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.

“The past is a different country: they do things differently there.” L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

At the cusp of the pandemic, an old friend contacted me for the first time in decades. We began on a sad note— learning of a death—before engaging in a lively, absorbing correspondence that lasted through much of the year. Recently, I contacted a childhood pal and we sifted through our short shared past. Ah, the past! L.P. Hartley’s finger wag first line of The Go-Between reminds us ‘The past is a different country: they do things differently there.’ Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again warns that attempting to recreate the past is futile. Despite these dire predictions, some old friends do reunite, as some old friends remain constant—a home still there. During this past year, I’ve had reason to think about friendship past, present and future, as though conjugating a living noun.

“Only connect!” E.M. Forster, Howards End

The friends of my youth are old now, old friends whether they are in my life or not. The years stretch back and catch up like an extended and released rubber band: snap! we’re old. Then again, there are other types of old friends, old regardless of when we connected or what their ages are now. The friendship feels old (comfortable, deep, secure) despite its relatively short existence because of the quality of the connection.

What is it about the quality of connection between old friends? What is the difference between friendships that last and those that don’t? The roll of the dice in life makes a difference, of course—survival is key. Circumstances of health, family, location, interests and politics matter to varying degrees. With some friends the constancy of experience together over time is necessary and with others it doesn’t matter. Reunions click even after years of silence. Like frayed wires easily mended, they mend. With other attempts at reunion, the friendships just sort of…short out.

“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” Scout song

Before the pandemic I would have said that making new friends becomes harder and harder as we age. But my own experience proves otherwise, because as it turns out, two new friends were just around one corner and the renewal and rejuvenation of an old friendship or two around another—despite or because of the pandemic. Still many friends were lost along the way and there’s been no reunion. With some, it’s a shame, but with others, it’s OK: they gave up on me or I gave up on them—or we were careless with each other. Friends far and few between—silver and gold—connections forged, sustained or renewed, or connections lost, some mourned and remembered with love.

You’ve seen TV commercials for Prevagen on cable news? While you watched the Capitol rampage and the second impeachment trial, a Prevagen ad popped up, surely. Even if you watched for mere seconds before turning it off in horror, you were bound to see a Prevagen commercial.

What is Prevagen? Prevagen is a supplement touted as a reversal for age-related memory loss. The manufacturer, Quincy Bioscience in Madison, WI, claims that in a clinical study Prevagen “…was shown to improve memory in subgroups of participants with normal cognitive aging or mild impairment.”

The main ingredient in Prevagen is a photoprotein extracted from jellyfish, apoaequorin. Apoaequorin plus calcium provide the cool bioluminescence jellyfish enjoy. Like many ingredients, apoaequorin is digested in the human stomach and gets nowhere near the brain, where its function as a photoprotein would… what? Light up the interior of the skull? Sounds like fun, but not useful for memory improvement. Unless the skull is a dark attic, the photoprotein a flashlight, and the missing memory a box of old photos in a corner. They’re not.

The results of Quincy Bioscience’s Prevagen study consist of a bar graph showing a rise in recall tasks over 90 days. But there’s no way to know what these numbers refer to, how many people were studied, or other important details, like what recall tasks? Four words repeated in a row? What did you have for breakfast? Who’s the President of the United States?—scratch this question—it no longer works as a recall task for everyone. And no information is provided about effects on memory after 90 days. The fine print under the graph says that the supplement “improved recall tasks in subjects” without explaining what this means.

The results of the clinical study were not peer reviewed by any member of the scientific literature body nor the FDA. In fact, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission charged Quincy Bioscience with fraud in 2012 (the case is ongoing).

So how is it we still suffer from Prevagen TV advertising as it remains on the shelves of pharmacists who may or may not recommend it to their customers? Because supplement manufacturers are not required to undergo the FDA process required for prescription drugs. That process requires proof of clinical safety and efficacy. The prescription drug manufacturing process and product contents are reviewed and analysed completely. Limits and standards are set for what should be in the drug, and what should not, and are followed over time for expiration dating. Note that the FDA is reviewing the lack of processes in place for supplements with an eye toward increasing rigor.

Supplement makers are allowed to make a connection between their product and the body’s structure and function. Supplement makers currently cannot claim that their product cures or prevents disease. Prevagen’s marketing runs mighty close to the wind with hints about preventing Alzheimer’s or dementia.

The question is, how do they get away with it? Well, there’s no rigorous review of their data and there’s vigorous data massage. And then there’s p-hacking (the p value is the measurement of statistical significance after analysis of data)—or going back in to re-analyze. As Anthony Pearson, MD, reported in https://www.medpagetoday.com/blogs/skeptical-cardiologist/80321, “A great article on the Prevagen case from the McGill University Office of Science and Society summarizes the problems with this re-analysis: This is an after-the-fact, unplanned exploration of the data to see if anything else of interest happened in the trial. Some might call it a fishing expedition. Scientists do this all the time, but with a big caveat: post hoc results are considered tentative, not conclusive. Before they’re accepted as valid outcomes, they need to be confirmed by additional studies.

That’s because random events happen all the time in scientific studies. Some of them may seem statistically significant, but they’re flukes and not the result of cause-and-effect. And the more post hoc analyses you do (like the more than 30 Quincy Bioscience did), the more likely you’ll encounter these chance results.

Scientists guard against accepting them as real by setting a high bar for statistical significance and by not accepting post hoc findings until they’ve been tested again. For a more in-depth analysis, see the deep dive by Jann Bellamy at Science-Based Medicine in “Prevagen goes P-hacking.“

Supplements have strong anecdotal support and Prevagen is no outlier. Unfortunately, when put through a rigorous study that generates peer-reviewed data, there is little evidence of any support or improvement linked to many of them. Prevagen is not an outlier there either.

But let’s get back to the commercials, which add weirdness to this tale. Each Prevagen commercial features a different Prevagen taker or set of takers. The advertising premise is a few minutes spent with a real person(s) really taking Prevagen with good results. They don’t seem like actors and they don’t seem unalike. Middle class, older of course, the majority are white, but there is one Black man, a substitute teacher and inspirational speaker by trade. All of them, however, have a very strange affect, one that at least hints at some sort of affliction already in the works.

In one commercial, the protagonist is an older man. He is a fly fisherman (he has a beautiful cast), has six children and grandchildren. His speaking voice is low and slow. His movement is ponderous. He reports slowly that Prevagen has helped him an awful lot.

In another version, another older man is shown preparing to shoot (but not shooting) a basketball. He praises his own memory. His voice is also low and slow, his movement also ponderous.

In yet another version, an older woman lives in the mountains and has an art studio in her house. Every day she goes to her studio first thing, where she encounters people who praise her artwork (who are they and how did they get into the house?). She speaks and moves more quickly than the two men, her face is more mobile, but she seems quite…off.

Then there’s the older married couple. The couple are shown performing their various happy, healthy older persons’ activities. They walk—she follows him as he moves as though trekking up Denali. They write—laptops in evidence, he says, “We consult, but we also write,” pronounced RRRRiTTTe. Consult about what? Write what? He reads the newspaper aloud while she hangs on his every word. She gets a star turn to announce that after 11 years, Prevagen is still helping her (the company’s answer to what happens after the 90 days). Let’s see, 11 years x 12 months/year x $32+shipping/30 tablets = $4224+ (x2 for “extra strength” Prevagen). More than enough for a super nice pre-pandemic vacation or a super donation to a food bank now.

Prevagen use can’t be to blame for their shared idiosyncrasies, can it? But would any potential customer actually want to behave, sound or move like any of them? Is it a side effect of Prevagen? Doesn’t the ad agency see that? Perhaps they’re taking Prevagen, too.

Some may say, what’s the harm? The consumers in the commercials aren’t cutting back on food in order to take Prevagen. Beyond lifestyle recommendations, science and medicine haven’t offered anything up to seniors terrified of dementia, so why not? The placebo effect is a strong one, so if consumers feel that it helps, why not?…but it doesn’t help and it could harm them further. Severe side effects have been reported as linked to Prevagen use.

Robert H. Shmerling, MD wrote in https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fda-curbs-unfounded-memory-supplement-claims-2019053116772 “Unlike prescription drugs, supplements are not thoroughly tested or evaluated. While dietary supplements might provide benefits in certain cases, it’s vitally important that their makers not make unfounded claims to exploit consumers. And, of course, these products should contain only what they’re supposed to contain.”

In other words, aside from the apoaequorin, Prevagen consumers don’t know what they are consuming exactly. What else is in it? They also don’t know the quantity or quality of that mystifying ingredient. Even the origin of the apoaequorin is in question: extracted from jellyfish or engineered in a lab E. coli strain? Only the FDA submission and approval process (and yes, it’s a long, expensive and labor-intensive one) can provide that knowledge by rigorously reviewing both the manufacturing and clinical data required by law.

Prevagen’s producers did not want to wait the ten plus years required for peer and FDA review—and the threat of failure to approve—before raking in millions https://www.wired.com/story/prevagen-made-millions-fda-questioned-safety/. But at what real cost to the consumer?

For more musings on modern life, see https://www.constancegemmett.com/unprecedented/