Reasons to Remain

I’m sitting in a coffee shop called The General, in South Bend, Indiana. It’s June 2026. It’s over two years since I wrote this.

I no longer live up the hill, in an apartment called The Hill. Róisín and I lived there for our full two-year allocation of South Bend: 2024 and 2025. But then, in mid-2025, an extension to my contract came, for an extra six months. That’s why, in June 2026, I’m sitting once again in The General, in South Bend, Indiana. It’s been redeveloped since 2024; I don’t think it’s as nice but it’s a bit more modern. The back wall has chalkboards on it now, instead of mirrors.

We moved in January from The Hill to a nearby apartment complex called Irish Gold. We hosted a Burns Supper for our housewarming party, for my fellow postdocs and Róisín’s fellow dancers. The University of Notre Dame, which is effectively an American Football team with a $20 billion university attached, is nicknamed The Fighting Irish, so there’s a lot of Ireland in the local nomenclature. Irish Gold apartments. Irish Realty. East Ireland Road. A park called Irish Green. An ice-cream store called Murphy’s. The Blarney Stone liquor store. Green-painted pubs called O’Rourke’s, Fiddler’s Hearth, Finnie’s, Corby’s Irish Pub, McCormick’s, Shamrock’s.

We moved out of Irish Gold a month ago, and went travelling this huge, incomprehensible country. In the time we’ve been here, it’s switched from President Biden, b.1942, to President Trump, b.1946. There’s been ICE raids in Minneapolis and Chicago, and No Kings protests across the country. There’s a war with Iran, now (there wasn’t six months ago) and the USA is co-hosting a World Cup where one of the Iranian players can’t get his US visa renewed. President Trump has had his name added to the Kennedy Arts Center, and seen it taken off again. We don’t currently have an address at all. We’ve been to twenty-three and a half of the fifty United States in our two-and-a-half years in the USA. California Colorado Idaho Indiana Illinois Kentucky Louisiana Maine Massachusetts Michigan Montana Nevada New Hampshire North Carolina New York Oregon Pennsylvania Tennessee Texas Virginia Vermont Washington State and Wyoming. The District of Columbia—the D.C. in Washington D.C.—we have counted as a half.

The rule is that you have to stop in a state for it to count. So our trains through Ohio and Rhode Island, our Greyhound bus through New Jersey, our airport connections through Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis—these don’t count. Our day trips to Virginia and Idaho do. Our cheekiest entry is Idaho, where we only went for breakfast. We were staying just across the state line in Montana, and in the rural expanses of Eastern Idaho there was one breakfast place within easy driving distance; a hotel canteen called The Cowboy Kitchen. The only vegan item they had was potatoes with fried peppers, so Róisín had potatoes for breakfast, and we ticked Idaho off the list. We’ve been hosted by American friends and their wonderfully hospitable families in Washington State for Thanksgiving (twice) and North Carolina for the Fourth of July. I’ve spoken at conferences in Louisiana, Massachusetts and Colorado (and left the US on work trips to speak in Toronto, Galway, Limerick and London) and here at Notre Dame. Róisín has taken a dance workshop in North Carolina, reviewed shows in Chicago and Notre Dame, given a talk at a dance festival in Grand Haven, Michigan, and attended a dance reviewer’s symposium in New York City.

We never got to Arizona or New Mexico. Florida and Georgia, Minnesota and the Dakotas, Alabama and Arkansas will also have to wait for now. There’s a chance we could still add Wisconsin, but it would mean spending one of our three remaining days in the USA to make the day-trip by train from Chicago.

Three days. We’re flying home. But not without dust on our boots.

We went to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming/Montana, which was astonishing. We went to the Rocky Mountains National Park in Colorado, which was astonishing. We went to Yosemite National Park in California, which was astonishing. The National Parks (I recommend Alison Byerly’s essay “The Uses of Landscape” for background reading on the type of aesthetic intervention that a “National Park” comprises) are one of the best things about America. We’ve also been, in earlier travels, to the Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, which was astonishing, and the Indiana Dunes National Park in Indiana, which was also very nice. Trump made it that non-residents have to pay an extra $100 per visit to access the National Parks, but we didn’t have to pay it, because we’re residents, with Indiana driving licenses. For now; for one more week.

Yellowstone (Montana – Wyoming – Idaho) was a discrete trip, with a Texan coda added on by way of two nights in Austin. Then, after returning to South Bend to (almost) finish up our professional commitments and move out of Irish Gold, we left for the big one. First to my conference in Denver, Colorado, from where we also visited the gorgeous town of Boulder and the Rocky Mountain Park, and then out of the US to coincide with Róisín’s parents’ visit to Vancouver, Canada, then back into the US on the Amtrak train to visit friends in Olympia, Washington State, then further down the train tracks to Portland, Oregon, and the world’s largest independent bookstore, and then we retook to the skies to get to Fresno, California, from where we rented a car and drove north to spend four nights in a cabin just outside Yosemite, in the wine country and forested hills of NorCal. Bats flew around the cabin at night; deer grazed behind it in the morning; a peacock crowed from a nearby coop.

In Yellowstone we saw buffalo and elk and mule deer and marmots and ground squirrels and ravens and, yes, two grizzly bears. We saw mostly hikers and cyclists and chipmunks and sprays of bright flowers in Yosemite, and we had a packed breakfast of porridge with bananas and peanut butter at the top of an overlook over Yosemite Valley, which Róisín said was the most amazing breakfast that she’d ever had. We saw elk again, and moose standing in the marsh, and brown trout swimming in the streams in the Rocky Mountains.

The trout reminded me of the gorgeous (non-spoiler) ending of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

I included The Road on a course I wrote and taught at Notre Dame. The course was called “Energy and the Environment in Fiction” and it also featured books by William Morris and Rachel Carson and Ursula K Le Guin and Upton Sinclair and Jeff VanderMeer and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and Amitav Ghosh and Raymond Briggs, and some Mad Max movies including Fury Road, and the video game Final Fantasy VII. I also wrote and taught an intro to Irish Literature course including James Joyce and Edna O’Brien and Samuel Beckett and Eimear McBride and Melatu Uche Okorie and W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney and Danny Denton. I love teaching, and I loved teaching at Notre Dame. The students were sharp and inquisitive and I got to take them into the thickets of books that I love, and we all got to think out loud. Teaching was my favourite thing that I did in America, or at least it was up there with seeing the grizzly bears. One of my students offered what I think is the correct analysis of the passage above: that there’s no hope in its beauty at all, even though we want there to be.

After Yosemite we flew back to Chicago, which is just around the corner from Notre Dame, and now we’re in South Bend so I can hand in my office keys and Róisín can choreograph for her dance students one last time. She’s gone from being legally unable to work here when she first arrived to a genuine pillar of the South Bend community, recognized everywhere we go in the city, teaching at dance schools and yoga studios, accumulating piles of hugs and thank-you cards when it came time to say goodbye. She’s performed, spoken and choreographed at various festivals in Indiana and Michigan both under her own name and with South Bend’s modern dance company, New Industry Dance. It’s very fitting that our last activity in South Bend will be a reception put on for Róisín by her primary employer, Dancenter.

I read around eighty-four books, that I can remember, while we were here, and wrote two. One is a novel set in northern Indiana, about emo nostalgia and heavy music and damaged, damaging creative partnerships. It’s called Circles & Circles and I think it’s really good, but I haven’t gotten anywhere with finding a publisher who agrees, yet. The other is my monograph, Streams of Damaged Consciousness. That one is to be published, by Syracuse University Press, in 2027: this has been my primary professional achievement, along with teaching my courses, while I’ve been W. B. Yeats fellow at Notre Dame. It should appear on this webpage at some point. It’s based on my PhD thesis but it’s much better. I’ve also written for Strange Horizons, The Irish Literary Supplement, Irish Studies Review, H-Environment and the Los Angeles Review of Books, with more work in Strange Horizons, C21 Literature and The Ancillary Review of Books coming later in the year.

The General is quiet on this summer Tuesday afternoon. Three other indoor tables are occupied; a young woman reads a biography of Aleksander Blok at one, an older man types on his phone at another, and two young women are having a late lunch of sandwiches and crisps at a third. At an outside table, three women have been chatting for hours over coffees. It looks like they’re going on a trip; their bags and cases are strewn around them.

We’ll be going back to Chicago tonight, to our drab AirBnB in the vibrant Logan Square neighbourhood. On Saturday, we fly to Toronto. A week from today, on Tuesday night, we fly home to Edinburgh. We’ve nothing lined up after that, although not for want of applying; there are 56 completed job applications from the last two years on my laptop. A handful of them led to interviews. Just one led to a job offer; a teaching post in a small town in Southern Georgia. Although very kind, that offer ended up not being right to accept, which is why I’m writing this from The General and not some high street café in Americus, Georgia. A few more applications I haven’t heard back from yet; we’ll see.

We land back in Edinburgh next Wednesday. The next day, we’re going to Glasgow with a friend to see Metallica, supported by Gojira, the best live metal bands of their respective generations. Welcome home. Metallica are from San Francisco. When we visited last year I took pictures of Battery Street, and the Cliff Burton Memorial Plaque on Broadway, and I bought an oversized Kill ‘Em All shirt from Amoeba Records in Haight-Ashbury. Ozzy Osbourne had just died and California showed up for him. At Zeitgeist rock bar on Valencia St, they showed episodes of The Osbournes while blasting Black Sabbath. At Ozzy’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an impromptu pile of tributes had grown: beers and flowers, bottlecaps and dollar bills. I had a Metallica plectrum in my coin pocket; I flicked it into the shrine.

San Francisco was wonderful, and full of incredible food—mission burritos, Japantown ramen, dirt-cheap banhs mi and high-end vegetarian fine dining. Chicago is an amazing food city too; our favourite regular haunts are Penelope’s vegan taquería and the Handlebar rock café. I loved Boston, and Cambridge MA, and their student buzz and redbrick gentility, and I loved the jazz clubs and the voodoo tat of New Orleans. I loved doing the most touristical things you can do in every place we went: seeing a movie in the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, and dancing to country music in the honky-tonks of Nashville, and drinking bourbon at the Maker’s Mark distillery outside Louisville, Kentucky, and staring up at the lighthouses on the rocky coast of Maine, and throwing on thin plastic ponchos to be drenched on a boat tour of Niagara Falls. I loved those glorious National Parks, of course, and I loved the mountains and the trees in Vermont and New Hampshire, and the mountains and the sea in Washington State, and the mountains and the lakes in Montana, and the Bayeux swamps of Louisiana where two raccoons fought each other tooth and nail as we watched from a touring boat. I loved seeing Carlos Santana shred through a thunderstorm at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado, and seeing Korn throw down in a muddy field south of Chicago. I loved the wooded hills of Kentucky, and wandering a punk festival in the tiny, condensed progressivism of downtown Olympia, and eating food from food trucks in the Oregon drizzle. I don’t love Indiana much, but it’s the place that let us go to all the others, and it has powerful snows and pretty sunsets. Thanks for the paychecks and the visas, Notre Dame, and all the good people you let us meet.

The General is closing in a few minutes, but I don’t have to move far, because when The General closes, a bar called Hammer & Quill opens, and there’s a connecting corridor between them. The guy who was on his phone just broke his mug by accident, and now he’s called someone on his phone to ask if she can get him another mug with a bear and a horse on it, because that was his favourite one, but he doesn’t know where she got it from. He must have brought it in, himself, to drink his coffee from.

I’ll slip through to Hammer & Quill and sip a beer while I finish writing this up. Then I’ll go join Róisín at her reception in a couple of hours, but we can’t stay long, because we have to get the last train back to Chicago. And that will be that for two and a half years at The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana—at least for now. I’m hoping maybe they’ll have me back for a book launch, next year.