The faded brown autograph book has seen a lot of wear in the past century. Its pages are filled with signatures, snatches of poetry and inspiring slogans all written out, in florid cursive, by Irish prison inmates.
The autograph book belonged to Sean McCarthy, a teenaged Irish revolutionary. Swept up by British arrests after the Easter Rising of 1916, young Sean found himself transported to Spike Island, a prison in Cork harbor, along with other members of the Irish Republican Army.
The book passed to McCarthy s daughter, Joan Brillaud. Her husband, Andre Brillaud, is now working to preserve his father-in-law s memory.
indeed, still is one of my heroes. While I didn’t meet him until 2002, when I first went to Lawrence for the Sturgeon Award ceremony, I already admired his writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and had benefited greatly from his expansive, benevolent influence on science fiction as critic, anthologist, conference organizer and educator.
Sitting rapt in Jim’s KU office as he talked about the field he loved, I realized that my own mentor John Kessel had sat there just the same, as Jim’s student in the 1970s.
Kessel was my thesis director at North Carolina State University, and for years afterward, I passed to my own writing students the scores of aphorisms I learned from him. One day, when I did this in his presence, Kessel fidgeted and cleared his throat and confessed that he had stolen most of those aphorisms from Jim Gunn.