Niamh McAnally is the author of the new memoir Following Sunshine: A Voyage Around the Mind, Around the World, Around the Heart. She also has written the book Flares Up. She is based in Florida.
Q: How was your new book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Choosing a title for a book is probably one of the hardest parts of the project. And this memoir went through several titles including Freed Spirit, Surfacing, and A Woman Emerges.
There’s a line near the end of the book that says “I’ve lived life as a scatterling, following sunshine” which not only sums up my journey to this point in my life but also helped define the subtitle: A Voyage Around the Mind, Around The World, Around the Heart.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Writing this memoir and seeing it all the way through to publication has been a lesson in perseverance. From typing the first line to seeing it on a bookshelf has taken eight years.
While my agent was pitching publishers in the UK and Ireland I wrote my second book Flares Up: A Story Bigger Than The Atlantic. Ironically, that one got picked up first, but things happen for a reason.
I was then able to go back to Following Sunshine and bring the epilogue up through the pandemic years and to the point when I took the iconic photo of Paul Hopkins and Phil Pugh when they held their flares up having rowed a 20-foot wooden boat 3,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic. Now Following Sunshine serves as a prequel to Flares Up.
I write from the belief that it is never too late to create the life you believe you should be living rather than the one friends, or family think you should.
Q: The writer Sinead Moriarty said, “Niamh McAnally is a brave, fearless adventurer, who grabs life and lives it to the full, picking herself up when she falls and moving forward, always with hope in her heart.” What do you think of that description?
A: A very lovely statement, one I think gives an idea of the contents of Following Sunshine, but while the characteristics of my story may differ from others we are all essentially the same. We all have that instinct to survive, to pick ourselves up and keep going.
At times it’s tough. We have to force ourselves to look for the gift in all of it, and understand things are happening for us, not to us. If we look for nuggets of positivity in every situation we can find them. They are there.
Sometimes we have to turn our thoughts upside down. When motherhood passed me by I felt empty. But to pull myself out of that despair I asked a better question — What can I do that women with childrearing responsibilities can’t? The answer brought a new direction to my life: long-term and volunteer travel.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In 2020 I founded an international writers’ group and have run monthly Zoom meetings for the past four years. My goal is to see all of them traditionally published and so I came up with the idea of creating an anthology of all their short stories. In 2023, we all met in person in the UK for the first time and agreed on a theme.
I’m now curating that work titled: Stories of Place: ///zinc.level.blindfold. The subtitle, and each story title, highlights the geo location algorithm of ///what3words, a company that mapped the entire earth into three-meter x three-meter squares and given them each a unique three-word address. This collection will be published by Black Rose Writing in May of 2025.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I still love working on the water and am now a guest speaker on Celebrity Cruises.
Along with my husband, Gary Krieger, I’ll be sharing behind the scenes stories from my books and giving talks on how to write your memoir on the next transatlantic cruise from Barcelona to Tampa, followed by a Caribbean cruise to Honduras and Mexico.
I also enjoy meeting with book clubs who choose to read my work.
And finally, I would say to my readers, believe in yourself. Living a fulfilled, meaningful life is a choice. Visualize the life you want to live, take the necessary action to achieve it, be open to the all the possibilities it offers, and then live in quiet expectation and gratitude. It will come. Enjoy this gift called life!
To learn more about my work visit www.thewriteronthewater.com
and to follow me on social media https://lnk.bio/thewriteronthewater
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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