SEP 07, 2023 by Constance Emmett https://diymfa.com/writing/writing-through-thick-and-thin/

published in Writing DIY MFA.com

Writing Through Thick and Thin

Writing through thick and thin is not easy. Every writer’s life has thin stretches which overwhelm the importance of writing. Illness, death of a loved one, financial disaster, and now in climate change, weather related disasters: all overwhelm. All terrible, all distracting. Life has thick stretches too, joyous events such as marriage, childbirth, raising happy and healthy children—all great, all distracting. But writing must be a consistent habit for a writer to grow, to produce, to succeed. So how can we write through thick and thin?

Write Every Day

Habits, good and bad, are hard to break. Establishing a daily writing habit will help you write through thick and thin. Name as many good habits as you can, the ones you keep. Don’t go for difficult habits like exercise or being grateful (unless you practice both daily), but something easier, more routine. For instance, you may not get 8 hours of sleep every single night, even if you set it as a goal. If you don’t set it as a goal, however, you will never get enough sleep. Think of writing as being in the same habit genre. I may not be able to write for 6 or 4 hours every day, or even 2 hours, but if I don’t sit down and write for however long I can every day, I’ll never link those short spurts with longer ones until hey presto! the novel’s first draft is complete. Writing each day will develop your muscle memory for the activity. The consistency will not only produce completed works but will allow you the time to grow as a writer.

Honor Your Reality

Founder and instigator of DIYMFA.com Gabriel Pereira related to our P2P class that as a writer she learned to “honor her reality,” https://diymfa.com/writing/honor-your-reality/. What does that mean? It means that as a human with obligations, sometimes you must recognize the situation you are in and act accordingly. In fact, you must recognize the situation and give yourself over to it: you just can’t write through thick and thin. Thin times require honoring your reality. Your child/partner/parent or you are sick—all these situations require you to leave your desk and take care of someone, including yourself. But thick times require a reality check too. If your sister is getting married and asks for your participation, you will have to plan the hen party. You will have to honor that reality and plan to write around it.

It Comes Down to Planning

Many things in life can’t be planned, but your writing time should not be one of them. Once the habit of daily writing takes hold, you can afford to lose writing hours to the care of yourself and others. It comes down to planning. The plan should hold for thick or thin, since whether you are leaving the desk for a brisk walk or spending days as a patient due to an illness, you are caring for yourself, and that is absolutely necessary. You need the care or your family does, and there’s no getting around it. You may be juggling family, your job, and writing. Everyone may be fine but there’s a lot to handle. Most situations, thick or thin, can be handled in as relaxed a way as possible with planning. Find a time of the day when routinely there are fewer demands upon you—early in the morning or late at night or when the kids are in school—and set that as your writing time. Try to make that time inviolable. If you are consistent, time can be given to honoring your reality when you need to, and you still will make progress with your writing.

Easy, Huh?

Even with planning and habit making, writing consistently won’t be easy. There are extremes in life that make it impossible to write through thick and thin. Death in the family, divorce and grave illness define thin times. But in routine times, you work, cook meals, go on hikes, play music, garden—things you must do, things you like to do. You must give time to all those activities to have a healthy and happy life. In the humdrum of daily regular life, the days when everyone is blessedly well and things are smooth, even dull, it is easy to plan the time to write, to give your writing the importance it deserves. Don’t forget to include the space where this habit can form. A place that will be available, quiet, and comfortable during those hours you plan to write. A room of one’s own, if possible, but at least a solid surface in a quiet corner.

Your Brain Needs Time in PJs

If you start when life is sort of rolling along, the daily writing habit will quickly become just that. A full life requires doing the things that you like, that fill your soul, but also doing the things that make your life function. Walking the dog in the woods but also grocery shopping, cooking good meals but also doing the dishes…you get it. And in fact, the brain needs some time not writing but sitting around in pajamas to create. I am always surprised by how a thorny plot problem resolution comes to mind while folding the laundry. I’d be happy to tell you that giving your brain some time in pajamas, while essential, counts as writing time, and it does, but only sort-of, sorry. The hard graft of writing is just that: putting words on paper or editing the words you’ve put there already. The more time you consistently give to that act, the more you will accomplish, that much is simple. Good habits are hard to form but take the first steps now: stake your writing space and plan your writing time. Show up and write! Good writing!

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Constance Emmett was born in Brooklyn, New York where her mother’s family landed after leaving Belfast, Northern Ireland. Constance’s debut novel, Heroine of Her Own Life (2019) and sequel, Everything Will Be All Right (2022), books 1 and 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series, were published by Next Chapter. A Massachusetts Hilltown dweller, she is writing book 3 in the series and a novel set in 18th c. New York.

You can find her on her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

JUN 15, 2023 by Constance Emmett

Published in DIY MFA Community Edited version

If you’re a writer of a certain age (i.e., not young), pitching face-to-face to a young agent or editor, your understandable anxiety may include the subject of your appearance. Seated across from the agent, you may misinterpret the look on her face, while imagining the agent’s internal voice wondering: “Just how old is she?” 

Whether the look on her face is caused by indigestion or consternation about your age, the effect will be the same: going into your pitch, your confidence will plummet. In your flustered state, you may even forget the important points to deliver in your pitch about your own creation, your baby, the work you’ve spent years polishing until it shines. 

When this happens, it’s not fair to you, it’s not fair to your work, and it’s not fair to the agent, who really is looking for great writing by an author she can promote. 

So what is happening here, and what can you do about your panic at the look on her face, so you can pitch with confidence during your 10-minute chance to shine?

So Shine, Already!

Plan on taking care of the physical aspects of shining. Maybe you can’t look so young or beautiful or handsome as the young agent across from you, but you can look your best physically—take a look at the look on your face. Is the look on your face one that will invite and intrigue the human being sitting across from you? 

Presentable and professional is the minimum requirement for your hair and clothing, how far up you go from there is up to you. You should be alert and pleasant, as comfortable and relaxed as possible, with plenty of shine. You must be focused in thought and passionate in your speech, with the latter as clear, crisp, and understandable as you can make it. 

The key to all of the above is your self-confidence, based on your dedication to your own work.

How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, Practice, Practice!

Research the best way to pitch by starting here: The Write Practice, Writer’s Digest and Women’s Prize for Fiction. 

Practice your pitch a lot, out loud. Start with a one sentence summary and then fill in the details through the end of the allotted pitch time. 

Practice in front of a mirror—check the look on your face—while your phone records and times your pitch. Play it back and listen to how you sound—is your passion for your project coming through clearly? Don’t rush but keep close to the time allotted for your pitch (out of the usual 10 minutes with an agent, time your pitch to 1-1.5 minutes; the rest can be used for the agent’s questions and also for yours). 

Practice again in front of your family, your friends, your writer’s group, inviting critique. 

Keep in mind that the agent will listen to 100 pitches that day, so make yours one that will grab and keep her interest by getting to the point of the novel (play, screenplay, short story collection) at the beginning of the pitch.

Self-Confidence

Think about how you felt about yourself in your youth. What is the one thing you wished you had more of then, or even now? Self-confidence? 

Many of us lack the self-confidence we should have, especially middle aged plus women, especially women of a certain age who began writing or returned to writing later in life. 

To be an artist, you must have pride, you must be proud of yourself. You know this when a sentence just isn’t good enough, not up to your standard, not meeting the level you want to achieve. At your computer or with your notebook open, sitting alone, you know this in your bones. In a large room full of your fellow writers vying for places in lines to pitch to one of fifty agents, that feeling of pride may evaporate, to be replaced by panic. 

So ahead of being in that room, or opening that Zoom, you must remind the inner you, the proud, dedicated artist deep within, that you are just that: a self-confident, proud artist with a passion to write and a great book to pitch.

Learn From The Hags

Irish artist collective The Hags, Na Cailleacha in Irish, meaning “wise women,” is a group of 8 women, mostly over 70. These artists (6 visual artists, 1 musician, 1 curator/writer) formed a collective to break through the invisibility of age, and to create a forum to show their work. They came together for the camaraderie essential to continue developing their art. 

Most older people begin to feel invisible, lose an essential network, and a good sense of how to move forward. The Hags have found it. When asked, all of them said that the thing they lacked as young women was self-confidence. When they developed more self-confidence with age though, they were no longer invited to show their work, and were assumed to be retired by the youth-oriented art world. They felt forgotten. With the collective though, they found an enjoyable and productive way to be visible, to develop and show their work.

What happened to the 8 women pre-Hags, happens to older writers too. But there are many communities and groups of writers, everywhere, online and in person, and as much as we work alone, it’s essential to find the support of a writing community—and you’re in one right now! DIY MFA offers myriad ways to develop your writing skills, professional writing life and community. So, find your community (see my March post, Finding My Writing Tribe) and start pitching your work!

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Constance Emmett was born in Brooklyn, New York where her mother’s family landed after leaving Belfast, Northern Ireland. Constance’s debut novel, Heroine of Her Own Life (2019) and sequel, Everything Will Be All Right (2022), books 1 and 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series, were published by Next Chapter. A Massachusetts Hilltown dweller, she is writing book 3 in the series and a novel set in 18th c. New York.
You can find her on her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

MAR 21, 2023 by Constance Emmett

published in Community diymfa.com

My writing life began late in life. I had to catch up, make up for lost time writing, but I also had to catch up finding my writing tribe. Perseverance won the day, as it does, but it’s hard to recognize that while no obvious goals are met. It’s a matter of hope and faith, really: faith in the evolution of your writing, faith in yourself, and hope for the future.

Hope and faith are a large part of writing, but can they sustain the lonely writer? At this point in my journey—I’ve published two novels and am making good progress on two—I’d say, no. I believe that finding a writing tribe, one that is supportive and knowledgeable, is key.

I’d been writing steadily for 18 years before traveling to the Historical Novel Society UK conference last fall. Meeting inclusive and serious historical fiction writers helped me find my writing tribe. As is the experience of many writers, the road to finding my writing tribe had been a lonely one. Alone, I toiled away in ignorance of my craft and the world of writing, publishing, and perhaps most importantly, readers. There was no obvious reason to keep going as the rejections piled up—no obvious reasons except hope and faith.

My early years of writing were littered with too-early submissions and subsequent rejections. But at some point, something made me pick my head up and join groups of writers. I began with Writer’s Digest, an organization thousands strong. WD holds annual meetings in the settled furnace blast that is New York in August. Packing zero talent for networking, I got on the train to New York. Sitting on that train, I still hadn’t a clue, but it was the first step to finding my writing tribe.

The First Step on the Road to Finding My Writing Tribe

While spending days inside the vast refrigerated Hilton Hotel, I failed to connect with anyone. I attended panels, keynote addresses, speed-dating style agent pitch sessions, and talks, many of which were stand-outs.

One led me down the road to finding my writing tribe and my writing life. Given by Gabriela Pereira, founding instigator of DIY MFA, it was kismet. I knew nothing about DIY MFA or Gabriela. But there on the stage was a young woman who spoke directly to this member of her audience. She urged us to call ourselves writers, aloud and loud—to shelve our imposter syndromes—if we wrote, we were writers. Period. How liberating was that? It was life-changing.

I Am A Writer!

I joined DIY MFA and enrolled in the P2P course. Among other things, the course taught me how to navigate marketing for authors and to create my website/blog. My website went live within months of the course ending. After P2P and starting the blog, I contributed short pieces about experiences as a writer to the DIY MFA website.

Heroine of Her Own Life, published by Next Chapter 2019, Book 1 of the series Finding Their Way Home 

At the same time, I continued work on my debut historical fiction (family saga) novel, Heroine of Her Own Life. I also joined the Historical Novelist Society, which includes branches in Ireland, the UK, and North America, and began attending the annual conferences online before joining in person in 2022.

Finding a Writing Tribe

As I moved down the road to finding my writing tribe, I found a publisher, Next Chapter. My novels, inspired by my Northern Irish family, led me to the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin. As Covid overwhelmed the world, organizations adjusted by presenting everything online, from courses to conferences, which opened a new world.

My first course at the IWC was called the Northern Soul Roadshow with Fiona O’Rourke, author, facilitator, and mentor. Each week, we met Northern Irish poets and writers such as Michelle Gallen, Olivia Fitzsimons, Maria McManus, and Sue Divin, and listened to them read and describe their journeys. As a class, we shared our writing, exchanged feedback, quickly gelling into a tribe, one that has held. A tribe—I found my writing tribe!

My Writing Tribe for Life

Every step toward finding my writing tribe has been one of growth for me, as a writer and as a person. The supportive writers and poets in the tribe have become my friends, advisers, editors, and comrades—a tribe for life. I characterize myself as a dedicated lifelong DIY MFA HUB member and active participant, and many are to be found here.

My writing course work through the Irish Writers Centre continues. I belong to an online weekend writer’s group and they have become like family. Writing with a group of people in silence is a wonderful feeling and very productive. I hope to attend as many of the future Historical Novel Society conferences as possible, made easier by continued offering of virtual versions.

Nothing replaces getting on the road and meeting the members of your writing tribe in person—those met, those yet to meet. However, even virtual contact and participation are key to the evolution of a writing tribe, key to the evolution of a writer.

My best advice: get out there and find your writing tribe! If you stumble into one that is not supportive, not in your corner, and the members don’t seem to be dedicated writers, move on, and find one that will nurture you as a writer. Finding your writing tribe will change your writing life, your writing, and your life.

Everything Will Be All Right, published by Next Chapter 2022, Book 2 of the series Finding Their Way Home.

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Constance Emmett was born in Brooklyn, New York where her mother’s family landed after leaving Belfast, Northern Ireland. Constance’s debut novel, Heroine of Her Own Life (2019) and sequel, Everything Will Be All Right (2022), books 1 and 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series, were published by Next Chapter. A Massachusetts Hilltown dweller, she is writing book 3 in the series and a novel set in 18th c. New York.
You can find her on her website and follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Last week I was deadheading a hanging plant, a plant I’d watered daily during the high heat of this summer, when I noticed a beautiful little nest, complete with four speckled eggs, blue and brown. One minute I was looking at four eggs, the next minute the top of one egg cracked and was pushed off, revealing a helpless looking creature—dark head, beak wide open and pointed at me, eyes shut, soundless. For a moment, the tiny chick looked like a drunk wearing a lampshade, swaying.

I left them alone, except to position an umbrella so the hot sun didn’t bake them, the mother giving me a quick once-over before fleeing the nest. A song sparrow, she’s rarely still, flying back to the hanging basket’s chain with her wriggling catch, she stands for a moment before dropping down into the nest. “Tchep tchep,” all day long, as she flies back and forth. “Tchep,” that’s how the bird book describes the sparrow’s call.

A day later I gave into temptation and saw the chicks had sprouted grey down. The mother had removed every scrap of eggshell.

The last day I saw the chicks, I wasn’t even bothering the nest with my peeking. I was busy elsewhere in the garden, but I was near enough to see one chick, looking exactly like a striped and speckled sparrow, hopping down the green alley between the hanging plant, a large hydrangea, and the house. The mother’s tcheping became frantic as I watched a second fledgling stand on the edge of the hanging pot for a moment. “No, don’t jump!” A third one watched me from the nest. I never did see a fourth.

The next day, I peeked into the pot and found the nest, empty. The mother sparrow was still tcheping, so perhaps she’d rounded them up in the hydrangea. I removed the umbrella and watered the plant with abandon.

Early the next morning, long before twilight, I heard a few weary tcheps outside the window, but after that, no sign of the sparrow family.

In a few weeks I’ll take the garden down, including the hanging plant, but I’ll save the nest. After the fall, the winter will creep until—surprise!—it seals us inside. Long, long after that, the spring will unwind slowly and eventually, I’ll rehang the hanging pot, fill it with a plant, and wait for the sparrows. Should I place this year’s nest in the plant, or let her build a new one?

Dear Reader: this blog post is an edited version of the piece I wrote and read aloud in the Northern Soul Roadshow course this spring, hosted online by the Irish Writers Centre https://irishwriterscentre.ie and created by facilitator/writer/mentor Fiona O’Rourke https://twitter.com/fionamkorourke

My writing life really began watching a televised interview of novelist Sarah Waters in 2004. I had written fiction as a child, later tried, and failed as a 20-something, but Sarah Waters really got me going in middle age. Something she said struck me to the core (to paraphrase): I want to write what I want to read, and I thought, I want to do that! I began by writing steadily on the weekends and during vacations (I never found a successful and comfortable time to write during the work week), spending 4 years working on a novel that I completed and even shopped around. I had no idea what I was doing, both with the writing and the publishing end of things.

That first novel went into a virtual drawer, where it has remained (along with a few short stories), but the next novel was in my bones, so I began writing it. It took me more than 10 years to write and publish the novel in my bones, during which time I constantly rewrote and edited, and put it through the wringer of three professional editors.

During those 14 years I became a writer, though, and even learned to call myself a writer. I never joined a writing community during that time, I never found a good fit, and it was a very lonely pursuit. I cherish the communities that I have now: I’ve found my tribe.

When I started the novel in my bones, which is set in early to mid-20^th century Belfast and northern coastal Northern Ireland, I read a lot of books about writing, books and novels by writers who grew up in Northern Ireland in the early 20^th c., books about Northern Irish flora, fauna, and historical ordinance maps of Belfast. As you can guess, some of the 10 years was taken up with the joy of research, which while essential for historical fiction, can also be a distraction from the hard graft of writing the novel, especially if too much is done up front.

Later in the process, I began going to conferences and listened to talks about various aspects of writing and publishing. Early on in this process I attended a weekend workshop where I had to pitch my novel to an audience of 100 aspiring writers and the instructor. That experience helped set me on my path because the instructor, a writer/agent herself, said that she liked the pitch and could sell the book: “Ireland is always hot! Sisters are always hot!” Of course, she turned me down later when I submitted the novel to her, but hers was just one of 33 rejections.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself…the novel in my bones, which became Heroine of Her Own Life, was based on my Belfast family and their stories, told in the Norn Iron accents I’d listened to since I could sit at my grandparents’ kitchen table. I used some of the stories in the novel based on their Belfast generation, born in the 1890s, mixing some of the actual events they endured with fictional characters, situations, and reactions to the endless roil of Irish history in early-mid 20^th century. Think about Ireland from 1914 through 1945: WWI, the Irish Civil War, the Partition of 6 of the 9 counties of Ulster to form Northern Ireland, the daily sectarian violence of the 1920s Troubles, a global depression, WWII and the Belfast Blitz in ’41, the fear of which lingered another 4 years.

Since I was writing fiction and not history, I imagined the life my characters wanted versus the life they had. Most of the characters in Heroine of Her Own Life are fictional, and I knew very few of the real people I based several of the characters on, but those few I knew well, although obviously not as the young people they were in the 1920s and ‘30s. I knew enough about them as young people to know that their lives had not been entirely a grim grind in Belfast. They’d gone to the films, the music halls, the races, learned how to dress and dance, walked up at Belfast Castle and along the Lagan, and strolled in the Botanic Gardens on Sundays. Whenever possible, their lives included the joy of a sing song and great laughs. Still, the Troubles seared their lives. One of my great aunts, the model for Heroine’s protagonist Meg Preston, witnessed a Catholic man kicked to death at the Harland and Wolff shipyard where she worked, girl and woman. He’d pretended to be Protestant to get the job in one of many industries that would not hire Catholics, was discovered, and murdered in public—that was one real event I kept in the novel.

As I wrote and rewrote, I continued to weave family stories, historical events, and my imaginings. Once you create a character, imagine and write what’s in their head, you’re writing fiction. Starting with my grandmother’s many sisters and brothers in their two-up-two down off the Sandy Row, and my grandfather and his family (and their horse in the back yard) up in the Falls, I set the stage to show what it was to like for ordinary, working people to struggle to survive and even thrive in extraordinary times, in an extraordinary place, a very beautiful place, one sometimes made ugly by division, like many other places in the world. Future historical novelists may see us the same way: living the best life we can during a plague, wars exploding and threatening to worsen, in a world of inequity and injustice for humans, animals and the environment.

After several full drafts, I met a historical novelist at a New York conference who also edited for a living, as many of them do. She became my editor and that was an expensive project, but extremely worthwhile. We went through at least 3 full drafts together, but afterward I wanted an Irish editor to look particularly at the language, so the next editor was Irish. That was not such a good experience (she was not connected to The Irish Writers’ Centre). For instance, she was horrified that I wrote a 16-year-old girl character as a sexual person, even denying that it was a possibility, but I think that may have been because the girl was lesbian. She also said, referring to the modern version of the Troubles, which does not even appear in Heroine, since it ends in 1944, “At first I thought it was about the Troubles, so my eyes rolled back.” No northern soul there.

As I continued to rewrite, edit, and cut my way to a novel—killing my darlings as I whittled to 90,000 words—I began two years (2017-2019) of attending conferences to pitch to many agents in person, 3 minutes a piece in assemblies like cattle calls, and sending the versions of submission packages required off to agents and publishers in Ireland, UK and US. I made a spreadsheet of them all, which allowed me to keep track, but also to vent. Too many submissions went into black holes, some elicited reactions like “I did not fall in love with the story/characters/writing,” and two were very positive even in rejection: one from an Irish house and another an American agent. I took heart in those, as Michelle Gallen, author of Big Girl, Small Town advised us to recently, when speaking to our Northern Soul Roadshow class. Ahead of Michelle’s advice, and without any other support, I persisted.

I never told anyone outside the family what I was doing until very late in the game. After many rejections and expensive conferences, I began to feel like an idiot, but I persevered. Did I believe in the book? It’s my only explanation for continuing as I did, but I’m not sure it’s accurate or true.

The original, helpful editor suggested that I try her new publisher, Next Chapter, and my submission, number 34 of Heroine of Her Own Life was accepted in May 2019. I was 68 years old.

Exactly two years after the book’s release, we published an audio version of the novel. Through a friend’s UK book club, I met a Belfast native who became the narrator. Olwyn Fitzgerald did a marvelous job: she loves the book, has a beautiful voice, and of course has a Norn Iron accent—which was very important to me.

I wrote the sequel, Everything Will Be All Right, also set in Belfast and the Causeway Coast, but also England, and Brooklyn, US, 1941-1969. I started and finished it during the worst of the pandemic, publishing in January 2022. A big difference in the time required to write these two books!

I just don’t have another 10 years to spend on one book so I’m 100 pages in on an unrelated novel and have begun the third book (no working title) of the Belfast family series, Finding Their Way Home.

I still don’t have an agent and my publisher is not a big house, one with a lot of large marketing tools, so much is left to me. After several marketing courses (expensive also), learning something about social media use, and designing a website and blog, I’m still not good at promotion and marketing, but to some degree I’ve accepted the publicity deficit the books endure currently, at least until I find a way to change that deficit. I think as writers we must decide what we want, and find some way to write through both the quotidian and the extremes of life. I wanted to write and publish more than anything, and right now, I’m fortunate to do both.

1950s St. Patrick’s Day in New York: no green beer, no green foam hands with index fingers raised, and no “We’re No. 1!” boasts shouted. Then as now, too much drink was taken in certain circles of the diaspora, while others observed the feast day with Mass attendance and a large meal.

In my family, celebration of St. Patrick’s Day was understated, muted and even dignified. My grandmother covered small brooches or pins with a bit of green cloth that we wore on our overcoat lapels.

There were large St. Patrick Day Parades in the New York of the 1950s, as there had been since 1762, when the marchers were Irish immigrants and those serving colonial military duty with the British Army. The wearing of the green was banned in Ireland in the 18th century, so the marchers in Colonial New York, bedecked in green, singing and playing pipes, enjoyed themselves green.

One March 17th, possibly 1957, we took the subway from Brooklyn to New York (what Brooklynites called Manhattan) for the parade. The marchers were organized by cells of the four Irish provinces and their counties, and led by the U.S. Army’s 69th Infantry Regiment, the “Fighting 69th.” We stood on Fifth Avenue, shivering in heavy coats adorned with the bits of green cloth, and watched the representatives of the various provinces and counties march by, flags flying, pipers piping, and regiments of cops in their winter uniforms, two rows of buttons across wide, dark blue plackets.

Behind the provincial flags marched descendants of immigrants mixed with visitors from Ireland, New York politicians and celebrities of Irish heritage. Representatives of the counties of three provincial units marched past. Kerry! The crowd applauded and cheered, and we clapped, albeit politely. Cork! The crowd roared. Kilkenny! Waterford! Dublin! Galway! On and on through the three provinces of Connacht, Munster and Leinster.

And bringing up the rear to a much thinned crowd, the northern province, Ulster. We clapped harder and waved at Ulster’s representatives, reaching a crescendo for Belfast’s county, Antrim. We, nearly alone on the wide Fifth Avenue, clapped as the banner of the Red Hand of Ulster flapped in the wind.

Ulster. It took me a very long time and a lot of research to grasp any understanding of what it was, what it meant, how we were Irish—my grandparents, mother, and her brother having emigrated from Belfast to Brooklyn—and how we weren’t Irish.

Brooklyn born with an American father of English descent, I wasn’t Irish directly, and yet I felt then as I’ve felt most of my life: Irish.

The crowd on Fifth Avenue didn’t seem to think Ulster was Irish, not Irish like they were. Indeed, we didn’t know any other Irish people, and any that crossed our path often were dissected verbally for sport. For light friendship, for she never cared for anyone outside the family, my grandmother gravitated to Scots neighbors in Brooklyn, not Irish. It took me a long time to understand the pull all things Scots exerted on her; and yet, she was proud to be Irish. Understanding Ulster explained some of that much later (although understanding my grandmother fully has yet to arrive).

My grandmother was Ulster Scots, meaning that her ancestors took a short sea voyage across from Scotland to settle 17th c. Ulster, as Queen Elizabeth I’s forces chased the Irish Chiefs from the land, lands stolen from other Irish people earlier. Of Scottish descent, religion, attitude and physical traits, her family lived on that Irish land for nearly three hundred years before my grandmother was born.

The very complicated history of Ulster—human, religious and political—was unknown to me as a child, of course. At home there were clues to an oddity connected to Ulster that I sensed but could not understand—things dramatic, both hidden and obvious, things not discussed for reasons unknown.

For instance, their accents were what I’ve since understood to be the Norn Iron sound spoken by Belfast born and bred people, people of their time and background, but also what I sometimes heard and could always identify in 2014 Northern Ireland. My childish brain knew they didn’t sound like Scottish people (those on TV and the movies, but also those around us), but I also knew they didn’t sound like the Irish actors of the day (when the rare role allowed them to sound Irish), like Maureen O’Hara and Barry Fitzgerald. Yet I never doubted that the family was Irish.

My grandparents were Catholic and raised their three children in the Roman Catholic Church—that much was entirely and frequently on the table. As in all families, there were blow ups that made their way to the surface, and often about religion in our case. What was hidden until long after her death was the fact that my grandmother was a Protestant who converted to marry my grandfather in the dangerous and highly charged 1920s—the time of the first Troubles in Ireland. The War of Independence (the Irish Civil War) raged throughout the island, and continued on in Belfast past the Partition of Northern Ireland in 1921 (for further discussion of the Partition, see constancegemmett.com/borders-irelands-brexit-killer).

My family’s emigration in 1930 was explained by their religion, which incited someone or some group to burn my grandfather’s business to the ground. Catholic and comfortable, he was a sitting duck, apparently, because before the arson he’d nearly been killed by drunken and armed B Specials. Explanation: around the time of the Partition, the British Government enlisted ex-WWI British Army servicemen (enlistment data show they were all unmarried and shorter than average) into a quasi-military unit of the Ulster Special Constabulary, commonly called the B Specials. Whatever it was on paper, the B Special’s commission was interpreted to commit the violence (rape, murder, assault, and arson) they carried out against Ulster Catholics and anybody else who protested their appalling behavior.

A passing Protestant minister vouched for my grandfather as his parishioner and that lie saved him. The ruined business may have been the final straw, and I suspect that both experiences made my grandfather want to get the hell out of Ulster, a move my grandmother always regretted.

Still, there we were at the St. Patrick’s Day parade in 1957 wearing our little bits of green. I now understand that many living in Ulster today experience the same pulls: Irish and not Irish, British or Scots, or all three, or plus all of the places people have emigrated from to Ulster, as they choose Irish or UK passports.

My grandmother, of Ulster Scots heritage and the Protestant religion, chose to become Catholic despite everything she’d been taught and experienced, and in the face of disapprobation of some in her family (but not all), of everyone in her culture, and despite the violence against Catholics she lived through ahead of the marriage.

And years later, there she was with her bit of green, the symbol of Ireland, standing near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where she took me for my baptism. All things she would never have done as a young woman, before her conversion, before her marriage. She became her version of Irish.

At least that’s how it seems to me now, but there’s nobody alive to ask, nobody who would get the full picture, except for my new Ulster friends, possibly. As for me, I still embrace being an Irish American, but feel more like an American who is of Ulster descent specifically: a mix of Irish and Ulster-Scots from my mother’s side, and English on my father’s side. My most recent DNA test confirms the identity it took years for me to understand: more Scots than anything else, Ulster (but nothing from anywhere in what is now the Republic of Ireland), English, and 3% Norwegian and Icelandic; a drop of Viking blood handed down in the red hair on both sides, and to me at birth, just as it was to many on the islands in one little corner of the world, the world of my ancestors.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

My father was born on February 7, 1921. He died on February 13, 2003. A span of 82 years, bookended by dates held by one week: this week. Naturally, February is important to me, containing as it does my father’s circle of life. But beyond marking this week every year, February’s importance has changed over time for me, from the dead of winter—the bleakest point, the “Abandon all hope ye who enter here” month—to the beginning of spring.

For I see spring everywhere this week, even though New England does not yet experience early springs. What has changed? Certainly, the climate has changed, although we are still encased in icy snowbanks this week, but the real change is about me. It’s about where I spend all of my time, what I pay close attention to, what I hear and see. I live in a wild and rural place, spending time out of doors each day in the quiet where bird song is obvious. Bird feeders in our front yard draw a crowd visible through the house’s many windows, permitting close and consistent observation. The overwintering birds are singing and flying about with purpose. Their colors seem brighter already, too: the male cardinals are very red and the male goldfinches more yellow olive than their winter dull olive.

February is the month to prune apple trees here in this northwesterly corner of Massachusetts—a sign of early spring. And there’s yet another sign of early spring: the seed and nursery catalogs are clogging our mailboxes and filling our minds with dreams of the coming gardens.

First comes the dream of the purple and green heads of asparagus poking up through cool soil. Dream upon dream: the perfect red orb of a tomato; long, slender zucchini; golden, thin-skinned potatoes. Dreams and memories of tall black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers beckoning the bees, butterflies and humming birds, and of milkweeds welcoming the returning Monarchs. In the dream, hollyhocks stand tall and glowing heads of dahlia wave in a ruffling breeze. Nothing is attacked by disease or predator. In the February dream, our gardens grow lush with flowers and the September vines and beds are laden with perfect fruit and vegetables.

All of that gardening hope and disappointment awaits us, very far away from this week in February. We first must pass into March to even think about starting seeds indoors. If April is the cruelest month, March in New England is the most treacherous month, with historical snowstorms and winds to pull the life out of early spring.

Setting aside March for a moment, this week in February nevertheless shows us the promise that spring will come. It will come. For now, we’re taking a tiny break from winter, with milder temperatures and sunshine. We are not winter rookies though. Ice grippers remain attached to our boots and our puffy coats are besmirched by mud and sand from the town’s winter road care. We see February for what it is, we see February as 19th c. botanical artist and poet Rebecca Hey saw it:

“Though Winter still asserts his right to reign,/ He sways his sceptre now with gentler hand;”

Except for the mental sunshine that is St. Valentine’s Day, the return of the hard cold next week, and the nostalgia felt during the presidents’ birthdays, I can’t guess what the rest of February will be like. But as soon as the snow melts enough for an easy walk up the cemetery path, I will venture up that silent little hill. To the tune of the wind in the trees, I will brush the ice off my father’s gravestone and say hello.

East Hawley MA, February 10th, 2020

February

Though Winter still asserts his right to reign,
He sways his sceptre now with gentler hand;
Nay, sometimes softens to a zephyr bland
The hurrying blast, which erst along the plain
Drove the skin-piercing sleet and pelting rain
In headlong rage; while, ever and anon,
He draws aside his veil of vapours dun,
That the bright sun may smile on us again.
To-day ‘twould seem (so soft the west wind’s sigh)
That the mild spirit of the infant Spring
Was brooding o’er the spots where hidden lie
Such early flowers as are the first to fling
On earth’s green lap their wreaths of various dye—
Flowers, round whose forms sweet hopes and sweeter memories cling.

by Rebecca Hey (known as Mrs Hey), 1797-1859, botanical artist, born in Leeds, Great Britain

Everything Will Be All Right, sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life and book 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series, was released this week by the publisher, Next Chapter. Here’s a link to both, https://books2read.com/u/4DKPAd

on Amazon (US) and if you click on it, it will take you to two clickable buttons, one for the Kindle and one for the paperback. Other versions will come out (large print, an ebook other than Kindle, hardcover and many sizes of paperbacks and an audio version), but this is what’s launched now. 

However, I encourage you to order through a local bookstore or a preferred independent online store (A Room of One’s Own, Hudson Booksellers, etc.), even though you can’t write an Amazon review if not purchased through them. Bookstores can order through Bookshop.org or however they order all their other books, and mine are available to them.

Out a few days and already it’s in the top 100 bestselling LGBTQ+historical fiction on Amazon US!

Here are some descriptions I wrote for Amazon yesterday:

 About Everything Will Be All Right:

Splintered by emigration, World War Two and secrets kept from one another, the Prestons are a Northern Irish family grappling with the past, dislocation, and a frightening and uncertain future. Throughout their lives, members of the larger Preston family are split along lines of strongly supporting one another, or barely holding together. Facing separation in their violent and sectarian times, can they find the strength to reunite? In this sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life, Everything Will Be All Right is book 2 in the Finding Their Way Home series.

After Belfast is bombed by the Luftwaffe in 1941, Meg Preston and her partner Lillian Watson escape the horrors inflicted upon their city for the relatively safe Causeway Coast of Northern Ireland, bringing with them their friend Mildred, sisters Florrie and Beryl, and their sons, Robert and Albert. Meg Preston’s seventeen-year-old nephew Robert Henderson enlists in the Royal Navy, both to escape his smothering parents and the dawning knowledge that he is gay. Robert endures active duty in the dangerous North Atlantic before assignment to a minor codebreaking role at Bletchley Park, where he meets Jo and Holly, two young Irish women in the Royal Navy with similar assignments. 

The three become lifelong friends, as their experience at Bletchley Park is silenced by the Official Secrets Act for life, adding to the burden of the secret kept from many in the Preston family about Jo’s daughter’s paternity.

The post mid-century sectarian violence, known as The Troubles (as it also had been called in the 1920s) erupts, pulling Jo’s daughter Rosie and Robert into civil rights activism and danger.

Enduring the stresses of intimate relationships, global and local catastrophes, but thriving due to the relief found in community both inside and outside of the family, the Prestons’ story is one that resonates during our own stressful times. 

Amazon also asked for my description of what it was like to write the book and that was fun to write:

Everything Will Be All Right, book 2 of the Finding Their Way Home Series, was written over two years of the pandemic and is the sequel to Heroine of Her Own Life, published in 2019. Inspired by the poem of the same title by Ulsterman Derek Mahon, who died in 2020, and experiences a Northern Irish family like mine may have had over the mid-20th century, the novel allowed me to spend more time with the fictional characters from Heroine as well as new ones, while happily researching the time period.

As a novelist, I was able to give the characters experiences my family did not have, and to explore favorite pieces of history, such as the great work at Bletchley Park, work that saved the United Kingdom from almost certain defeat by the Nazis. My creative role also allowed me to provide a community that would have been rare for the gay characters to experience and happier conclusions for many of the characters than reality would have provided in the harsh landscape of the time and place. 

Dear Reader, if you buy from Amazon (US and UK), I’d very much appreciate a review there and also on Goodreads (Goodreads.com/review). Goodreads will accept reviews regardless of vendor.

I’m forever grateful for your support and I hope you enjoy Everything Will Be All Right!

November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Thirteen years old that October, I was a student at Nyack New York public school, Hilltop Junior High. “Hilltop Junior High, hats off to thee!” The school was housed in a modern building attached to a beautiful old mansion, high on a hill overlooking the town of Nyack and the widest part of the Hudson River.

I was in science class, taught by Mr. Murray, a tall, depressed man in late middle age, who wore bow ties and had horrendously bad breath. 

The principal announced the shooting of President Kennedy over the PA system. November 22, 1963, a Friday.

Waiting for the bus to pull up in front of the school, a girl in my class came over to me and told me how sorry she was, even though her family were Republicans, because she knew we were Democrats.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur, but I do remember that I was wearing five eyelet brown oxfords (the loafers I yearned for would have ruined my feet, apparently), because while this girl was apologizing for JFK’s shooting—we did not know he was dead yet—I was looking at my feet, having no idea how to respond to her or the event.

The orange Bluebird school bus delivered me to the top of the 100+ steps down from Route 9W, Grand View, N.Y. to our house, where I lived with my parents, our dog Butch (called Mr. Baby) and our red tom cat, Harry Lyme, a roving fellow, soon to disappear for good.

We rented a turn of the 20th century almost Mansard house, clinging to the side of a steep hill overlooking the river. Built by a ship’s captain, the house contained more than 50 single-paned windows without storms, and a boiler the size of the Queen Mary’s that lost the battle with all that draft. That house had the most gorgeous views from all the back windows, looking down on the ever-changing Hudson River. On a clear day, we could see Washington Irving’s house, Sunnyside, across the river in the hills of Westchester County. The weekend after JFK’s assassination, we were rooted in our freezing living room, glued to the TV for days, although there must have been time spent on the phone with my Irish, Kennedy-loving grandparents. My father and I watched nightclub owner Jack Ruby shoot the charged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, live on television. My mother was in the kitchen and missed it, since it was all over in a second but our shouting for her to hurry back to the living room (given the timing of the shooting, she was probably making Sunday breakfast). 

We continued in that mode through Sunday and into Monday, watching all the stages of John Kennedy’s funeral and burial, many of which stay with me: the backwards-facing boots in the stirrups of the magnificent Blackjack’s saddle; little John-John (long dead now too, and the subject of Q Anon fantasies) saluting the caisson carrying his father’s casket; Charles de Gaulle sticking up over the rows of foreign dignitaries assembled.

Such a defining set of events for so many years, and not a mention in the newspapers this morning, not a whisper in The Boston Globe or The Irish Times, two publications with strong ties to John Kennedy during his life. It’s as though the waters have closed over such an important man, such an important event and moment, as they have over all but one who lived that day in the cold house with the spectacular view.

The audiobook of Heroine Of Her Own Life is now available FREE on Audible, U.S. and UK (https://audible.com/acx-promo or https://audible.co.uk/acx-promo). Even if you’ve read the novel (thank you), the audio version offers a new experience as wonderfully read by Belfast native Olwyn Fitzgerald (produced by Iain Fitzgerald). Enjoy! Plus, if you download, you are eligible for a free month’s subscription to Audible (if not already a subscriber) where you’ll find thousands of titles.