The first of I don’t know how many posts today

Or maybe it’ll be my only post today. We’ll see.

Greg Herren is supposed to read from James Joyce’s work at the Garden District Bookshop’s Bloomsday Celebration tonight. Wish I could be there.

On this day in 1904, James Joyce took a walk in Dublin with a chambermaid he’d met at a hotel. Their outing became the basis for Leopold Bloom’s fictional odyssey in Ulysses, another of those books I’ve never read. And the chambermaid, Nora Barnacle, became Joyce’s lover, companion, wife, and muse.

One of the most fun parts of writing fiction is when some chance moment from life–a meeting, an overheard conversation, a vignette told to me, a piece of art, a song, or a photograph–either inspires something I’m writing or gets woven into one of my novels. If the story hasn’t involved me directly, I generally ask and am given permission to use it.

Lynne has family in town, and last night I had a conversation with Aunt Lil. She’s never read Three Fortunes in One Cookie so it was fun to tell her some of the little stories I “borrowed” from her family for Phillip and his family. Though those things we writers lift from our lives may not have the impact on the literary canon that Nora Barnacle had, I think everyone’s fiction becomes a little truer and more alive because of them.

Aunt Lil with her great-great niece, Lila.