Essays and a prose retelling drawn from Buile Suibhne — where kingship breaks and poetry becomes shelter.
Story is the heart of the work: essays that read the medieval imagination, and a prose retelling drawn from Buile Suibhne — where kingship breaks, the wilderness answers, and poetry becomes both wound and shelter. Before the novel can walk the tale in prose, the tale must be read for its shape.
The keystone essay
A reading of Buile Suibhne in five movements — Anger, Curse, Madness and exile, Vision, Mercy — a tale about prayer, told through the man who made war on stillness.
From the manuscript
The opening scene of Sweeney in Flight is taking shape — a prose passage drawn from the rupture at Mag Rath and the first hours of exile. It will appear here as the draft reaches a finished cadence.
For finished excerpts as they land, subscribe via Take Flight.
Three creative nonfiction essays — why this author, and why this retelling. Drafts in progress.
Creative nonfiction and reflection — the bardic thread that runs alongside the novel.
A coat of arms is not a family history compressed into proof — it is a declaration of how a house wished to be known. The MacSweeney arms carry the boar, the axe, and the strange silver reptile; behind them stands the wild king later tradition claimed as ancestor.
A reading of Buile Suibhne in five movements — Anger, Curse, Madness and exile, Vision, Mercy — a tale about prayer, told through the man who made war on stillness.
St Moling listened to Suibhne without judgment, then wrote the story and kept the poetry. John Climacus climbed the Ladder by the same habit — visiting the desert fathers to listen and record. Take flight is that discipline: ascent by attention, not escape.
Enchantment, captivity, and the disciplines that keep us human — Merlin and Suibhne as liminal figures who become voices of warning and vision.
A rule of craft for modern life — attention, making, and the eternal. The scriptorium tradition as a transferable practice for forming perception and preserving memory.
On preserving human creativity and authorship in the age of AI-generated content, and how ChronicleEngine demonstrates a path forward that preserves human agency while leveraging machine capability.
On facing the difficult parts of history, personal and collective, and finding a way forward.
On myth, memory, and the ways we construct meaning from fragments of the past.
After the name attached — PTSD and the frenzy, exile and isolation, addiction and liminal sight, and the desert fathers' mercy that paralleled Moling's reception of Suibhne. Why retelling his story is, metaphorically, retelling my own.
University, 1995 — Tolstoy's Quest for Merlin, the hunt for O'Keeffe, and the 1997 surname search that delivered Buile Suibhne inside a packet from Ireland. How Merlin's Irish double was waiting under my own name.
Eighth grade, 1980 — auditioning only for Anchorman in The Idiot Box, and recognizing the guardian archetype that would keep returning: the long white beard, the book against the machine, the keeper of the word.