Acclaimed novelist Colm Tóibín joins host Charles Donelan for a discussion that includes getting started as a published author, teaching James Joyce in the Ivy League and the narrative strategies employed in his latest novel. From Brooklyn to Long Island and The Magician, Tóibín reflects on voice, silence, and the pull of home, writing across borders and time. Recorded ahead of his appearance in UCSB Arts & Lectures’ Speaking with Pico series, at Campbell Hall on Wednesday, November 19. More info at artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.
Listen to the episode above or read the full transcript below.
Charles Donelan
You’re listening to Air Time from UCSB Arts and Lectures. Today I’m joined by celebrated novelist Colm Tóibín. He’ll be on campus Wednesday, November 19, at 7:30pm in Campbell Hall as part of the Speaking with Pico series. For tickets and information, call 805-893-3535, or visit artsandlectures.ucsb.edu. Now here’s our conversation.
Charles Donelan
Welcome. This is UCSB Arts and Lectures Air Time podcast, and it is an innovation. We are doing everything we can think of to make sure that the hall is populated when wonderful writers such as yourself come to campus, and this is part of it. So thank you for taking the time, and we’re going to talk for about a half an hour, if you have that time, and we will prepare you for what will, I am sure, be a vastly superior interview experience with Pico Iyer, who is your interlocutor, on Wednesday, November 19. You’re in New York City. Is that correct?
Colm Tóibín
I am, yes, I’m just here today,
Charles Donelan
and you’re a Californian as well. Is that true?
Colm Tóibín
Yes. I’ve discovered the joys of the Californian winter, the Californian summer, the Californian spring, the Californian fall.
Charles Donelan
It’s hard to put down once you’ve picked it up, isn’t it?
Colm Tóibín
It’s a wonderful you know, in Ireland, a backyard is something you’re almost ashamed of. You throw things out there. You don’t look out there. In California your backyard is your realm. And that’s a wonderful thing. You can you get little spot where you get the sun, if it’s not where the cat gets the sun, you know. And then you can grow things in California that are unheard of, where I’m from, such as passion fruit and pomegranates.
Charles Donelan
Fantastic. Well, that’s wonderful. And that means that your journey to Santa Barbara will be perhaps less arduous, and you’ll be closer to where you live. That’s great. Now we have, well, I’m not sure exactly how in common this is, but I did a PhD in the English department at Columbia University,
Colm Tóibín
Right, when?
Charles Donelan
In 1992 I finished.
Colm Tóibín
For me, that’s not very long ago.
Charles Donelan
I think, in addition, that makes us somewhat contemporaries. I wrote a dissertation and published a book on Lord Byron.
Colm Tóibín
Right, and who was your supervisor?
Charles Donelan
His name was Karl Kroeber.
It was a wonderful experience. I have great memories of the place, and I’m very indebted to Columbia for the education that I got there. This is probably of little or no interest to my listeners, so we will continue to talk about your work and your life, but I think that’s great context, because we may have some fun with that at some point in the conversation. Maybe you can get us started where you got started, and just talk a little bit about your initial experiences with writing and publishing. What got you going as a writer? When did you realize that you could have a career and publish things and publish visibly?
Colm Tóibín
Right, okay.
It comes, I suppose, with a bedrock of failure, like a sort of scaffolding or something that really, really did sort of really matter at the time. In other words, that I began by writing poetry. And I mean, when I say I wrote when I was 12, I also, I mean, I really wrote poetry, and I worked at it, and I read poetry, and that was what consumed me in the same way as other boys might have been consumed by music or sport, but it didn’t work. And it didn’t work for a fundamental reason that I just didn’t get it right. And I kept trying. And the more I tried, in a way, I was trying to be a poet rather than write a poem, but the poems themselves were forced, and the voice was forced. Anyway, it didn’t work.
And then I wrote nothing. And then I began to write short stories, and they were worse than the poems, even more forced. I was pushing the material and not managing to ever connect with breath or with a sort of natural sound. So the short stories were a disaster, and it took longer, I have to say, to write them, and by which time I was working as a journalist on a number of magazines, working freelance. Never in a newsroom, never drudgery, always interesting pieces. Dublin, Ireland was changing. The two magazines I worked for were at the front of that effort to sort of liberalize things and to make things better, I suppose. And I worked with a very interesting team of people all around the same age. And one day, I would think, in maybe 1980 or ’81 meaning I’m 25, and the idea of a novel occurred to me. It had never, I’d never thought of it before. It was such as a novel, when you see it at that age, seems such a big work, so filled with detail and pattern within the detail that you can’t work out. How did, how did that get done? That the story got told at that length, say 80,000 words, without dipping, without being, without having too much or too little information or material. Anyway, I started to work and that, beginning of 1981-82 I really worked on the novel, certainly over the next three years, everywhere, every time anyone was going anywhere, I wasn’t going there, I was writing my novel, and when it was finished, no one would publish it.
And that was tough, because a lot of friends of mine were publishing first novels, and I wasn’t, and everyone knew I’d written a book, and people would stop you and say, how’s that’s that book of yours? Everyone turned it down. And so I wrote a first book called Walking Along the Border, which later became retitled as Bad Blood. In other words, I had the skills as a journalist. I knew how to do that, and it was I walked along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic in a very, very dangerous year. It wasn’t really, I mean, you exaggerate the danger, but I mean, a year when there was a lot of murder and a lot of violence, a lot of bombs and a lot of armies, British Army, Irish army, various illegal armies. And I wrote that book, and I published that book in ’87 which is my first book. And all the time I’m waiting for a phone call, and I know it can come at any moment, and so, but it doesn’t come about the novel. So I get a second commission to write a book about Barcelona, and because the Olympics are going to be there in ’92, so this is ’88. So in ’88 I’m working on my book in Barcelona. I come through London on the way home for Christmas in 1988 and I stopped by and drop into the agency in London. And as I come in the door of her office, she is on the phone, and she just puts her hand over the receiver and just says to me, “I have news for you.” And I knew what there was. There wouldn’t have been anything else. And I had a publisher, and that was Christmas of ’88 and they published it in the spring of 1990. I didn’t know how long it took, which is pretty standard, actually, but it didn’t seem like that seemed so long away. And my first novel came out in 1990 and so there was no question of a career, it was a question of just even the simple business of getting a novel out. And I remember one day I said to John Banville, who was much older, and who published his first novel, it seemed to me, effortlessly when he was 25 and had been publishing ever since, and still is publishing. Said to me, I said to him one day, “if I can get this book out, everything will change for me.” And I remember him saying to me, years later, we just realized your trouble is only starting if you get it. But that wasn’t true. What I said was true that once I had the book out, I was away.
Charles Donelan
So I think I follow this. The novel sits in the drawer for several years before, eventually, after Walking Along the Border, it’s picked up.
Colm Tóibín
Yes, after Walking Along the Border, it got picked up, and it was my first novel. It’s called The South and it got published in 1990, but by this time, I’m old. I’m 35 and it really should have been published about two or three years earlier at the time, and I still remember then, as you notice, I’m still talking about then as though it’s yesterday. But so it isn’t as though I saw a career that things took a long time to get into shape.
Charles Donelan
But now I want to focus a little bit just on the aftermath of the nonfiction. Because you do so much, you write so well, I’ll say, in so many different genres. Did that bring attention, Walking Along the Border? Did you begin to, you know, get called up to do television or radio, or, you know, this kind of public intellectual kind of activity is that when that starts, from journalism?
Colm Tóibín
That sort of that started in about ’93 you mean, the border book came out in ’87 and what happens in about ’93 is that I get a phone call from the London Review of Books, and that’s a game changer, because I hadn’t been working on long literary pieces. I hadn’t been reading intensely for a purpose. That stuff you did when you were in college. I was reading randomly, and I was probably having a very rich social life, and I was beginning on that business, which happens to novelists, especially where you get invited too many places, and I’m just a girl that can’t say no. I mean, I just keep going, and I get a lot of energy and pleasure out of that. But the phone call was serious, it was, would I write a piece for them about Samuel Beckett, and I remember thinking, if I’m doing this, I’ve got to do it properly, and I’ve got to do a lot of work on it, and I’ve got to make sure that every sentence is as good as it can be. And that began a relationship that’s really lasted–it continues until now of about twice a year, settling down for a period of maybe three weeks solid to write one of those pieces for either the New York Review of Books or, more often the London Review of Books, and I put the same amount of energy into that as I would to a chapter of a novel or a new short story. But it’s given me a sort of, again, we’re back to bedrock. It’s given me a sort of, no matter what’s happening, I’m always working on one of those pieces, and it’s not journalism, in the sense that it’s not reporting. I’ve been doing very little reporting in the last 20 years or so, but it’s more sedentary. It’s indoors. It certainly is indoors. And it requires a lot of thinking, and it’s been very good for me.
Charles Donelan
Well, I would call it, it’s scholarship.
Colm Tóibín
I wouldn’t call it that.
Charles Donelan
But you’re a university professor, and you are not on the traditional route of the novelist, which is through the MFA writing workshop program. I took the liberty of exploring the Columbia course offerings, and I see that that’s not how they’re using your talents. You’re teaching Ulysses to undergraduates at times and Irish literature and the literature of the Irish Revolution.
Colm Tóibín
But more than anything, really, what I do at Columbia is in the English department, and is that I’m going, in middle of January, to do a seminar for the whole semester on James Joyce’s Ulysses. On simply that book. Again, it’s really lovely work because A, the students are brilliant, and B, the book is enough to keep you going for winter after winter. And you can approach it in various ways. But yeah, I’m not over in Dodge Hall, which is the creative writing MFA program. I’m not in that. There’s nothing really I can do for anyone in that. I mean, you know, for me, I’m much more interested in what I can contribute to the understanding of a great book, rather than trying to work out how people should start their stories or what people should do with their careers as writers. In Ireland, when I was growing up, no one, you wouldn’t show anybody your work. The idea of a seminar on handing in your story to every single person, and each person could comment on you, “I think there should be more about the grandmother.” You wouldn’t do it under any circumstance. You wouldn’t show your work to people. And it was considered indecent in some way. But I mean, all that’s changed now. There are creative writing courses in Ireland, as well. But I wasn’t brought up as a writer with the business of the workshop. And I mean, I’ve done it as a teacher, and I’ve enjoyed it to some extent, but I’m much, much happier as an academic.
Charles Donelan
Let’s pursue this. I have lots of questions, and I just I enjoyed Long Island so much. It was such a pleasure, such a satisfying novel that I want to spend some time just enjoying it with you. But while we’re you know, with this door open to the question of what happens in a classroom now, what is it like to work with undergraduates and have the text be Ulysses? Are they receptive to that book at this time? How does it feel at this moment to be presenting that material to that audience?
Colm Tóibín
First thing is that if you’re an American kid and you’ve got into Colombia, it means you’ve read the Odyssey in high school. Yes, so you come in and you read the the Odyssey also in the core curriculum at Columbia. So you’ve been through the Odyssey twice. You take the Odyssey for granted. So if somebody says, “Oh, Penelope,” you know that it’s not Penelope Cruz. Also, these are undergraduates, usually English majors, in their final semester. And this novel, Ulysses is somewhat of a rite of passage if you’re in any way literary. “Have you read Ulysses?” And the idea that before you leave Colombia, just before you leave Columbia, you get to read it, and you get to read it in a seminar. And it’s not just a book you’re glancing at. You go through it in detail.
So receptive isn’t the word really. I mean, this is what these students are here for. They have an idea I think that this reading will stand to them for all their lives, irrespective of what they do. I mean, if you become a lawyer, Ulysses is a complex text which you’re interpreting. If you become a teacher, no matter what you do, it’s also another country Ireland, but another country with, for example, the large question of anti-semitism in Ireland is a big matter in Ulysses. And again, it’s something that everyone in the classroom has some connection with and you know, I don’t have to explain anti-semitism to the seminar, but I do have to explain the very small details of, you know, the Irish Revolutionary period. This is 1904 and what’s strange Is that people just have no difficulty grasping that. Some of them have done a, you know, history module, but some of them just also, they just grasp things. There are always a few, one or two, and there’s no gender, there’s nothing, you can’t judge at the beginning who’s going to be that person whose memory for proper names is exact and beyond belief. And that was if you know Nosey Flynn appears in the book, and they remember, yeah, Nosey Flynn is on page x, and they will have an uncanny memory. And I find that absolutely extraordinary. Just as a constant, you have to sort of, it’s almost embarrassing, where no matter what you say, you know, Lee probably has a potato in his pocket at this point, is this the first time we have that. So we say, no, it’s there on page x where you see that.
You also get people who have ways of interpreting the text, people who come in from queer studies, people who come in from gender studies. Yes, even when I talk, there’s this feeling out there that queer studies and gender studies really have to be wiped out because somehow they’re so deeply progressive that, you know, America mustn’t be progressive. It must be unprogressive. But actually, when you get a student who has come from queer studies, they have a way of reading a text, that is so deeply intelligent and original, that it isn’t as though they’re just saying, oh, everyone. They become a great subtlety with a lot of nuance into this. And so you’re benefiting, in a way, from the studies they’ve been doing in other areas when they come to interpret this book. And sometimes I sit there amazed, I have to be very careful not to go, “Oh, my God, you’re so, you know” because there was one moment where one student who had come from George Chauncey’s teaching on, I suppose, a sort of queer reading of history. His interpretation of the text was so interesting that I passed it on to the people who were doing the new annotation of Ulysses. And he found a new annotation, and he gets credit for it, I mean, he will get credit for it in when the next annotation comes out. You know, he spotted something that no one else had ever noticed, and that was in my seminar, and it arose from his studies in Columbia. So, yeah, that’s pretty good.
Charles Donelan
Oh, that’s wonderful. And I could not agree more, the wide range of ways that people have developed to study literature has been, for the most part, all positive. It’s just added to the richness of the experience, you know. And I think this current backlash is just ignorance. It’s not a legitimate intellectual response, it’s a grandstanding. So just stop right there.
Colm Tóibín
I know that, and you know that. How are we going to let everybody else know this?
Charles Donelan
But that is so wonderful to hear. You know, it’s fascinating. We have a great Irishman professor here named Enda Duffy, and his Ulysses seminar and his Irish 20th century literature classes are two of the most popular courses in the UC Santa Barbara English department, and it just makes me very happy. You know, I taught that Literature Humanities core curriculum class for years as a graduate student, and I know exactly what you mean, which is that the Columbia core curriculum gives you a student, especially in that English major, with a fairly comprehensive background in canonical Western literature, and that’s a great point of departure for any kind of discussion. All right, we’re going to talk about Long Island, if you will. I think the sort of rote questions have to do with identity and belonging and place. But I’m going to start in a slightly different approach, and I’m going to ask you about the generation and the time, because this as I understand it… well first of all, congratulations. The detail, having it be set in County Wexford and really be set in Enniscorthy, real places, is terrifically satisfying for me as a reader. For whatever reason, that happens to appeal to me. I like knowing that this is a real place, and I can look at a map and think about a real river, a real beach, but you’re also talking about a generation that has become more and more interesting to me personally as I have grown older, and it’s the generation of our parents, because I believe we are quite close in age. I was born in 1960 and you know my parents were Irish Catholic Americans, in New England, and the development, for example, of the relationship between Eilis and her Italian husband and his family is just immediately recognizable to me as part of the American experience of the period 1960-1970 through to when we came of age in the 1980s. So maybe you could talk a little bit about why you chose this time. First of all, you know it starts in the 50s with the first book ,with Brooklyn, but then now you’ve landed later. You know, there aren’t a lot of temporal signposts. I think Nixon maybe comes up once, but I know the time. Now tell me, was that part of what was interesting about this year, or is that part of how you feel confident when you approach a story?
Colm Tóibín
I didn’t feel confident. And I don’t about writing about the United States. I can’t really do American dialog, and I’ll make a mistake so that the Italians don’t speak like Italians. You know, it isn’t “mama mia,” but nonetheless, there is a flatness in their speech that doesn’t attempt to get a sort of an American flavor, and obviously Eilis, and the man who comes to the door at the opening of the book is Irish, simply because I have no idea what a large white American man in that year will say when he’s angry. I just don’t know. I tried to, and I can’t get anyone else to write it for me. And if I write it myself, I’ll get one thing so wrong, and so I make him Irish. So he’s Irish. Eilis is Irish. All the other people there are Irish and then the rest of the people are Italian Americans, as it were, the Armenian is Armenian, and the big thing was that she has a daughter called Rosella. And Rosella is one of those very studious nun-like teenagers who really studied. She wants to be a lawyer. Now this is there for a really good reason. This is 1976 a girl like that should be out, should be wearing new fashion, should be playing loud music in her room, should be missing some nights, but I can’t do that. I don’t know how. I have to do so much research, and I’d get one thing so wrong that every woman of that age would say to me, “you don’t know anything,” and therefore I make her nun-ish. That’s a strategy. It makes it easier. Rather than having her flighty just, I don’t want to plot about this teenager. I want this teenager to sort of be, in a way, more adult than the adults.
1976 was probably the last summer I was in Enniscorthy, you know, for a good stretch of the summer. So I know, like there’s nothing I have to worry about. That business of the phone boxes is such a business because we didn’t have a phone at home. A lot of my friends didn’t either, so that business of if a phone box is broken, and they broke a lot, button A, button B, pressing things, and then queuing outside about someone’s talking forever, all of that is very much part of life. And plus the bars and plus the different dances they would go to. And also, what a wedding, I mean, I was at a wedding more or less in that year in that particular place, the barn of White’s hotel in Wexford. And so all of that detail is there. On Long Island, the detail is, more or less, it’s the interior of the houses that matters more than the social world. Yes, she goes to Jones Beach, yes, she goes to work for the Armenian, but generally, she’s in her house. And that’s again, for really good reasons, in that I’m confining myself so that I don’t try and stretch it, so that I think I know something I don’t know.
Also, what’s really important here is the matter of feminism, that Eilis has been affected deeply by the feminist movement without knowing and I know that because that happened to my mother and her sisters, where they didn’t march, they didn’t burn their bras, or, you know, read pamphlets, but somehow or other, in the 1960s as their children were beginning to grow up, they became as interested in their daughter’s education as well as their sons. They asserted themselves more in the house. It took various forms. It wasn’t angry, but it was there. And I mean, my mother had a view, and she did have views on, say, the Catholic Church, and had no trouble explaining those views to anyone who came into the house, including a priest. So I’m thinking about that idea that every time Eilis speaks in Long Island, she speaks in good sentences. She’s never hesitant and inarticulate. As a young woman coming over from Ireland, 25 years earlier, she was shy. And how has this happened? So that also interested me, that while her husband had remained the same, she has changed, and one of the big manifestations of that change is that she gets the New York Times delivered on a Sunday. Now, for a woman of that class, of that type, to have that done on her own, wanting it herself, that’s a very big move. My mother did it with the Irish Times in one of those years, like changed our newspaper to a much more intellectual newspaper and with neighbors, you know, no neighbor was doing that. So it’s not as though it is part of a generation of women who all got the New York Times delivered on a Sunday. It’s a really unusual thing to do. So there are a whole lot of things like that, but there’s small things. But it’s also important that she isn’t part of an Irish community. Once I start getting that, I get color pieces of Irish dancing on Long Island and a different music and a bar and Irish people and Irish priests and no, no, no, just she’s not involved at all. Yes, she’s isolated.
Charles Donelan
It’s fascinating. That’s such a wonderful answer, and a wonderful answer for me, because it does allow me to continue to reflect on my own family and the exact change that you described, which is where women of that generation, especially in the Irish Catholic New England world, were deeply affected by feminism without necessarily participating in it. Beyond, of course, we got the New York Times on Sunday. And of course, that Arts and Leisure section was perused in a way that was quite intense, and had a huge impact on the next generation. I love your character, Larry, because I detected a little, maybe there’s a little Colm in Larry. He’s quite funny. Is that how old you would have been?
Colm Tóibín
Well, yeah, he’s also, I mean, I need him just to be the one to make jokes and to spread rumors. He’s very important. But the thing about him is that he hasn’t a brain in his head. You know, he’s one of those kids who’s never going to be good at school. You can’t listen to the teacher, you know, she’s always trying to get him to study, but I say not a brain and I said that just means he’s not going to go and be a doctor, right? That he’s a very light-hearted fellow, and he just seems to be very happy, you know. Just putting happy people into a novel and not punishing them for being happy, it’s a big departure.
Charles Donelan
Well, and that that actually brings me to something. We’ve got a few minutes left, and I want to make sure that some of the things that I feel most strongly about get acknowledged. I think that the work that you’re doing with these novels to present characters who are, if not wholly admirable, at least not abject, these are people who have agency. They’re people who are clever and who experience life in a way that’s quite full; they’re not down and out. They’re not struggling in the way that so many novels I see depend on this notion of the outsider as a kind of desperate person. And I just really appreciate that these are, they’re adults, and they take control of situations, sometimes to an extreme. I think this is one of the things that I found most fascinating about, and I won’t have any spoilers here, but there are moments, several in this book, where consequential decisions are made unilaterally. People take things into their own hands, and I just found that the combination of that and also something else that I think you handled very, very well technically, which is that in some of the dialog scenes, what’s not said is more important than what is said, and the way in which people don’t answer questions or the way in which people choose to avoid subjects is handled just in a way that seems to me, very interesting, very revealing, very useful. But maybe you could talk a little bit about those unilateral decisions and the way that they impact the characters who must bear up under the loss of control that is involved, right?
Colm Tóibín
Yes. I mean, Eilis’s mother-in-law makes the decision, and she doesn’t see any reason why Eilis should have to agree to the decision. And thus she breaks a fundamental rule, which is that Eilis is very easy to deal with, except her house is her realm. Her life has been devoted to making this house safe for her children and a secure place in many other ways. And her mother in law wants to breach that, thinking that would be okay because Eilis is in the bigger family, but she’s not. She might seem so, but she’s not. Therefore she’s up against a very hard rock with Eilis for the first time. And yeah, she makes the decision unilaterally, just as Eilis makes the decision unilaterally that she’s going home for Mother’s Day, and she’s going home for an extended period that Tony won’t know how long she’s going for, and he’s not invited, and the children are coming with her, so she’s going to leave him alone for that summer and being alone is something he’s not interested in. You know, he finds that very difficult.
So there are two decisions, but the minute she arrives in Ireland, two things happen. Her friend Nancy tells her two things that A, are so wrong, and B, give me the rest of the novel. But Eilis tells her that Jim Farrell is doing a line, as they say. It’s not a line of cocaine, it’s a line, meaning that he’s having a relationship with the woman in Dublin, and she doesn’t tell her the truth that you know. And she also invites her to her daughter’s wedding, which is a big mistake. She should not have done that. So Eilis will come to the wedding, and it’s a moment where you see that idea of the returned immigrant. She’s both from the community, and she’s not. She’s like a ghost wandering through that reception and party. People don’t really know what to say to her. They’re in their own groups. She’s the only woman alone. And of course, it’s a dynamite because it’s like something from a folk tale, you know, as a wedding was taking place. At the door, there appeared a ghost, a revenant, so that those two things, if she had not been invited to the wedding, that lot of other things wouldn’t have happened, and if she told her the truth, then the novel would have been over. That would have been a short story and then many other secrets. Eilis doesn’t tell her mother she’s having trouble in America because she doesn’t want her mother going on about it. Obviously, she doesn’t want anyone to know what happens, and Jim doesn’t want anyone to know, and Nancy is missing the whole point of what’s going on. And so it’s basically all of them are missing the point, except the reader. And the reader knows everything. So the whole point of it’s meant to be that, as you as I turn the page and work, you think, what does the reader know now? Because the reader has to really be kept in the loop, and therefore you have to do it from the perspective of three different characters, where one knows something that the other doesn’t know, but the one who doesn’t know also knows something the other one doesn’t know.
And so it’s a constant business of characters who don’t know things. It happens a lot in Henry James, where you know Isabel Archer doesn’t know, unfortunately, something that really matters. And it’s the same in The Ambassadors, it’s the same in The Golden Bowl. It’s the same in The Wings of the Dove, that there’s an engagement, for example, that is a secret. And that secret engagement, then its secrecy, will release a lot of poisonous energy. And so I’m working out of that sort of tradition of in a much simpler way, I think. But nonetheless, it’s a sort of, it’s a 19th century, it’s a pre-Ulysses way of approaching the configuration of characters and plot. But there’s also a plot in Long Island, which I hadn’t really done before, where, you know there’s a plot, meaning there’s an action, and the action has consequences, and you’re dramatizing the consequences of that action. And basically it’s all, you’re working with arrows constantly. You’re shooting arrows in a single direction. Each thing moves with a plot. I don’t have side plots that don’t matter to this.
Charles Donelan
Right. So wonderful to talk with you. So fascinating to hear the way you think about these things and so satisfying to read this wonderful novel.
Colm Tóibín
Thank you very much.
Charles Donelan
Really, just a thrill to talk to you and we’re going to see you in person very soon, and I appreciate your time. Thank you Colm, you’ll be in conversation with Pico Iyer on Wednesday, November 19, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, thank you.
Colm Tóibín
Thank you.
Charles Donelan
Take care.
Charles Donelan
Thanks for listening to air time. Don’t miss Colm Tóibín, live at Campbell Hall on Wednesday, November 19, at 7:30pm Part of the Speaking with Pico series. For tickets and information, call 805-893-3535, or visit artsandlectures.ucsb.edu. Until next time this is Airtime.
You must be logged in to post a comment.