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11.
AOTW: What are you working on now?
Maureen Dezell: I'm working on my day job at the Boston Globe and reclaiming the life I put on hold while I was working full-time and finishing Irish America.
Mary E. Lyons: I'm saving money to go back to Ireland.
Liam Clancy: With the front of my brain --- details of getting the first book out there and sold. With the back of my brain I'm chuckling at the possibilities, the endless possibilities, of the next one (two, three, four...).
Eoin Colfer: I am currently working on Artemis Fowl 3, a musical set in ancient Ireland and a murder mystery screenplay.
Máire B. de Paor: The Latin Life of Saint Moline and the Poetry of Tadgh Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin (1715 - 1795), poet, mystic, catechist.
Marita Conlon-McKenna: I have just finished a new novel called Miracle Woman. Set in Boston it is in fact about an Irish American woman who discovers she has the gift to heal and the consequences this power to alleviate pain and cure the sick has on her life and those around her. It was a fascinating book to write and I got to meet some interesting healers. It is just out here in Ireland, and will come out in the UK and Europe later in the year.
Morgan Llywelyn: I have just completed 1949, the third volume in a five-volume series of historical novels which began with 1916. 1921 was published last year. The entire series is called THE IRISH CENTURY, and follows the story of Irish politics and culture from the Easter Rising to the Northern Peace Process.
Emma Donoghue: My next novel, Life Mask, set in England in the turbulent 1790s.
Malachy McCourt: I am working on collecting published Irish fiction from the last century and there's a book of essays and ranting lurking in the noodle. I'll be doing the play, Inherit the Wind in Wilkes Barre and Scranton in April and in June I'll be doing Mass Appeal in the Cape Cod Playhouse as an actor of course, as well as some more episodes of the HBO series Oz.
Randy Lee Eickhoff: I am wrapping up my new translation from The Ulster Cycle of The Death Tales --- in fact, that will be the title. I am also, however, continuing to trace the evolution of modern Irish society as I have with Fallon's Wake with another story about Tomas Fallon who I see as symbolic of the current Irishman. But I really don't like to talk about my fiction while I'm working on it. I suppose you can say that I'm afraid of "talking it out" rather than writing it. I generally work on two books at once, history and myth in the mornings, fiction in the afternoons. But I don't recommend that for everyone. It works for me.
Regina McBride: I am finishing work on a novel, The Land of Women which is forthcoming from Scribner. It takes place in Ireland and in New Mexico. It is a novel about place and memory and how the past lives in the present. A bit abstract sounding, but I'm so inside it now that it's difficult to summarize. I am also working on the screenplay for my novel, The Nature of Water and Air. Actor/producer Gabriel Byrne has bought the film rights and he and I are co-writing the screenplay.
Martin Roper: The second novel. More of the usual. Sex. Obsession. Hatred. Loyalty. Love. The meaning of life. All the things I probably shouldn't be writing about because I'm still new to it all.
Andrew M. Greeley: Just finishing a book on the Vatican Council called New Wine In Old Wineskins: The Catholic Revolution and thinking about another Nuala Anne story --- Irish Cream!
Jamie O'Neill: Avoiding, quite successfully, another book. I loved writing At Swim, Two Boys and if I write again I want it to be an affair of love, of absorption, of the words battling to be said. I want to believe that, if only in a small way, my writing will add to the sum of understanding. Otherwise, it seems to me, you're just killing trees. It's not as though the world will run out of things to read. Having said that, I should add that the happiest place for me is not Dublin or Galway, Ireland or France: it's the middle of a paragraph. On a bus going home when your last sentence still rings in your ears, and nothing matters but the positioning of an adverb, the creation of the most perfect phrase --- there's happiness, that's writing.
Niall Williams: I have just finished the screenplay of Four Letters of Love. I am started on writing something new now, very slowly. I hope it will be a novel, but it is too soon to say.
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