My Life In Pieces-Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock - Ambrose Clancy

Ireland, where Clancy became a professional writer, plays a significant role in this collection of journalism spanning four decades. Clancy has the eye. He froze a moment that captured The Troubles. This was a long time ago in Belfast. He watched a young boy, half a brick clutched in his hand, edge out of an alley, then pitch it through the window of the buffet car of a passing train.

He is a splendid travel writer, from Florence to the Finger Lakes, but never better than when he is in Ireland, where his spirit awoke. In the late 1970s, after several years as a New York cabbie, with meager success as a freelance writer, he and his wife, Mary Lydon, took the $4,000 she had earned as a freelance copy editor and bet it all on Dublin. It was romantic and pragmatic and they won. Ireland gave Clancy another home and the confidence to write a terrific novel, Blind Pilot, and become a successful magazine writer.

Daring, adventuresome, yes, but the reality for freelance writers was forever defined by the American humorist and journalist Robert Benchley, who noted that the freelancer is one "who is paid per piece, or per word, or perhaps."

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Other places represented here in significant numbers are New York City and Long Island. Even though the author hasn't lived there in 20 years, he is a New York City nationalist, and has roots in the East End of Long Island. Other places visited are Britain, Italy and the Netherlands with a few stops in America, and a journey to mountain monasteries set on the coasts of a remote peninsula in Northern Greece.

Also, people, places, events (and a few ghost stories) from Shelter Island, or "The Rock," as some affectionally call the place where he has worked for more than a decade.

These pieces to follow are snapshots of times and places, and it's not news that both change, with writer William J. Hogan-quoted in the pages to follow-noting: "If any man lives long enough, he becomes a stranger in his own place."