The Observer Series

I first started the Observer series in 2002, a newsletter I wrote after leaving America and moving to England that chronicled my experiences in England and then Ireland.

The first series, Village Observer, was a description of my experiences in a tiny hamlet in Gloucestershire. Later, we moved to an old Victorian town on the Lincolnshire coast and the newsletter became Town & Country Observer. In late 2004 we moved to West Cork in Ireland and I began writing The Irish Country Observer.

The Observer Series grew out of a habit of writing down what I saw on my own doorstep. It began as a small newsletter sent out after I left America for England, and it has followed me from a hamlet in Gloucestershire to a Victorian town on the Lincolnshire coast and finally to West Cork, in the heart of the Irish country. Each edition is a plain record of landscape, weather, work and neighbours, written in an observational voice that borrows as much from the Irish country tradition of keeping a local chronicle as it does from the personal essay.

Living between Ireland and America shapes everything in these pages. I write about the West Cork coastline and the Gaeltacht, about the highland roads and the fields that hold the light, and I carry with me the sense of an outsider who settled into a place rather than simply passing through it. The writing is grounded in daily attention: noticing the fall of light, the mists coming off the glen, the small domestic details that become the substance of a life lived in a rural community far from the city.

The Observer series also reaches into my other work. Alongside the novels, I sing, play harp, paint the landscape around me, and gather material for stories that cross centuries and continents. The newsletter has become the place where those interests overlap, a testing ground for the descriptive prose that later appears in fiction and song. Readers who follow the Observer instalments are really watching a writer build a vocabulary, one season at a time, from the country she now calls home.