About Colum McCann

By Travis Mahmout

Colum was born in suburban Dublin in 1965. His father, Sean, was a journalist for the Irish Press newspaper group. His mother, Sally, was a homemaker. He has two brothers, Sean and Ronan, and two sisters, Siobhan and Oonagh. His father -- who had been a professional soccer player with Charlton Athletic in London -- was also literary editor for a Dublin newspaper, and fostered a love of books at an early age.

“The house was full of books,” says Colum. “You could run your hands along the spines and just keep going.”

Colum went to St Brigid's National School in Foxrock, not far from the birthplace of Samuel Beckett. Here, he found mentorship among many teachers, including Pat O'Connell and Gerry Kells. One of the first essays he recalls writing was “The Person I Most Admire,” at the age of eight. He had just gone on a trip to London with his father and had met – for the first time ever – his grandfather who had emigrated to England.

“'Another fecking McCann,' he said, when I walked through the door of the nursing home,” says Colum. “But we gave him whiskey and cigarettes and he brightened up. I sat on the bed beside and he told me stories. Mostly tall tales, if I recall rightly, about love and war and drink -- in other words, good Irish stories. He was dying, though I didn't know it at the time. I went back to school the following Monday and my teacher asked us to write an essay. It's the first time I remember being conscious of the power of story-telling. I worked for hours and hours, crawling over every word.”

From the age of 12 on, Colum went to Clonkeen College, Deansgrange, a Christian Brother's school, where again he came upon a number of influential teachers. “I'd be loathe to name all the names because I'd certainly forget somebody, but Brother Kelly was really important to me. He was the sort of teacher who could transform a class, turn words into living things. His passion was extraordinary. He wasn't my English teacher, but he taught me a whole way of thinking, and I developed an enormous respect for him.”

Initially encouraged to follow a course in languages and international marketing, Colum went instead to the College of Commerce Rathmines in 1982, the only journalism course in Ireland at the time. Here he won Young Journalist of the Year for a series of investigations on the plight of battered women in Dublin. “That was the sort of journalism that opened me up,” says Colum. “I had to go into the flats in a part of the city I didn't know at all. I was a middle-class kid. I had to learn to talk, or rather how to listen, I suppose. It was an eye-opener. Heroin needles on the stairs. Junkies hanging out down by the lifts. I met those women, who as as Roddy Doyle says, walked into doors. After I'd written the article there was a questions and answers period in the Irish parliament, the Dail. I began to recognise the odd power in the word.”

After a summer with Connaught Telegraph in Mayo, Colum graduated in 1984 and went to New York for a summer. “I landed there on Sixth Avenue, down by the Time-Life building. I actually lay on the ground to look up. People were stepping over me. I was nineteen years old. I'd never seen anything like it. I was a bit mad, that summer. I was let loose. I lived out in Brighton Beach in a real shithole of an apartment. But I landed a job in Universal Press Syndicate. First they hired me as a teaboy. I used to run and get sandwiches. I didn't even know what ‘mayo' was. To me it was just a county in the west of Ireland. I got all these sandwich orders wrong. It became a bit of a joke in the end.

“But eventually they hired me as a reporter. I stopped running from place to place. I spent a couple of months there and then returned to Ireland. I'd be opened up by a whole new landscape. I was happy to be back in Dublin, but itching to move on again soon.”

From late 1984 on, Colum worked for various Irish newspapers and then landed his own column in the Evening Press. “It was god-awful, really,” he says. “I used to write about who'd been seen in the Pink Elephant nightclub, or what designer stubble was. Dreadful stuff. But I got a lot of invitations to a lot of places. My friends and I enjoyed ourselves out ‘ligging,' (a newspaper term for sponging). It was a good time but I was ready for it to end. I was dragging my liver behind me.”

In 1986 Colum took what was due to be a short trip to Cape Cod in Massachusetts. “I wanted to write the great Irish-American novel. I landed in Hyannis and bought a typewriter. The thing is, though, at the end of that summer the same page was still in the typewriter. And I couldn't even read what I'd tried to write. And that's when I knew it was time to get some experience beyond my immediate white-bread world. I took off on a bike. A year and a half later I had pedalled through about 40 states and 12,000 miles. It was an extraordinary journey. It taught me the value of stories and story-tellers. I didn't get a novel out of it, but I got a whole lifetime of stories. I got lost in the desert in Utah, I almost got killed by a Ute Indian in Calfornia who'd spent seven years in San Quentin prison on a murder rap, I stayed with a family of Amish in Pennsylvania, the stories are endless.

“From a young age, I had imagined the America of Kerouac and Cassady, but this was entirely different, and just as fantastic. One day I might write about it, I don't know. Not yet. I got too many stories that fit into other stories.”

In 1988 he returned to Texas where he had worked on a ranch for juvenile delinquents at Miracle Farm, near Brenham. “I met my friend Terry Cooper, possibly one of the great influences on my life, my reading, my approach to life. We worked together with kids who had come out of broken homes, or kids who had been in trouble with the authorities. I ran a wilderness programme where I took kids out into the boondocks for three months on end. Incredibly tough times, but magical. I would read these hard-scrabble kids to sleep every night. Books like Catcher in Rye. Or Fup by Jim Dodge. Or The Dixie Association by Donald Hays. I loved those books. Still do. There we were, out under the stars, telling stories.

“I still get letters from those kids, twenty years down the line. It's amazing, really. Some went back to prison but most of them got out. It was a great time for me. I wrote two books while I was there. Neither of them ever got published and they never will, not as long as I'm alive anyway. But my brother, Sean, back in Ireland, bought one of the books from me for $10 a page. And that kept me going. That kept me writing. Certain things prop up your heart in the most unusual way.”

After leaving Miracle Farm, Colum went to get a B.A in the nearby University of Texas. “A brand new life waited for me there,” he says. “I ended up bartending in the Texas Showdown Saloon on Guadalupe Street. And I saw a whole new city life. And I was older, it was 1990, so I was 25, and I really got a kick out of university. Not so much the English classes, which were fine, but the other things, the astronomy and the physics and so on. I was endlessly curious. And that was a great time for me.

“I also met Allison (his wife) on a short trip to New York. I met her one evening, then waited for hours for her to come off a train the next day.”

By 1992 they were married and on his way to Kitakysushu, Japan, where Allison was studying Japanese. “It was not my favourite place in the world, Japan, but I met some incredible people. And there was a good silence there. A sort of vacuum in which I could write. I got a lot of work done. I finished my collection, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, which I'd begun in Texas. And I started work on Songdogs, my first novel.”

The couple returned to New York in 1994. They have three children – Isabella, John Michael and Christian. Allison works as an ESL teacher in a school on Manhattan's west side.

Numerous international literary awards and six books later, Colum and his family still live in New York.

“I feel inordinately blessed,” says Colum. “I have had such a great run at things. I live here in the city, but I can hear the voice of Ireland in almost everything. I suppose if I had to label myself I'd like to be seen as an international writer. I've also been exposed to so many different types of lives – I got to stay with the homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York, I got to watch the dancers in the Kirov at Saint Petersburg, I got to meet the Romani people in the setttlements of Slovakia … all as part of my job. I wouldn't swap it. Nor would I relive it. There's still too much else to do.”