Welcome! I am a writer, editor and teacher and have lived in beautiful Western Massachusetts for 20 years this year (2024). My work is a blend of history, genealogy, journalism and memoir.

Checkout my articles on Medium. Please signup (free) to be notified! In 2024, I’ve been reporting for the storied Springfield Republican, where I began with an homage (2019) to a neglected author who sold more books in his lifetime than Mark Twain. Here’s my radio essay. Wikipedia piece. He was born a stone’s throw from my home at Dwight, a Wiki page I also created.

At the family homestead in Ireland, 2020.

Speaking of home, I’ve put my neighborhood on the map this year by publishing this page and spearheaded the event Dwight Day, where I gave a history talk.

I read my essays for the radio. Here’s my first, Powerlessness, from 2011. Find others at New England Public Media. Here’s a favorite published during the pandemic, Contagion in Family’s Past and Present. Another favorite on Philip Seymour Hoffman, the gifted actor who died of addiction (also see The Philadelphia Inquirer).  All audio essays are here (signup for free and follow!)

Read my UMass Alumni Magazine articles.

My father is dearly missed as he passed in 2023 (my sister Nancy and I wrote this obituary)…so I’ve been wiki-writing about where we grew up in the 1960s and 1970s.

A three-part series that began in 2011 with Part I, the award-winning “Perpetual Hunger”: Part II, Éireann’s Exiles  (2020). On IrishCentral, a popular site with 3.5 million monthly hits. Part III, How My Ancestors Begin Their American Dream (2022), on IrishCentral. With fabulous photographs, paintings and graphics, on the 175th anniversary of the arrival of the Carolans to America (1847-2022). And listen here. My first essay picked up by The Philadelphia Inquirer.

An Irish Passenger, An American Family, And Their Time: My old website that my dad loved. I constructed back in the early aughts when I first arrived to the UMass MFA Program for Poets and Writers, found in the Wayback Machine!

Fall 2018 marked the 10th anniversary of the publication of “Breaking Point: The Search for a Postwar Grandfather,” a longform essay that made “Notable Essays of 2008” in the Best American Essays series published annually by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Here is the link to the hardcopy and here is the audio.

The 10th anniversary of my essay, “Breaking Point: The Search for a Postwar Grandfather”, has come and gone. The essay was among “Notable Essays of 2008,” which were selected by Robert Atwan, series editor, and appeared in The Best American Essays 2009, edited by Mary Oliver. The essay originally appeared in the Autumn 2008 issue of The Massachusetts Review. An earlier version of the essay won the Atlantic Monthly Essay Prize that year.

Here’s more on the Best American series, or you can skip to the right and hit the play button and hear me read it:

“The Best American Essays features a selection of the years outstanding essays, essays of literary achievements that show an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought,” writes series editor Robert Atwan in the Introduction. “Hundreds of essays are gathered from a wide assortment of national and regional publications. These essays are then screened, and approximately 100 are turned over to a distinguished guest editor….The list of Notable Essays appearing in the back of the book is drawn from a final comprehensive list that includes not only all of the essays submitted to the guest editor but also many that were not submitted. To qualify for the volume, the essay must be a work of respectable literary quality, intended as a fully developed, independent essay on a subject of general interest, not specialized scholarship, originally written in English, or translated by the author for publication in an American periodical during the calendar year. Today’s essay is a highly flexible and shifting form, however, so these criteria or not carved in stone.”

The Best American Essays 2009 was the 24th volume in the series; it was dedicated to writer John Updike, who died that year. The editor was the poet Mary Oliver, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

“Michael Carolan’s beautifully crafted essay, “Breaking Point: The Search for a Postwar Grandfather,” moves back and forth in time exploring the relationship between the trauma of earlier generations and his own.” – Sima Rabinowitz, Newpages.com