A Writer Who Writes Not Knowing Why Comments

That my parents were Irish immigrants is probably the most significant factor in my writing life. The English expelled my father from Ireland around 1920 at age 18 or so for running guns for the IRA. My mother was an illegal immigrant who somehow got on a different ship around the same time and ended up in Harlem. Nice people took her to her cousin's place elsewhere in New York. She too was 18. The year may have been 1924. Hunger motivated her to leave.

Words were everything in the home I was raised in. Words flew around the house at times like butterflies; other times like missiles. My father launched most of them. My mother said little.
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