Blog Archives

Journal entries from the blog of Kristin Gleeson, a USA Today bestselling author originally from Philadelphia and now living in the West Cork Gaeltacht, Ireland. Posts are filed by month and year, and cover travel, book promotions, readings and personal updates. Entries run from 2011 through 2018.

Kristin Gleeson is an Irish based writer, musician and painter who was originally born in Philadelphia and now lives in the West Cork Gaeltacht, a stretch of coast where the Irish language is still spoken every day. Her work moves between the written word, the harp, the stage and the canvas, drawing on landscape, history and the lore of her adopted home. Her debut novel, Selkie Dreams, published by Knox Robinson Publishing, follows Maire McNair as she leaves 19th century Belfast for Alaska, seeking a freedom that the salt and fog of the selkie world promise.

The blog archives gathered here collect journal entries spanning the years from 2011 through 2018, filed month by month so that the shape of a writing life can be traced over time. The entries cover travel between Ireland, America and beyond, book promotions, readings, library appearances and the ordinary personal updates that fill the spaces between published work. They offer a quiet, chronological window into the years in which a Philadelphia-born writer settled into the Gaeltacht and built a career from the other side of the Atlantic.

Among the archived posts are records of events in County Cork and further afield, including appearances at Macroom Library and at the West Cork Literary Festival, alongside readings and library events across Ireland and the United Kingdom. These entries capture the practical rhythm of an author's touring life: the journeys, the introductions, the gatherings in small rooms where a story is read aloud and conversation follows. They also show how the Irish setting that runs through Gleeson's writing becomes a meeting place for readers who come to hear about the land and the language she has made her own.

Running through the archives is the recurring theme of place. The West Cork coastline appears again and again, its mist, hills and strands named in posts about daily life and in the wider world of the selkie stories, where the sea holds its own histories. Alongside that, Gleeson's background as a harpist, singer, painter and administrator of archives, museums and libraries informs the sense of research and stewardship that colours the writing. The result is a body of journal work that belongs to the same landscape as the novels.

The pages on this site are set in a spacious serif face with generous margins and wide letter-spacing, echoing the unhurried cadence of the writing they present. A near-white ground, soft charcoal text and a single warm burnt-orange accent drawn through a hand-drawn illustration give the site an airy, editorial calm, with sections separated by whitespace rather than lines or boxes. Thin-line social icons and plain text navigation keep attention on the words themselves. It is a fitting frame for an archive of journals, novels and songs made by a writer at home in the far west of Ireland.