The Fifth Province

My head is full of threads and I’m slowly weaving them into a new story…there’s space to dream because I finished The Oracle’s Door on Monday! It’s with two editors but I’m trying not to think about that and I’m still prepared to self-publish if necessary. When I finish a novel, I often fall into a slump so I preempted that by diving into my research on Blacks in Ireland. I leave for Glasgow next week; I’ll teach a writing workshop the night of the 7th and then leave the next day for Dublin. So far I’ve lined up a school visit and a tour of Tipperary; Cork seems to have a connection to the Caribbean so I might take the train down there on my last day. Then it’s back to Chicago to write! My guide actually emailed me today to say she was already in Terryglass, checking out the pub and churchyard to save us time next Saturday. Maggie’s an artist and I can’t wait to pick her brain about Irish folklore. I bought a book last fall that introduced me to the mystical Fifth Province. This week I’ve been reading scholarly articles and I’ve discovered so many things to help me with the next novel…the Stone of Divisions sits on the Hill of Uisneach (pron. ish-knock), spiritual center of Ireland, the place where disputes were once resolved…so where else would an enslaved girl from the Carolinas go when seeking justice? I am deep in dream mode and just started Part 2 of a 5-part documentary on the history of Ireland. On Tuesday I started things off by watching this informative presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Stack of the Irish American Heritage Museum in upstate New York: “The History of Black People in Ireland.” She shared her sources right at the beginning so I ordered one book by Dr. Nini Rodgers and then found that I had already saved an article of hers when I got back from Dublin last fall. Dr. Stack included the above newspaper advertisement and that immediately jumped out as a potential protagonist. The picture book I started last fall has a Caribbean girl as the main character so it doesn’t hurt to have the second girl be from the (soon to be) U.S. A student this morning asked how long it has taken me to write the dragon series but it’s so hard to measure because most of the time I’m dreaming and researching and walking my neighborhood listening for voices…it takes a while for a story to come together, though I almost feel ready to write about Uisneach and it’s only been three days! But this week’s research builds on everything that came before—including my many visits to Scotland, where I saw this painting by “Glasgow Boys” Henry and Hornel, The Druids Bringing in the Mistletoe. Hornel’s adjacent painting of a brownie at the Kelvingrove Museum partly inspired me to write Blue Boy and now another of his paintings is haunting me…maybe on my one unplanned day in Ireland I can figure out how to get to the Fifth Province (modern day County Westmeath)…