D. Connor Ferris

Connor Ferris, Irish writer, eleven books in total, nearly all on the interface between semantics and syntax, except for a three-part satirical novel. I was accidentally born in England.through arriving a month early. My mother was undergoing painful procedures in the maternity ward at the time originally scheduled for travelling to Ireland. The next major event in my life, certainly very important, was that my father was killed in a bomb explosion when I was two years old. This, plus various other factors, led to a strange childhood. Male relatives – uncles, cousins, grandfathers – were in extremely short supply, and the household consisted of just my young, inexperienced and very shy mother and myself; adult women friends (hers, of course) appeared from time to time, adult males so rarely that a French door-to-door salesman riding a bicycle loaded with(fairly) fresh vegetables (as they did in the south of the country in those days) could be the visitor of the month. That was the unbalanced picture until I was well into the teens. (If you are thinking of raising kids in such an unbalanced household, please think first – and then think a lot more. I reached adulthood with zero understanding about normal interactions between adult humans.) The lopsided counterweight to home life was school. School (in England) was of a type now rare, around 600 pupils all male, plenty of explicit school rules and rigid hierarchies, outwardly a little like a prison; but actually an unusually civilised specimen of its kind. The arts got some serious attention, and corporal punishment (beatings) very seldom reached the level where parents might talk of bringing in a lawyer.) There were many excellent teachers, whose skills got me into Oxford with an exhibition (scholarship of the second rank), to come out later with a first-class degree in Oriental Languages.

Not much of this fitted well with the strong impulse towards non-conformity which is a key part of the Irish birthright, and it took the better part of twenty years before that broke surface and let me see orthodoxy as a short-cut to lack of progress. Activities throughout those years and since have ranged from carpenter’s mate to professional singer with more in between but have centred on writing, teaching and editing, in places scattered across the globe, including Exeter (UK), Toronto, Singapore (much more open-minded than its reputation suggests), the Netherlands and Chiangmai in Thailand where for 20 years I have been living with my astonishing and talented wife Lamduan. (Thirty years married) Plusses and minusses for living here, with the minusses scoring well when it comes to international communication.

(For some years I ran an online journal (©) at www.ammophila.org . As from December 2018 this is suspended, but dipping through the last couple of years will give a fair picture of my outlook on the world around. It's up to you to decide which pieces are spoofs and which are for real.)