McCann to read from new work in An Taibhdhearc

New York-based Irish writer, Colum McCann is not short of ideas for books — he just doesn’t have the time to get around to using them all.

Since the Dubliner emigrated to Japan and then New York, he has been quite prolific in his literary output despite being a college professor, raising a young family and travelling the work promoting his books – when he reads from his new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking, in An Taibhdhearc Theatre this Friday, it will have been his seventh visit ‘home’ to Ireland this year alone.

“When I am in New York, I call Ireland home and when I am in Ireland, I call New York home. As Joyce once said in a letter, ‘I have been so long out of Ireland that I all at once hear her voice in everything’.

“I feel the same way. In many ways I never left. And I travel back and forth all the time. My trip home next week will be my seventh this year. I almost feel that I commute!”

McCann trained as a journalist and in fact started his career in the Connaught Telegraph in Castlebar before landing a job in the Irish Press, where he had his own column — a rare achievement then for a young strapping young fella just out of college.

But his columns were insightful and showed he wasn’t afraid to voice his opinions. Dublin, possibly even Ireland, was too small for him and before long he had upped and left for the Big Apple.

In seemed no time at all before he was back talking to Gaybo on The Late Late Show about his work with the homeless in the tunnels of the NYC subway and which was to become a subject for his first novel, This Side of Brightness.

Most of his work have international topics, though he believes his last book, Transatlantic, was “very much an Irish book, especially in relation to the Peace Process, but even when they aren’t about Irish topics, I still think of them as Irish books”.

“I like the idea that we can look outwards as well as inwards. I do like to write about ‘otherness’, or topics that might not be immediately associated with someone who has grown up in Ireland. To me it’s a form of adventure and travel.”

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.