Creative Non-Fiction

Annie Moore (January 1, 1877 - 1923) was the first immigrant to the United States to pass through the Ellis Island facility in New York Harbor. She departed from Cobh, County Cork, accompanied by her brothers Phillip and Anthony, aboard the steamship Nevada on January 1, 1892, her fifteenth birthday.

I decided to enter another competition. One of the promises to myself this year was to keep 'er at it. I find competitions sharpen the writing, making the reading and editing eyes more focussed and the ears more attentive (I always read my own work out loud).

This is a new genre for me. Creative non-fiction. I'm at the age where mulling is a skill I've resurrected to an art form. Now that I've lived long enough to have the time to think and savour and relive some memories. So this piece of my life's memoir is about my emigration from Ireland, the reality of all of that, the multiple layers to the story as I boarded one of the last emigrant liners out of Ireland way back in the late sixties, a time of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and folk music. I travelled with my guitar and entertained on board, informally. My hit piece was "The Butcher Boy" I'd have everyone join with me in the last chorus:

Oh, make my grave large, wide and deep
Put a marble stone at my head and feet
And in the middle, a turtle dove
That the world may know, that I died of love.

A jolly young folksinger was I.