Photo by Laurence Thorpe of wife Marie and daughter Helen circa 1968, with their backs to the Atlantic Ocean, about two years after the family immigrated to the United States.
Cover design by Andi Todaro.
Finding Motherland is a digital only collection of linked essays on the themes of family, food, migration, and privilege. The author depicts life on the dairy farm in rural Ireland where her mother was raised, then describes her own experience of motherhood as kind of like moving to an entirely new country.
She celebrates the accomplishments of an undocumented student who carried the American flag in his ROTC unit in the years before DACA offered him protection. She explains the predicament of a single mother at a shared public school who lacks legal status. She documents the labor done by migrants with agricultural visas in fruit orchards on the Western Slope.
In the book’s final essay, she recalls the arrival of Irish immigrants in the wake of the potato famines, and asks why some Irish-Americans are hostile toward people who migrate today. She posits this is due to a misplaced “ethnostalgia” for a bygone homeland of yesteryear.
Alas, you can no longer buy this e-book from Denver’s best-known independent bookstore, the Tattered Cover, which is presently in the process of being acquired by Barnes and Noble. Thankfully, you can still find the essay collection on Amazon. It’s also possible to listen to the author read the essay “Great Hunger,” about the dismal years when Trump served as President of the United States for the first time, from 2016 until 2020, and persecuted migrant families with help from so many ethnically Irish-American appointees. Click through to listen to the author read the essay, “Great Hunger.”