published in the US and in Ireland. I had previously recorded the same story in Ireland for “Echo,” an audio magazine for the blind. Now it’s been published again in a new book, Extended Family: Essays on Being Irish American (Dufour Editions). It seems a story that has struck a chord with many readers.
For the past three years I have also enjoyed reading as part of “An Irish Christmas” at the Irish Arts Center in NYC. The reading recalls shopping for a Christmas tree long ago in the Irish-American Brooklyn of my youth. That world has been the main focus of my recent efforts. I’ve been exploring the dual cultural identity that is a part of the emigrant/immigrant equation. Given the importance of immigration in today’s political discourse, I hope my writing about Irish-America will resonate with others in the diverse cultural landscape that is at the heart of the American experience.
I hope to keep involved with the Irish Studies Program as it grows with such exciting initiatives as courses in the Irish Language and the new link with the world famous Abbey Theatre, the National Theater of Ireland. Irish Studies is a happenin’ place and I’m glad to keep my connection as it goes forward in these new directions.
