His name was Eoghan, and I never did catch his last name. A solid year spent with the desultory coming and going of this enigmatic man through the door of The Galway Music Center, and I came to accept him as Kieran’s friend from Derry. Kieran rarely explained himself, much less anyone attendant, and because he was the…

Even on the best of days, when the weather is temperate and the sky soft and cloudless, Galway City has a worn, secondhand feel to it: an historic, pensive, erudite quality everywhere you roam down its serpentine streets. But there’s also an energetic undercurrent to Galway that seems to thrive on the idea of opposites,…

After more years than I care to count, Kieran has resurfaced. The last time I saw him, it was raining; it was one of those gray Galway days on New Castle Road, and I’d sleuthed Kieran out, after swearing to Adrian I’d never tell who had told me where I…

If one is travelling through Connemara, one of the more compelling tourist destinations is Kylemore Abbey, a Benedictine monastery since 1920, which sits majestically surrounded by wooded acres behind a tranquil lake. The…

Once upon a time, I spent a year living on the western coast of Ireland, in an area of Connemara called Inverin, which is thirteen miles up the coast road from Galway City. Last October, I had good cause to return for nine days, and had invited a childhood friend to accompany me sans…

I’ve had many people ask about the picture on my author page where I’m standing against a gray stone wall on a windswept day in the middle of an Irish field with what are obviously the ruins of a monastery behind me. Observant people have said to themselves, “Wait, there’s a ruined…