STATEMENT OF MOTIVATION

After graduating from university having written and defended my thesis about Ireland's economic developments and community changes since European Union accession, I transplanted from Boston across the Atlantic to pursue a route I've dreamt since boyhood.

I first visited Ireland when I was six weeks old, my mother bringing me "home" from my birthplace of New York City. I returned once or twice yearly throughout Ireland's economically developing 1980s, and I so fondly remember certain moments from those days of youthful exhilaration: plodding, barefooted, along the West Coast's mystical beaches, exploring their cliff-topped caves and poking washed-up jellyfish with twigs, playing board games out of tin boxes and bounding among hay bales with my cousins at their farm, chomping biscuits and sipping tea within a snug whitewashed kitchen, warmed by family close and flames licking from the charred fireplace over which my grandma I never met had labored daily, baking bread before sunrise for all while my grandpa tended the pastures.

Not without sorrow and sacrifice, the family and community fabrics of this bygone era interwove faith and dedication, joy and discipline, humor and tenderness, and it is from narratives of the past that we derive meaning and motivation for both the present and the future. With this in heart and mind I have set off to develop and write my first book, one comprising Ireland's not-so-distant memories.

Throughout this process of discovery and creation, I am looking ever forward to the roads that lie unwinding, yet unknown, ahead.

GENERAL GIST

Sean Carlson's book-in-progress traces the life of Nuala, Sean's mother, and the overlapping exploits of her parents and 15 brothers and sisters on a small-village farm in rural Ireland throughout the twentieth century, exploring the country's broader historical and economic landscapes through the stories enduring in family and community.