For all the complaints about college students becoming more puritanical, more likely to avoid sex or substances, more likely to reject art that deals explicitly with sex, my students this semester really seemed to like the smutty parts of the readings.

In Cork, I stayed on the fourth floor of a bed and breakfast with halls carpeted in the style of the Shining...

At the edge of the Hendrick’s Building, a satellite office of the University of North Carolina, stands a series of dilapidated buildings that stretch down a hill to the Mason Farm Biological Reserve, a swampy wildlife area run by the North Carolina Botanical Garden...

Although Sally Rooney gets all the press, my favorite contemporary Irish author is Kevin Barry. This is nothing against Rooney–though it wouldn’t hurt if she cracked a joke here and there–but Barry reminds me of my favorite types of conversationalists, those who can mix high ideas and low vocabulary, the philosophical and the utterly crude. You see this in his novel City of Bohane and his bruising collection There are Little Kingdoms, which I just read on my last trip to Galway.

Because I became a parent in my late 30s, much of what came at me with the birth of my son was not a surprise. The sudden lack of sleep. The sudden then continuous lack of money. The eternal fear raising the type of child who’d storm the capitol. I’d seen it all before.

O. was impressed that my books were in the same space as Captain Underpants and the Magic Tree House. For one fleeting moment I was cool to him. And then when I told him “no, we can’t get more Pokemon cards,” I became a tyrant again.

One of the most attractive parts about me, according to my wife, is that I’m not a golfer. Don’t own clubs. Never had a tee time. Can identify maybe five golfers by face and some are probably dead by now. There are no long afternoons out on the course with my buddies, chugging High Life’s and talking shit. She’s seen how her friends lose their husbands–and childcare–for a day or two a week to the sport. When people talk about golf, her eyes glaze over as if you were telling her about a particularly dull dream from the night before.

Like a lot of childless couples, my wife and I got a dog a year after we married. We had no plans to have children and we were at a point in our lives where it seemed like a good idea.

In May, I took 21 students from the University of North Carolina to Galway, Ireland for a three-week study abroad program in creative nonfiction. Students challenged themselves by climbing Dimond Hill, eating blood sausage, and adapting to an unfamiliar culture where the police do not carry firearms. I’ve taught this course three times, and each class has been transformed by the experience, excited to keep traveling, while also understanding the world with a greater sophistication. This most recent class was no exception. What was also no exception was that only two of the 21 students self-identified as male.

Writing Crime Fiction

On Keegan’s Foster and why to read people different than you.

About a decade ago, when I was in the midst of writing The Trench Angel, my wife found a stuffed prairie dog online (not stuffed as in taxidermied by some dude in a double wide, but stuffed as in "stuffed animal.")

There are 475 pubs in County Galway and I ended up in the one with the American bro wearing the “Ireland” hat and “Ireland” t-shirt, who ordered an Irish car-bomb.

It took me three tries to reach Inisheer (Inis Oírr)…

Every day, as I walk my 6-year-old son to school, I memorize what he’s wearing…

I don’t remember what exactly made me curious about Ireland…

A while back, I began looking into the life of Andrew Gutierrez: his grave is a few minutes walk from my UNC office.