Tom Ryan’s Shoes is a ghost-tinged Irish historical novella in which a famine-era journey becomes a story of survival, courtship, folklore, and the inheritance of memory. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Well, it’s difficult to give one simple answer. The Canterbury Tales and The Wizard of Oz were literary inspirations. So were stories of elves, fairies, and leprechauns I heard as a pre-schooler, along with family stories I heard about the Great Famine. I had long assumed that the famine had driven my family to come to America. But then, in recent years when I took up genealogy, I learned that my family did not arrive here until the 1880s or so (decades after the famine). I ran up against the paucity of good Irish records for pre-famine family histories. So, gradually, a story began to take shape in my head … and to take over my life, a bit, for a few weeks or so.

This storytelling is something of a mysterious process to me. I mean, I did not set out to explain my great-great-grandparents’ experience of those times, then embellish the tale with a few folklore nuances. Writing for me is more like playing with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (characters, conflicts, themes, snippets of history) and exploring how they might fit together in an interesting way.

How did you approach writing the Great Famine in a way that honored its suffering without letting the novel become emotionally one-note?

I did struggle a bit with that, as indicated in the Introduction.

I’m not aware of very much wonderful literature to come out of the famine. Maybe it is there and I’ve overlooked it. But it has seemed to me, it is almost a taboo subject. Unlike war, there is nothing much heroic or romantic about starvation. I’ve seen probably dozens of films about WWII, but can only think of one major motion picture about the famine (2018’s Black ’47). So I wanted to pop the lid off and take a look at this time period, without strong notions about what might unfold.

Now, given my family history, it occurred to me that, even though the famine killed or displaced some 25% of the population, many families not only survived but in some cases must even have profited from others’ suffering.

It was too simplistic to blame the British government for the whole calamity. I saw in the Canterbury Tales a framework for laying out a range of human character types, with all their shortcomings, that might have been on display.

Once I started to follow that path, I had begun to avoid monotony. But I did find myself getting caught up in the romance, toward the end, and had to be careful not to lose sight entirely of the horror.

Folklore feels inseparable from daily life in the book. Was that balance shaped more by historical research, family stories, or imagination?

A little of each. But again, the lack of reliable history was a factor. So we’re back to: “Never let the truth (or lack of it) get in the way of a good story.”

Toto the pig brings so much texture and vitality to the story. When did you realize she was essential rather than incidental?​

Somewhere along the way I read an old review of The Wizard of Oz, and realized I’d never given much thought to Toto and the role the little dog played in the story.

Toto represents innocence, but a knowing, uncorrupted innocence (not unlike that of the little boy who points out the emperor has no clothes).

It is Toto who pulls back the curtain on the Wizard. When I realized how appropriate that was, iI realized it would be quite nice to have the pig pull off the Hag’s cloak.

Now, in Tom Ryan, there’s another dimension to the pig. Toto represents a few good meals worth of meat. So it’s a marvelous thing she survives the journey.

But Toto the pig isn’t entirely there for explanatory power (as a metaphor for a relationship between innocence and wisdom). She’s there, too, to allude to the Wizard of Oz, to resonate with a story-telling tradition and our shared childhood memories.

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