 Thank you so much, Peter, for the reading and for the essay about the origins of Banished Children of Yves in particular. I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about how you balanced the historical figures in Banished Children of Yves with the ones or the one that was based on your own personal history. You've talked elsewhere about how Margaret O'Driscoll is based on your grandmother's as a kind of composite. What was the seamstress and what was her maid, and that was the well, you know, there's that history of what I just mentioned before. It was astounding when I began to do this research and you know, I know about the famine vaguely, but the more I dipped into it, you know, a million people die and two million people leave in a ten year period. It's an astounding event in the middle of 19th century Europe, and a million come into New York and I said, well, let me look at the records. What are these people leave behind? And there were no records. You know, there were no voices. And then I said, well, the Irish love to write, right? So this is a defining event in their history. I'll go down to New York Public Library. I'll read all the novels on the draft riots and the Irish famine immigration, and I read them very easily because there was one Harman Melville's Redburn, which is actually about its Immigrantship. That was essentially it. So, you know, I thought I had free reign with these characters and it was a frightening kind of thing never having written fiction except political speeches, which I guess don't count. But I had to let go and I, you know, and then the one thing about these people historically coming to New York, when the Irish came into New York and the ports on the east coast of the United States, there was the three-mile rule. Most of them had never been three miles from their home parrot. And they were suddenly 3,000 miles away. And for the first time they were in total contact with other cultures. They had to see themselves in different ways. And they said, I can't really write the story of the famine immigration unless I have African-Americans and Anglo-Americans. So I had to go to try to write about African-Americans. And I said, I can't write this experience. You can't write the famine experience without writing it about women. The only immigration to the United States where there are more women than men is the Irish immigration. And I see Ifa Murray who wrote a great book out here made his muse about Emily Dickinson's maid. My grandmother was made, my wife's grandmother, you know, and this female experience is so important. So I had to bring all this in. And then I took these characters, historical characters. But what I find is even the most exhaustive biographies just really touch people's lives. There's so much we don't know. You can write nine volumes about somebody and really not get to who they are and not know where they were on a certain day. So I had one thing in there. I had Stephen Foster becomes one of the, his music goes through the whole book. And I really, it was Foster who led me to write a novel because I went down to where he committed suicide in the Bowery in 1864. America's first grade songwriter. And I thought I thought I knew who he was. And there's wasn't a lot written about him. So I tried to follow his life and I tried to figure out why among all the songwriters in America, why was he the one who listened to black people's music? In some ways he paraded, but in other ways he reproduced it. And but why would he listen? So people, all the great popular culture in America comes from the margins, comes from, you know, Irish Jews, Italians and gays. So I thought to myself, Stephen Foster had a two week marriage that he was gay. So, you know, I did this, I take liberties with all these characters writing a historical novel. And of course I get letters from people attacking me. And I always remind them it says novel on the front, you know, it means it's a lie. So to get back to your question, you know, it's a balance between I never distort what's known, but there's so much that isn't known that I feel you can go in the shadows. And you know, as a novelist, you can do that. Honest historians can't, they have to stick with the facts. But as a novelist, you're a pathological liar. So you pretty much say whatever you want. And if it's not. And my other theory of novel writing is, you know, if you make the reader believe it, then it doesn't matter what it is. You said you grew up with a sense that literature doesn't happen here about the place you grew up. And that in reading Elizabeth Colonone, you was the first time that you recognized people like us in a book. Well, growing up in the Bronx, there was not people writing books. I wasn't around people who wrote books. My parents had gone to college, but we were encouraged to get civil service tests. And I always had the feeling that our lives weren't the stuff of literature. And you know, the whole Irish American experience, they talk about great writers like O'Neill, Fitzgerald, O'Hara. Most of the time they wrote nothing about Irish America. They wrote about things they never looked at their own experience. O'Hara did a little O'Neill's great play. But otherwise, it was off the record. So I didn't have the sense that this was something we did. I took a civil service test. I was a court officer for three years, because that was an ambition that you had. And my father's thing was get this job, get the pension put in 40 years and then raise your family. And I think that was a legacy of Irish poverty and immigration. We didn't have big ambitions like that. But this woman from my parish, St. Raymond's, wrote a wonderful, kind of forgotten novel, House of Gold. And her two uncles were Jesuits at Fordham. And it goes into the dynamics of the family. The mother is dying on a day. And I remember my parents were horrified. How could she do this? How could she write a novel about her? You know, expose the family to this. So that was the other sense I had that, you know, you didn't write about your own experience. It was something shameful, insignificant. You didn't put the dirty laundry out. And I remember when I published Banished Children, my sister called and said, my mother was 88. And my sister called and said, you know, mommy read the book, you better call her. So I knew it wasn't good. So I called and I said, well, what do you think? And she said, well, you know, it's a little disappointing to become 88 and realize you have a son with a pornographic, imagine it. I was going to tell her I hired a French graduate student to write those parts, but I didn't believe it. So I said, actually, I don't think it's that bad. There's not that much sex in it. And she said to me, well, it was a great Irish American question. What are my friends going to think? And I said, my only have two left. And Rosemary's blind. So I'm not going to worry about it. Go ahead. Sorry. You talk about the reticence to, you know, to tell what happened to tell your own story in a sense as part of this inheritance. And yet you turn to memoir, right after Banished Children of Eve in looking for Jimmy. So I'm wondering if you can say a little bit about why you made that choice. Well, it's actually a collection of essays, personal essays and research that I did on Banished Children. I was serious. I researched for six and a half years, Irish immigration to New York. And I did try to find my family. You know, I'm not a genealogist. Genealogy kind of bores me. Because again, you're not, you find birth dates and things. It doesn't mean anything. But I wrote these essays as I wrote Banished Children of Eve. And I published a number of them. And there's nothing like taking research and getting paid for it. So that was part of the motivation of doing this memoir. But I also wanted to say, because I think this is true about every family, you know, not just Irish American families, but here's what history is. Here's the uber story. And a lot of us don't know the unto story down here of our own families, who we are. And I was trying to show, this is the context that I wrote this novel out of. And there's a very rich history here, a beautiful history, an important history, a defining history in the American immigrant experience. And just to give my experience to other people, say, you know, Hilary's talking about the oral history out here. And it's just amazing to me the way stories are constantly lost. And, you know, and there is no, I remember I worked 23 years at Time Warner. And it was like a day job. I was around a lot of serious people, accountants and lawyers and things. And the more I worked at it, the more I began to say to myself, you know, the most important occupation there is is a storytelling. That was at the center of Irish culture, because there is no family, there is no nation, there is no religion that's not organized around a story. You know, America has a story, France, Catholicism, they're not facts, they're stories. And telling stories are what's the first thing we did after we gathered around fires in Africa. You know, after cooking the food, what made us human was we started to tell each other's story about where we came from, who we are, where we're going, what the meaning is. So, you know, I just don't think it's an occupation. I think that was one of the problems with people's education they're given. Well, these are writers and this is everybody else. Everybody should be trying to tell. Everybody has this story. We're all on the same journey out of, you know, we've been on this journey for 150,000 years. And I always say the good news or bad news depending on how you're sitting next to, you know, the whole genetic thing is they're your cousin. We're not that separate. As a species, we're so recent. I want to read a quick quote from Looking for Gin. Jimmy, that I think ties into this and ask you to talk about it a little bit. You say, perhaps no force in human history is more persistent or less appreciated than the tenacious persistence of traits, customs, and attitudes that embody a group's values and beliefs and that resist almost every effort to uproot or pull them down. The cabins are raised. The people move on and are scattered, but quietly without fanfare beneath the radar of history, they carry the stones of memory and understanding with them in their souls and minds to some new place to be reassembled as the foundation for a new life. Sometimes you don't have to be told a memory to have it. That's one of my theories is that if you grew up in a certain community or culture, it's filled with those stories. It's shaped by those stories. I never really related the famine story to my own life until I began to look at the expectations we had, the culture we lived in, the nature of the religious practice that was raised in, and the more I looked at it, the more obvious it became, the intense catholicism that I was raised in. Well, in 1800, there were 100 nuns in Ireland. In 1900, there were 8,000. As a result of this demographic catastrophe, the country changed in its religious practice, and as the culture died, the religion became more important, and it became the dividing line between the Irish identity, which was under such stress, and the English attempt to destroy this identity uprooted. It became the organizing principle. The only institution the Irish had transatlantic institution, this immigration, the famine immigration, was chaotic. Irish rural society dissolved. It fell apart, and the poorest people died or left. The British government really, in one of their blue papers said, the problem in Ireland is 8.5 million people, 3.5 million barely live every year. Well, by 1855, 3.5 million people were gone, either dead or scattered. But the one institution that they had on both sides of the Atlantic was the church. The Irish are the only immigrant group to create their own whole set of social institutions, universities. I grew up in the Bronx. There were three Catholic colleges, hospitals, grammar schools, political organizations. It was this process of reorganizing of a people, rural people who had dissolved. I often think that the church's role in early social services is overlooked in this country. It is. As well as there was a book several years ago talking about there were 500 social workers on the Lower East Side in 1900, and there's a woman scholar in Chicago that said there were actually 2,000, but 1,500 and were Catholic nuns. And they were. They were nurses. They were teachers. I'm still a practicing Catholic, but I think it was a tragedy for the Catholic church to become, once you mix nationalism and religion, you're not going to get a good result. I don't think it's been proved anywhere. We kind of know from experiences all around the world that you make the religion, the source of political authority. It doesn't turn out well for either group. So the church is the one institution that the Irish bring with them and set up here. Well, it's actually created in the process of the famine. There's this thing called the Devotion Revolution. The first Irish political leader in America is not from Tammity Hall. It's John Yu, the Archbishop of New York. And he's the first one to say, he recognizes that these people are totally disorganized. And he's the one who insists before they build the church, they build the school and he makes these political demands. At one point, the largest third party movement in American history is the American party of the 1850s, which was dedicated to stopping Irish immigration. And you had these nativist riots in Philly where they burned Catholic churches. And they were bringing the bloody shirt to New York, the nativists after one of these riots for a big anti-Catholic, anti-Irish demonstration. And Yu's went to see the mayor and the mayor said, Archbishop Yu, are you here because you're afraid some of your churches will be burned? And he said, no, I'm afraid some of you as will be. Because if one Catholic church is touched in New York, New York will become a second Moscow. Now, that's, you know, how many religious leaders in the history of American cities are threatened to burn the places down if they weren't. But again, this was a churchman saying this, and this was Yu's putting the church at the head of the reorganization of the Irish in the United States. And I think that immigrant experience for 150 years afterwards reflects this emphasis on reorganization. It was the story of the church, it's the story of Tammany Hall, it's the story of the labor movement, how do people who don't, who come into the country where they don't, two thirds of them didn't know the language. The oldest tradition in Anglo society was anti-Catholicism. All these pressures that they faced was this process of reorganization that the church was part of and led in many ways. Tell me about how you move from the journey of Ben Shornaviev and looking for Jimmy into the trilogy and how you fix on detective fiction as a vehicle for that journey? Yeah, I was, it's, I, when I finished Ben Shornaviev and took me 10 years, I said, you know, aging rapidly, I'm going to take 10 years to write books, I'm going to wind up writing too. So, and I read, I picked up Raymond Chandler, I'm not a big mystery reader, and I was blown away by Chandler, you know, he's described as a mystery writer, he's not a mystery writer, he's a great American novelist. His stuff, his stories are tremendous. And I said, you know, I liked Philip Malo and the LA setting, but I said, this story belongs in New York, and Malo is really an Irish Catholic, I could tell just by his attitude. I know, you know, a lot of cops, and they had that same street-wise mixture of cynicism and idealism at Kennedy. So I said, I want to create a character like that in New York. And then I said, you know, as a plot method, well, what's murder that every murder has been described? There aren't a lot of new murders, but what about a feat that stumbles on the greatest murder plot in history, which is eugenics and racial science and is the basis of the Holocaust? So then I said, I can't tell a story just in New York, I have to go to Berlin, because that's what Nazism was. There was no political theory to Nazism really between totalitarianism, besides totalitarianism. There was no economic theory besides state capitalism. But it was innovative in the idea it was a state based on racial biology. So I have a plot in Berlin with Admiral Canaris and a plot in New York, and then the simple book I was going to write first took eight years. But we had three foreign sales, and I really like Finn Dunn, and my publisher said, well, why don't you do another Finn Dunn book? Now the guy who sat in back of me in Manhattan College was James Patterson, who writes about nine books a year. He's a friend of mine said Patterson Schitt's books. So I said, well, I'll write three. I don't want to spend the rest of my life writing Finn Dunn books. And I wanted to use Dunn. Dunn is a detective, and all the stories stand on their own. They're not told chronologically. But to me, he represents, I want to tell a story of Irish American urban life between 1918 and 58, which was really, really, I think, defining a period in Irish American life from the First World War to the height of the Cold War. And the election of Kennedy in 60 is really, in many ways, the period at the end of the sentence of the famine immigration. And, you know, I wanted to write out of my own experience. So Dunn goes, part of Dry Bones in Slovakia, part of Ireland, Kettys in Berlin, but it always comes back to New York. And these characters, how I think a lot of, you know, I knew a lot of these people. My mother would be horrified by that thought. I've heard you say that you think maybe Finn Dunn is a descendant of Jimmy Dunn in Banished Children of Eve. So can you say a bit more about that idea of telling the story of Irish American urban life and how this, how this period fits in with your sense of where the Irish have landed, you know, between those two periods? Yeah, well, you know, it's Finn Dunn is a descendant of Jimmy Dunn, but I don't know how. Because that, to me, was part of the, in a little genealogy I did about my family. And I discovered a family genealogist where people disappeared. We thought there were five manning children. There were seven. You know, one, I think, did a horrible thing, married a Protestant and they ever talked to him again. And then there were illegitimate children. I had an uncle who was shell-shocked in the First World War, who this was a deep-dock secret, probably committed suicide in 1939. I had another uncle who was murdered by Willie Moretti in Hoboken, New Jersey, which another deep-dock family secret. So, you know, Dunn was my key to this, to that world, and the sense of people weren't, I don't know what the experience of other families are. We didn't keep a lot of family records, you know, hit and miss. We were not concerned about, my parents' accent was on America, getting on in America. My mother was, why would you be interested in this past? She was kind of baffled by it. Her whole, her life had been moving into America, and suddenly I'm turning around and becoming obsessed with all this stuff. As she once said to me, it's a lot of baggage. You know, you don't need this baggage, but I become obsessed with it. What is your sense of Irish-American writing now in comparison to where you started your journey? Where do you think we're going? And how do you think about Irish-American writing as a category in general? Yeah, it's interesting because in my lifetime, I mean, college we didn't, there was no such thing as Irish-American literature. And now you have the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, William Kennedy, who's written this incredible series of novels about Albany investigation of Irish life, just an amazing, the stuff wasn't written before. And then the other great novelist is Alice McDermott, who, you know, she writes these exquisite novels about very prosaic Irish families in Brooklyn. So in a way, I think it's the golden age of Irish-American writing. I don't know, I have no idea how long it will last, but a lot of the energy that went to the church and other things, it's now looking into Irish-American culture the way it's never been looked into before. I don't know how long that will last, but they've certainly put on the record. I mean, you read Alice McDermott with her ordinary working-class Irish-American people, and you read William Kennedy's gangsters and politicians, and you have this broad spectrum of the Irish-American experience. It's never been put on the, it was never literature before. And between the two of them, and there are other practicing writers who, Maureen Howard and other people who, for the first time, put the Irish-American experience made it literature. And what lasts more than anything else in human experience are these stories, literature. When it becomes literature, it becomes part of the human consciousness, and it lasts. So, you know, I think it will inspire other writers. We'll keep looking into that. And what I feel with those writers, too, you know, the great novel, Him to the Common Man of the 20th Century, the great anti-fascist book is Ulysses. And what Joyce did was, what Joyce said, if you went deep enough into an experience, the particularity of a group, if you wanted to double in people in one day, you'd find the universality. You'd find all the myths that were in Ulysses and ancient Greek. You know, it's not ethnic naval gazing. It's, you're writing about this and looking at it to find not what separates you from other people, but connects you. And that every culture in the world, at all times, is, again, they define themselves with these stories. And I think you find common threads in all those stories. So, you know, I think that's part of the great thing about Crossroads. It's not just a one a week great, and you know, it's about connecting ourselves to all the other immigrant experience. That's my two cents. Well, on that note, I'm going to open it up to questions from the audience. Hillary has a microphone. So, if you have a question, can you put up your hand and she'll find you. Hi. Thank you, Mr. Dunn, for the very humanizing message you've woven into your own story. I'm curious about your movement to Albany, if that was a long way for you to go. And when you researched the mid-19th century flood of immigrants, did you see anything in particular about the group that went beyond New York City or that flooded through it, filtered through New York City? I didn't look much outside New York City, but I know, you know, the Irish are the most rural people in Western Europe in the first part of the 19th century, and then they're the most urbanized people in America at the end of the 19th century. So, I think there were a lot of common experiences. I've met, you know, talked to people in different cities and gone to other cities, and there were this cohesion that came. The churches, you know, you were Catholic education in Baltimore, Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, you were essentially getting the same, it was more standardized than public education was. And the religious practice was the same everywhere, and in a lot of ways the music was the same everywhere. The Irish had this cohesion, although they were spread all around the country. That's what I found. Well, I was getting a PhD in Irish history at Fordham, and this is 1979, I was facing permanent under-employment as an adjunct, and I wrote an article in an America magazine that somebody gave to Governor Kerry, and they asked me to write his Fordham Law School commencement speech, and I had never written a speech before, and if I knew then what I knew now, I probably wouldn't have tried, but I did, and they liked the speech, so I wound up, and then I stayed with Governor Cuomo, so I was six and a half years in Albany, and, you know, one of the great things William Kennedy is that he makes Albany an interesting place. Well, after about two weeks I exhausted all the cultural and theatrical possibilities of Albany, so I began to read books. I stayed in my hotel room, and, you know, it's about 40 below in Albany in the winter, so there's not a lot to do, so I just read voraciously at night, and I read Thomas Carl Isle's History of the French Revolution, which actually influenced the writing of Banished Children, and you could tell this epic story. I wanted, Banished Children was 600 pages, I mean, I never crossed my mind I could write 600 pages, and I couldn't, somebody please stop me, I would cry in the mornings, and then I had a day job, after Time Warner I went to, I was 23 years of Time Warner, but the thing was I had this urge I wanted to write, and I had a friend, he was a novelist, and he was divorced, and he was successful, and I'd say, I can't find the time, Bob, to write, and he'd say make the time. I said, well that's easy for you to say, and then one day at dawn on me he was right, nobody was going to give me the time, so I started to get up at 5.30 and write for two hours, and I did that for 17 years, and that became, you know, writing, I don't know how writing ever got a reputation as this romantic Ernest Hemingway fishing thing, because it's very lonely, it's very isolating, it's very frustrating, and it's, you have to commit yourself, writing a book is like, you know, it's a year, two years worth of work, and a lot of mornings you wake up and you read what you wrote the day before, and it really stinks, and then you have to go back to that, and these people would tell me at work, you know, when I retire I'm going to do what you do, I'm going to write books, and I was, yeah, it's such a good, such a fun thing to do, you want to give yourself a sample, just take a nail and drive it into your head every day. We have time for one, or maybe two more questions? I was curious how you treated the draft riots in that book in regards to the complexity of that situation within other groups, it's very much been simplified and reduced down to Irish Americans are racist, and I'm sure that's not exactly how you handled that complex situation, could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, well they say, you know, there was no uprising in Ireland in the famine, it was a very small one, but I think the great post-feminine uprising is in New York City in July 1863. When I was in this Rick Burns documentary, I said one of the important things with the draft rights that nobody has ever pointed out is they, the draft starts in New York, this is a civil war where you could pay $300 to get out of the draft, it was the first military draft in American history, you could pay $300 to get out of a substitute, so J.P. Morgan sends the substitute, Theodore Roosevelt's father paid the $300, but if you were an Irish working person you couldn't, so the draft starts on July 11th, Sunday July 12th, which if you know anything about Irish history, you know it's the most volatile day of the year, the riot starts the next day, it's not accidental, and it's this uprising against the upper classes in New York, it's an insurrection, they bring the regiments back from Gettysburg to fight in the streets, and they have cannons in the streets, it really is an urban, it resembles the Paris commune, and it's also a race riot, not for the first time in America, the people at the bottom attacked the other people at the bottom, and the Irish knew they had stood a good chance to remain at the bottom, and they took part of this rage out on Irish Americans, on African Americans, but the amazing thing, the draft rights are also its hest because the police department was heavily Irish, even that early, and the thought was well what about if they go over to the other side, then the city is really screwed, so it is, you know, I found it was a terribly complex event, and I agreed it had been simplified, and I was offered the job to be a historical advisor on gangs in New York by Mont Scorsese, my wife and I were in Vermont, and I got a call from my assistant at Time Warner, I said, she didn't know who he was, she said there's a Mr. Scorsese trying to reach you, so I was like, we're rich, he's going to make banished children into a movie, but he had already had the script, and he gave me the script to read, well he actually took me to see the version that they filmed in Rome, and I saw it without the music, and he said what's wrong historically, so I sent him a six page memo single spaced, I said essentially everything is wrong with the story, and he called me up and said what's this, you know, this is, so I said well you write operas, Scorsese's movies, they say he writes Catholic movies, they're not Catholic, they're Italian operas, you know, Raging Bull is a great American opera, but Goodfell is a great American opera, I think the terrible thing about Gangs of New York is it's a bad movie, and he killed any chance that they'd make my book in a movie in my lifetime, so I'm really very resentful. Well Peter, thank you so much, it's a real honor to have you here at the festival, and I want to make sure that everybody knows that Dry Bones is for sale in the back of the room, so please pick up a copy, Peter will be signing books, and if you have any questions, you can ask him there, so please join me in thanking Peter Quinn.