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 begins by depicting life on the dairy farm in rural Ireland where her mother was raised, and then describes how her experience of motherhood resembled moving to an entirely different 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, explains the predicament of a single mother at their shared public school who lacks legal status, and 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.
Click through to listen to the author read an audio version of the essay, “Great Hunger.”
You can find the entire collection on Amazon.