‘I will be known’: A treasured conversation

Our last coffee was had beneath the gaze of Mary, mother of Jesus, on December 17, 2018, some months before she left. I didn’t know it would be our last one-on-one conversation. Neither did she. That’s the point—we rarely know. It’s only afterwards, in retrospect, that these final conversations find their light. Fortuitously, the conversation …

Beyond Love: The dying man

They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of illusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer …

FML17: A person in all but name

I need to know the identity of FML17. Not for any particular reason. He’s nothing to me. Not now anyway. He’s dead. Died on Friday, after falling from his bunk bed. Who does that? Falls from a bunk bed and dies? My daughter fell from a bunk bed once. We were watching a movie in …

Tears for my sister of mercy

I'm not a teary man, not really. But I've wept more in the past few weeks than I have in my whole life. And it's all because of Darlene. My friend. Who's dying. I think it's that I've been caught out. I've faced tragedy before. Lots of it, actually. I've experienced the death of people …

Piha rescue: Confronting the agony and ecstasy of isolation

I drove to the beach alone, to photograph the sunset. Alone. And as the sun dipped behind the rocks and its brilliant light squeezed through the gap to illuminate the surf spray like bedroom dust on a moonbeam piercing the tiniest gap in the curtains, it was the aloneness that made the greatest impression. Not …

Making time: A poem

Once upon a time I might have written a book about space and these walls and how things look About you in your place and me in mine the clock running down crisscrossed timelines About a life in the spotlight a story, a plot me, the protagonist likely or not About vaulting my hurdles big …

I Am Easy To Find: A soundtrack to my latest long night

It's been difficult to know all week whether I've been depressed or just perpetually hungover. Which seems like the perfect emotional backdrop for a new album release from The National. The National are my ultimate "do I accidentally take too many pills/just listen to some music" kind of band. My darkest times of the past …

Writing is our bitch: But getting there is hell

The reason more people don't write novels isn't the writing. Sure, that's hard enough — but if you're a writer, writing is the juice. The reason is the moment before you write, in which all your fear, loneliness, self-doubt, insecurity, and anxiety, floods in like canal water through a sluice gate. And that's not the worst …

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …