When I moved to Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1980s, I knew immediately that just like every other place I had lived, this one had its own unique story to tell.  Unfortunately, that story eluded me.  I loved the people I met, the Midwest’s matter of fact way of looking at the world, the "heavy on consonants" Eastern European names, the manic devotion to the city’s sports teams.  Most of all I loved the way Cleveland was transforming itself.  But still, I played cat and mouse with the novel waiting there, and the mouse was wily indeed.

Then one day I opened the newspaper to find a full page feature on Whiskey Island, a peninsula in Lake Erie, where Cleveland’s Irish had first settled after the potato famine.  I was hooked immediately.  I hadn’t found my story, it had found me.

Oddly enough, when I returned to Cleveland several years later to do a week of booksignings, I was in Brentano’s when a young man approached and handed me a CD.  Dennis Carleton, a local musician, had just heard my interview on the local public radio station, and he’d driven across town to catch me at this, my final signing.  The name of Dennis’s CD was Whiskey Island.  Dennis had gotten his idea from that wonderful feature in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, too.  I signed a book, and he signed the CD.  I still listen to it and enjoy that coincidence.