Our guest author today, Áine Greaney, writes about past and present, place and displacement, loss and hope in her book, Trespassers and Other Stories. She travels her characters from coastal Massachusetts to rural Ireland.
Áine has also provided us with her thoughts about writing in a wonderful guest post essay.
Here’s Áine:
Finding and Keeping the Joy in Writing
by Áine Greaney
In her essay, “305 Cartwright Avenue,” author Chimamanda Adiche recalls growing up in the Nigerian town where her father was a university professor. Adiche was an Enid Blyton fan, and she read her Enid Blyton kiddie books on a verandah just off her bedroom (I also loved Enid Blyton).
About her literary origin story, Adiche writes:
“… As a child, books were the center of my world; stories entranced me, both reading them and writing them. My writing, when it is going well, gives me what I like to describe as ‘extravagant joy.”
Hmm.
These days, when I visit online writer groups or scroll through other authors’ social media postings, I’m not always seeing that writers’ “extravagant joy.”
Instead, I see comments or questions about the daily slog of putting words on a page–all while trying to hold down a day job or take care of our families. And, oh yes! Let’s not forget about our diminishing (or zero) author advances and royalties. Now, full confession here: As a writer with a day job, in these groups and on these sites, I sometimes share my own writing worries and woes.
About three years ago, I logged into one of my social media accounts to see a post by another author: “Taking a break from the ‘literary hustle.’”
Hustle? I thought. When did ‘hustle’ get aligned with the creation of art on a page?
Now, what if, instead of regarding each of our writing projects as a mountain to be scaled, a race to be run, a contract to be signed or a set of creative boxes to be ticked, we tried an attitudinal shift? What if we took the time to savor the process as well as the product or payouts of writing?
Here are four ways to re-find and keep the joy in writing:
Axe the technology: Some days, I ignore my laptop to take out my pen and writing journal. In my journal pages, I re-find and re-love the real me. I ask bold questions. Sometimes, I even attempt an answer. In my hand-written pages, I return to that part of myself that once fell in love with books and stories.
Switch up the format: Remember when you were a child with a coloring book? As your crayons scuffed across those pages, you weren’t pre-casting or positioning yourself as the next Frida Kahlo. You were playing. You were creating. Experimenting. As writers, we sometimes need to give ourselves an artistic recess with no rules or expectations or limits. Or how about doing a Mary Oliver who, in one interview, says she goes “outdoors and waits, pen poised, for whatever comes?”
Experiment with a new genre: This morning, I participated in Day 18 of Writers Digest’s “Poem a Day” challenge for National Poetry Month, 2025. As a narrative writer (fiction and nonfiction), what do I know about poetic craft or forms or rules? Nothing. Nada. Zippo. But I’m at that writing desk every morning, grinning like a kid because I’m experimenting with something new.
Make meaning: In his book, “The Van Gogh Blues” psychologist, author and creativity coach Eric Maisel, PhD, posits that the creative process represents a search for existential meaning. And when we writers, painters, sculptors, get depressed, or anxious about our creative work (which we do) those low points are, most of the time, a crisis of meaning. So instead of writing to the market or chasing fickle publishing trends, let’s create what Maisel calls “worthy work”—work that aligns with who we really are and our personal life values and missions.
In his essay for “Creative Nonfiction Magazine,” the late Brian Doyle wrote: “One of the things that we do not talk about when we talk about writing is the sound and scent and sensuality of it, the scratching and hammering and tapping, the pitter of pencils and the scribble and scrawl of pens.”
Thank you for this sound and joyful advice, Mr. Doyle!
***
And thank you, Áine, for your ideas about keeping the joy in writing. I hope our readers will resonate.
Book Summary
From coastal Massachusetts to rural Ireland, the characters in Trespassers struggle to reconcile past and present, place and displacement, loss and hope.
A woman travels from her Massachusetts home to her native Irish village to care for her estranged and sick father. Back in her childhood home, she comes face-to-face with previously unspoken losses.
A wealthy couple travels to Cape Cod to spend their 52nd summer on the wife’s ancestral estate. On their private beach above Nantucket Sound, the husband must confront the realities of their long marriage and its social-class tensions.
An Irish immigrant takes her American-born teen to a raucous Boston house party. At that party, the teenager discovers that her mother had lied about her child’s birth father—a lie that will permanently divide the mother and daughter.
PUBLISHER: Sea Crow Press
ISBN-10: 1961864207
ISBN-13 978-1961864207
Print Length: 130 pages
Purchase a copy of Trespassers and Other Stories on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org. You can also add this to your GoodReads reading list.
About the Author
An Irish native, Áine Greaney now lives and writes in the Boston area. In addition to her five published books, her short works have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Salon, Another Chicago Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The New York Times, Books Ireland, NPR/WBUR and other publications.
As well as being an author, Greaney is a trained teacher who has designed and led fiction and non-fiction workshops, presentations and keynotes for regional, national and international organizations.
Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, cited in Best American Essays and named a “Great Group Read” by the Women’s National Book Association.
You can find her online at:
Website: https://www.ainegreaney.com
Instagram: ainegreaney
Bluesky: ainegreaney.bsky
Facebook: Aine Greaney, Writer
Threads: ainegreaney
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