Article in the SC Sentinel | carolynbrigitflynn

ARTICLE ABOUT THE LIGHT OF ORDINARY DAYS

SANTA CRUZ SENTINEL, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26, 2026 LOCAL NEWS, PAGE 3

Flynn will read from book

at Resource Center for Nonviolence

By Nick Sestanovich

SANTA CRUZ — Growing up in a large Irish American Catholic family meant Carolyn Brigit Flynn was frequently exposed to Irish culture, whether it was Celtic music being played in her Washington, D.C., home, hearing stories from her elders or visiting the country as a kid.

However, it was not always a part of her life. When Flynn was exiled from her family for dating a girl, she went more than a decade before she started to reconnect with — and learn more about — her Irish heritage.

“There was a point in my 30s when I realized that I had to look at Ireland more deeply in order to make a life, in order to understand myself (and) my family,” she said.

Starting in the ’90s, Flynn began making more frequent trips where she learned more about her ancestors and the Irish history and culture that shaped them. One trip in 2013, spurred by the recent death of her sister, inspired her to write her memoir, “The Light of Ordinary Days: An Irish American Journey of Healing and Homeland,” which she will be discussing with a special event at the Resource Center for Nonviolence Saturday, featuring readings and performances of traditional Irish music.

Flynn — a local creative writing teacher and author whose works include the poetry collection “Communion: In Praise of the Sacred Earth,” the Substack “Writing to Feed the Soul" and editing three literary anthologies — grew up in D.C. with five siblings, a father whose parents emigrated from Ireland in 1914 and a mother whose grandparents also moved from Ireland. Although her father grew up in Massachusetts, Flynn said he considered himself “a professional Irishman” who played traditional reels and jigs around the house, listened to his mother play the accordion, hosted St. Patrick’s Day parties and displayed Irish linens and signs about blarney around the house.

“He liked to say there are only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish and those that want to be,” she said.

The family also made trips to see relatives in the rural County Galway, and Flynn’s father marched in parades in Dublin every year.

“It was amazing to actually see country Ireland back then,” she said. “I was a little culture shocked. There was a lot of poverty and a whole different way of living, very rural. I’m growing up in Washington, D.C., an urban childhood.”

However, Flynn did not know the full stories behind her ancestors and Irish traditions until much later, and she became disconnected from her family in her junior year of high school in 1975 after her father learned she was dating a senior named Sheila at her local all-girls Catholic school. When her father confronted her about it, she was honest with him.

“I said, ‘No, I love Sheila. This is my girlfriend,’ and my poor father just kind of freaked out and just didn’t know how to handle it at all,” she said.

In the ’70s, same-sex relations were not supported in either Ireland or the Catholic Church, and Flynn’s new relationship came in conflict with her father’s long-held beliefs. She left home, moved into an apartment with Sheila and was only able to maintain contact with her sisters.

“It was a point when my father said I was dead to him, which was an old Irish kind of thing,” she said.

Flynn was eventually able to get back in touch with her mother, and her sisters would host family parties. While she said there were initially a lot of silences and she would not talk about Sheila or later girlfriends, she was able to reestablish connections with all her family members, her father included.

“People who have been in exile from family when they were young will maybe recognize, as I did, this idea of partial exile,” she said.

One thing Flynn did not think about during this period was her Irish heritage, which she began exploring in her 30s by making trips to Ireland every few years.

“I started to realize that there’s a very poignant story of my own family and the echoes within Ireland, both our trauma and our resilience and how we build our common field,” she said. Flynn had known that her ancestors lived through the Great Famine of the 1840s — when infected potato crops led to mass starvation, death and population decline — but she learned more about the impact it had severe population decline on them and families like hers, who grew up a few decades after the end of the famine.

“When I talk about trauma, they’re growing up in a countryside that has experienced profound loss,” she said. “The elders who were raising them lived through it, and there are graveyards all around them, people who were buried along the road. They grew up in a traumatized countryside and a beautiful countryside.”

Flynn saw a lot of changes visiting Ireland over the years. When her trips began in the ’90s, the euro was starting to be the country’s primary currency. Flynn also went from being ostracized for a same-sex relationship to seeing Ireland become the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by way of a popular national vote. For 28 years, she has been married to her wife Jean Mahoney and the two have raised daughters.

“It’s been an incredibly rich part of my life to re-engage with Ireland on my own terms,” she said.

Through her travels, Flynn was most inspired by the strength of Ireland throughout its darkest moments of history, whether it was the Great Famine or oppression from British rule.

“To see Ireland now, it’s incredible,” she said. “It’s just a place of resilience and incredible culture and wonderful people. It’s a country that was so colonized, and they wanted to kill the Irish language and the Irish traditions, and they didn’t. They have survived, and they run their own country, and it’s thrilling to see what’s happened there.”

The death of her sister Kathy to suicide in 2012 prompted a very different experience when Flynn visited Ireland a year later. She had been dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder for a year and starting to heal, and she picked up on new aspects of the country she hadn’t before, largely due to the experience she was going through.

“I was more present, I was more open, I was more aware of the grief of the world and could bear it better,” she said. “Once you’ve really borne great grief and touched the deep darkness that humans can touch and understand that’s just one part of the whole human existence, you’re less afraid of the world. I just felt like I was in Ireland more deeply.”

It was this experience that inspired Flynn to write “The Light of Ordinary Days,” which she described as flowing like a novel. She began writing the book in 2014 and spent a lot of the COVID-19 pandemic working on it. The biggest challenge was weaving a story that was her own while also incorporating the relevant aspects of Irish history.

“Finding a way to blend that successfully took time,” she said.

Still, Flynn found it an engaging experience and is happy with the end product. At the Resource Center for Nonviolence, she will be reading from sections of each of the book’s three parts, with traditional Irish music performed in between by Amiel Goodman, Shea Gaier and the band Gluin.

Flynn hopes readers will take away not only the rich culture of Irish history and her story but also the importance of honoring ancestors, something she feels has become a bit of a lost art. She emphasized that people do not need to get on a plane or take a genealogy test, but they can look through family photographs or hear family stories to get a better understanding of where their sense of resilience, grief or other feelings come from.

“That makes a larger life and an incredibly meaningful life,” she said.

The book launch is 6 to 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, 610 Ocean St., Santa Cruz. Tickets are $10, and complementary tickets are available. Refreshments will be served.

[This text was reproduced from the article, including links which were included by the journalist in the online version.]