At the HoCoPoLitSo

Last Friday, I had the real treat of attending the 32nd Irish night at the HoCoPoLitSo to hear Claire Keegan, the short story writer, read “Walk the Blue Fields.” 

First of all, the HoCoPoLitSo is just fun to say (the O’s are long and the I is short), but it is the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in Columbia, Maryland.  Just up the road, but I’d never heard of it, and now that I know it, well all the better.  They’ve been running an Irish night for 32 years, and I’ve missed the first 31.  Just wonderful.  Keegan, whose short story “Foster” was in the New Yorker issue of February 15, read for nearly an hour solid, not an eye batted.  The story was complex, twisted in unexpected ways, and was filled with my Irish cousins.  Is maith sin—as they say.