J.M Lane | Updates

Wild Atlantic Words

J.M Lane — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

News: I'm shortlisted for the Wild Atlantic Words Short Story Competition 2026, and I'll be reading at the prize-giving in Castlebar on Saturday 10 October, 7pm, in the Festival Dome on Bridge St. Come along if you're nearby.

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Samhain Harvest Festival

J.M Lane — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 25 October, I’ll be in Longford for the launch of the Samhain Harvest Anthology at Lyons Bar, 31 Main Street, Longford Town.
Two of my poems, Mitóg and Bonfire, are included in the anthology, and I’ve confirmed that I’ll be attending the launch and have put my name forward to read from the book on the day.
The launch begins at 3pm in the performance area behind Lyons Bar.
There is something particularly nice about hearing poetry read aloud in a room full of people. Poems live differently once they leave the page.
I’m looking forward to meeting some of the other writers involved and finally seeing the finished anthology in the fles

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Joining Ragaire Issue 6 in Galway This November

J.M Lane — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be attending the launch of Ragaire Literary Magazine Issue 6 on Friday, 20 November at 6:30pm in The PorterShed, Market Street, Galway.
Having work accepted by Ragaire meant a great deal to me, and I’ve also asked to be included among the writers reading at the launch if a slot is available.
This one will be especially important to me. It will be my first major literary outing after the surgery I’m currently going through, and I think by then I’ll be more than ready to get out of the house, meet people and talk about writing again.
The event is free, and if you’re in Galway that evening, come along and say hell

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My Haiku Have Found a Home in Rain and Roots

J.M Lane — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:49:14 -0400

J.M. Lane’s haiku appear in Rain and Roots: A Nature & Earth Haiku Anthology, a new international collection celebrating the natural world through one of poetry’s smallest forms.

The anthology brings together writers from different countries and backgrounds, each capturing brief moments of landscape, weather, memory and place in just a handful of lines.

For anyone who enjoys haiku, nature writing, or simply discovering new poets, Rain and Roots is well worth a look. It is also a lovely way to support the writers included in the collection and the small presses and editors who continue to make space for this kind of work.

J.M. Lane is delighted to have work included alongside so many other voices.

Rain and Roots is available now in paperback through Lulu. If you enjoy poetry that notices the small things, consider picking up a copy.

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A poem for my prostate

J.M Lane — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:20:28 -0400

Night Waters
I am getting older.
My prostate has swollen
in sympathy with my belly,
So now I drink less water
before bed,a peace offering
For the body.
Still, sometime after midnight
comes that little dart
low in the stomach.
Up.
Bare feet on cold floor,
quick little steps
to the bathroom,
and there,in the dark,
I sit down to pee
like a lady.
Women are clever.
Why have men spent centuries
standing up for this?
Then back to bed,
careful not to wake herself,
which means, naturally,
pressing both freezing feet
against my wife's warm back.
She yelps.
Her elbow finds me.
So worth it.
I turn over,
pull the duvet up,
And fall asleep again,
Then, an hour later,
the body taps its watch
and up we go

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Annie:The Ministry of Presence by John Lane

J.M Lane — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:18:24 -0400

The following is a poem to honour the love my uncle Pa Malone has for his partner , Annie, my Aunt who sadly passed away.

The church is hot.
The smell of cut grass
Flows through the open doors.
Inside, the heat has drawn something sweet
from the mahogany pews.
That is what I remember.
And the quiet, broken now and then
by a cough, a child being shushed,
shoes scraping the floor,
the pews creaking when somebody moves.
There are no seats left.
My feet hurt.
I stand at the back, shifting my weight
from leg to leg, thinking
I should have worn better shoes.
A stupid thing to think
at my someones funeral,
but feet hurt even when someone has died.
The body has no manners.
The church is full.
Every pew is taken,
people standing along the walls.
All these bodies
because one is missing.
Then my uncle stands.
His son goes with him.
They walk to the altar together
and stand there,
their shoulders almost touching,
carrying the same absence
in different places.
One has lost his mother.
One has lost the woman with whom
he built the ordinary architecture of a life.
Father and son,
grieving her from different shores
of the same dark water.
From the back I observe enough: the stopping, the looking down,
the breath taken
where no breath should need taking,
a smile arriving
at some small memory
and leaving almost as quickly.
He speaks of his wife.
Annie, My aunt.
And I understand
these are not the same loss.
He knew the place beside her in bed,
the sound of her moving through the house,
how she took her tea,
those little irritations that become precious
when nobody is left to irritate you.
I am family,
but I am standing
at the edge of his grief.
And, God forgive me,
I find it beautiful.
Outside, the flowers are in full bloom.
Trees are heavy with leaves.
The day is warm enough
to draw sweetness from wood.
Everything is alive,
and still
his winter has come.
Trees know this.
They bud, they leaf, they flower,
and when winter comes
they let everything fall.
We know this too.
We plant gardens knowing frost exists.
No tree has ever promised
it could keep its leaves.
Perhaps love deserves
the same honesty.
Perhaps beneath every I love you there should be the quiet knowledge:
one of us will Carry.
One of us will be carried.
And still, we should bloom.
Because watching him there,
with summer pressing through the church doors,
I understand grief is not
what happened to their love.
It is what survived it.
And perhaps more than that.
Grief is every I love you
we felt no need to say,
every kiss given without noticing,
every ordinary morning we believed
would be followed by another.
All that love,
small enough to live quietly
while two people shared a life,
suddenly has nowhere to go.
So it grows.
It pushes roots through memory,
breaks open all the places
we thought we had sealed,
reaches towards whatever light remains
and blooms into something
larger than it ever needed to be
when the person we loved
was still there to receive it.
And I envy him.
Not the coffin.
Not the empty place at home.
Not the morning that will come
without her.
I envy a love
that can make an absence
this enormous. A love with roots
so deep in another life
that death can fell the tree
but it cannot pull it from the earth.
A river loving stone
long enough to carve it.
The sea returning again and again
to the same shore.
The light of a dead star
still travelling through darkness
towards someone
who just might look up.
Perhaps that is grief:
love continuing
after the body
that received it is gone.
And there he is,
an ordinary man ,
his son beside him,
and there I am at the back,
my feet forgotten,
envying the beauty of his pain.
Because what a thing it is
to have loved someone
enough to hurt like this.
What a thing it is
to have been loved
enough to leave this much behind.
God, don't we all
we all deserve
a love like that.
A love worth the winter.
So if frost comes for my love,
let me remember this summer day:
sweet mahogany, cut grass through open doors,
a church filled
by one woman's absence,
a man at an altar
showing me what remains
when love loses its target.
Let me not curse the falling leaves.
Let me have loved enough to know
they only fall
because once,
they bloomed.

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Absence

J.M Lane — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:50:57 -0500

Full text can be found at https://www.writing.ie/tell-your-own-story/j-m-lane-why-i-write/

Know Where the Story Came From.

J.M Lane — Sun, 4 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the Monsters Live Up the Road

Irish Folklore Survived Because We Kept Changing It

J.M. Lane

I bastardised Irish mythology. Lovingly.

In the Raven Chronicles, my fantasy trilogy, I took Setanta, the childhood name of Cú Chulainn, and gave it to a fictional son of Cú Chulainn and the Morrígan. I moved stories around, mixed folklore from different places and periods and invented things completely. It was either a continuation of the tradition or an act of cultural vandalism. For a while, I was not sure which. Then I wrote a crime novel and found out the fantasy had been the easy part.

There is a temptation with anything old to treat it like an artefact. Don't touch it. Don't damage it. Certainly don't let some fella from Clare put it into a novel. But Irish stories were never sealed behind glass. They passed from teller to teller. Names changed. Hills moved. A creature at the bottom of a lake in Clare might turn up in Donegal with a worse temper. The story lived because somebody thought it worth telling again, and no two people tell anything exactly the same way.

I have been thinking about that lately because something is happening in Ireland. I am wary of calling it another great revival. Historians usually decide these things afterwards, when everyone involved is dead and neat dates can be put around it. Still, you can hear it in the music and see it in the books. It is there in the renewed interest in Gaeilge, folklore, pilgrim roads, field names, old skills, and why somebody's grandmother would never cut down a particular tree.

It is not a misty-eyed attempt to recreate an Ireland where we all sat around turf fires speaking perfect Irish and waiting for the banshee. Nobody really wants that Ireland back, if it ever existed. Instead, people are looking back and asking whether we left anything useful behind.

Manchán Magan understood that better than most. He could tell you something you had never known about your own country without making you feel stupid for not knowing it. That mattered. Many of us left school with a complicated relationship with Irish. Gaeilge meant grammar, textbooks and the fear that the teacher might ask a question we could not understand. Manchán seemed to say: forget that for a minute. Look at what is here.

He kept showing us that the old Ireland had never gone anywhere. It was hiding in the language and the land. He wrote a book called Thirty-Two Words for Field. Thirty-two. Only in Ireland would one word not be enough for a field. Every one of those words carried something with it: how the ground was worked, what happened there, what people believed about it. Listening to him, I started to think the tree your grandmother would not cut was not superstition at all. It was a memory that had forgotten why.

He died in October 2025, but somehow he is not quite finished talking to us. A posthumous spoken-word album, Slí na Samhlaíochta (The Way of Imagination), carries his voice back through mythology, Gaeilge, Tír na nÓg and the Otherworld. A man who spent so much time reminding us that old voices never really disappear has left his own behind.

That same instinct is turning up elsewhere. Through Wild Irish, Diarmuid Lyng and Siobhán de Paor set Gaeilge alongside storytelling, poetry, hurling, foraging and old skills. It is not heritage behind glass. They take something inherited and ask what use it might have now.

Any trad musician could have told me that. Rónán Ó Snodaigh has spent decades proving it, first with Kíla and now with Myles O'Reilly. Their new album, Mise Tusa, came out in May. I had Rónán's music on while writing my first book, and it taught me more about what I was allowed to do with the old stories than any textbook. A tune travels. One musician learns it from another. He adds something. She drops something. The rhythm changes. A Clare version does not sound exactly like a Donegal version, because Clare and Donegal are not the same place. The music carries the people who played it. Why should the stories be any different?

Of course, change is not the only reason the stories survived. Scribes wrote them down. Collectors recorded them. Scholars spent lifetimes protecting and translating them. Without that work, I would have had very little to bastardise. But preservation and retelling are not enemies. There have always been versions.

That does not mean anything goes. You can lift an Irish name or monster and drop it into a generic fantasy world, but something important will be lost. For me, the Irishness was in the land, the humour, the way the dead never seem very far away, and the way the Otherworld can begin on an ordinary road. It was also in refusing to make the old beings tidy. The Morrígan is not a superhero. A púca is not a mascot.

When I say these stories are ours, I do not say it carelessly. "Ours" is not a purity test, and it does not give anyone permission to use the material without understanding it. There is still a responsibility. Before you pull a story apart, you should know where it came from and what you are changing.

There is a darker side to that, though, and it is where my new novel lives. If the old beliefs are memories that forgot why, some of what they remember would turn your stomach.

Why the Curlew Cries is a crime novel set in the Ox Mountains, where women have been going missing for decades and nobody seems in much of a hurry to find out why. There are no monsters in it. Not the kind with horns, anyway. There is a family who believe in the Other People. They will not cut a lone hawthorn or cross a fairy path. They pour the first drop of poitín on the ground for whoever is listening beyond the hedge. And they decide that a woman who does not fit is not a woman at all. She is a changeling.

None of it came from nowhere. Two real stories have been following me around for years. One is Bridget Cleary, killed by her husband in Tipperary in 1895, who swore the woman he burned was a fairy changeling and not his wife. The other is the Vanishing Triangle, the women who disappeared across Leinster in the 1990s, whose families are still waiting.

I did not want to write about either. Those were real people, and their stories are not mine to take. So I did what I had done with Setanta. I moved the hills. I took none of the facts, none of the places and none of the people. What I kept was the horror.

It is the horror of a belief that becomes a reason to hurt someone, usually a woman or a child, usually by a man who has convinced himself he is doing right. It is the horror of that belief being handed down from father to son like a farm, the son wrecked by it long before he wrecks anyone else. And it is the horror of the people meant to stop it. In the book, posters of missing women fade on a station noticeboard, passed daily by men trained to notice things. The guard who asks too many questions does not get sacked. He gets moved sideways until he stops being a problem.

Everything I learned from bastardising myths held for this book too. Know where the story came from. Know what you are changing. And when the story belongs to real people, know when to keep your hands off it.

You cannot be faithful to the old stories and make them safe. The curlew's cry has been heard as a warning in Ireland for a long time. In my book, it carries over a bog that keeps more than it should. I was no more going to tidy that up than I was going to make the Morrígan nice. The book is out on 31 October. Samhain, the night the dead come closest. I'll take it.

I know a bit about the dead coming close. In July 2024, I had a radical nephrectomy for kidney and bladder cancer. This year, I was back in theatre again.

If I am honest, the guilt about bastardising the old stories did not go because I won an argument. It went somewhere between those two operating tables. Being that close to death gives you a new outlook. I love more freely now. I have also run out of patience for small-minded judgement, the kind that comes from somebody else's fear and gets dressed up as standards. Fair, honest criticism I will take all day. Tell me the book does not work and why, and I will buy you a pint. Tell me I am not allowed to write it, and I will tell you where to go.

I still do not know whether historians will call what is happening a revival. I do know where I sit in it, and who I am sitting with. Manchán found Ireland in its words and its fields, and when his own time came, he went on national radio from a hospital bed and talked about his cancer without a shred of self-pity. Diarmuid stepped away from the Wexford senior hurling panel in his prime, away from everything rural Ireland expected of him, and became his own man. He says it was not brave. I would disagree. Rónán has spent decades making it sing, changing and growing and sticking to his guns without once watering himself down to suit anyone. None of them waited for permission.

I decided to make it fight monsters. Some of them have horns. Some of them live up the road.

By the time these stories reached me, they already carried hundreds of fingerprints. I simply added mine. I hope that somewhere down the road, somebody else will add theirs.

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A strange start to October

J.M Lane — Fri, 2 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m back in hospital for surgery connected to the removal of my kidney two years ago because of cancer. Not exactly where I’d planned to be, but I’m still here, still writing, and still looking forward.

There was some good news in among it all. My poem “Samhain Harvest” made the longlist for the Frances Browne Poetry Competition 2026. Sadly, it didn’t make the shortlist, but I’m genuinely delighted it got that far.

And, all going well with recovery, I’ll be in Castlebar on 10 October for the Wild Atlantic Words Festival, where my short story has been shortlisted for the festival’s short story prize. I’ll be there to read the piece and attend the prize-giving.

The countdown is also officially on for the release of my first adult novel, Why the Curlew Cries, which is out later this month.

Cancer has interrupted plenty over the last couple of years, but it hasn’t managed to stop me writing or showing up.

See ye on the other side of this one.

J.M. Lane

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Reading at Wild Atlantic Words 2026

J.M Lane — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’m delighted to say that I’ll be appearing at the Wild Atlantic Words Literary Festival in Castlebar this October, where I’ll be reading one of my short stories as a finalist in this year’s Wild Atlantic Words Short Story Competition.

The competition was judged this year by Colin Barrett, which makes reaching the final particularly special for me. Barrett grew up in County Mayo and has become one of the most recognised contemporary Irish short story writers. His debut collection, Young Skins, won the Guardian First Book Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. One of its stories, Calm with Horses, was later adapted into the acclaimed film starring Barry Keoghan and Cosmo Jarvis. His debut novel, Wild Houses, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024.

So, yes, knowing he read my work and thought enough of it to put it into the final is something I’m fairly proud of.

I’ll be reading the story at the Short Story Reading & Prize-Giving on Saturday, 10 October, in the Festival Dome in Castlebar.

There is always something slightly terrifying about taking a story that has existed quietly on a page and giving it a voice in front of a room full of people, but I’m looking forward to it.

More than anything, I’m grateful that the story found its way to the final and that I’ll get the chance to stand up and read it.

If you’re around Castlebar for Wild Atlantic Words, come along and say hello. I’ll be very happy to chat to anyone who comes along, whether it’s about the story, writing, books, or just to have a bit of a natter after the reading.

Saturday, 10 October 2026
7pm
Festival Dome, Bridge Lane, Castlebar, Co. Mayo

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A New Project: Bringing My Poetry to Life Through Music

J.M Lane — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I've been working on an idea for a new project, bringing my poetry together with original music to create a series of soundscapes.

The idea is simple. I'll record myself reading my poems and invite musicians and composers to create original music around them.

Poetry means different things to different people. A poem might bring a particular memory, image or feeling to one person and something entirely different to another. I want to give other artists the freedom to explore the ideas and sensations within my work and see where their own creativity takes them.

I'm not looking for music that simply sits in the background. I'd love each artist to bring something of themselves to a poem, to interpret it through their own music and create something neither of us could have made alone.

I've already approached a few artists about getting involved, but I'd love to hear from others who might be interested in collaborating.

The finished pieces will be shared through my website and social media, bringing together poetry, spoken word and original music.

If you're a musician or composer and this sounds like something you'd enjoy being part of, please get in touch. I'd love to hear your ideas and see what we might create together.

John

J.M. Lane

jmlaneauthor.com

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Ragaire Issue 6 Launch

J.M Lane — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ragaire Issue 6 Launch
Ragaire Magazine Launch, Galway
Friday, 20 November 2026 | 6:30pm

I'm delighted to announce that I'll be attending the launch of Issue 6 of Ragaire, a literary magazine in which my writing will be published.

This will be my first public literary event following surgery in October, making the evening particularly special to me.
I'm looking forward to celebrating alongside the other contributors, meeting fellow writers and readers, and hopefully sharing an extract of my work on the night.
The launch takes place at The PorterShed on Market Street in Galway. Admission is free, and everyone is welcome.

I would love to see you there!

J.M. Lane

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Why the Curlew Cries Is Coming This October

J.M Lane — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I'm delighted to announce that my new novel, Why the Curlew Cries, is coming this October.

Set in the northwest of Ireland, where quiet country roads wind through isolated hills and everyone seems to know everyone else's business, this is a crime novel inspired by true crimes and the darker side of rural life.

At the heart of the story is Jack Dawson, a former Garda turned private investigator, a man carrying his own losses who finds himself drawn into a case that will take him into some very dark places.

I've spent a long time working on this novel. It's a story about the things we choose not to see, the secrets we keep and the terrible consequences of looking the other way.

It's also a story about ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and how far someone might go when there's nobody else left to help.

As an independent author, getting a book out into the world is only half the battle. Finding readers is the other half, and that's where your support makes all the difference.

If you enjoy Irish crime fiction, I'd love you to give this one a chance.

I'll be sharing more about the novel, its inspiration and its upcoming release over the coming weeks.

Thank you to everyone who has supported my writing so far. I hope you'll join me for this next chapter.

J.M. Lane

Why the Curlew Cries — Coming October 2026.

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The Modern Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

J.M Lane — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Women Who Vanished

The Modern Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

Part Two: The Cases That Refused to Go Away

In Part One, I wrote about Bridget Cleary.
A young woman killed in Tipperary in 1895 because the people around her came to believe that she had been taken by the fairies and replaced with something else.
That story gave Why the Curlew Cries some of its older darkness. Folklore, isolation, strange beliefs surviving beside modern life.
But there is another shadow behind the book.

And this one is much closer to us.
Women disappeared from Irish roads, towns and homes during the 1990s. Some went out for the day and never came back. Some were walking home. Some were standing beside roads looking for lifts.

Some vanished within sight of places where they should have been safe. They became associated with a phrase that most Irish people of a certain age will recognise immediately.

The Vanishing Triangle.

I need to be careful with that phrase. There has never been proof that one person was responsible for all of these disappearances. The cases are different, the circumstances are different, and treating them as chapters in one great Irish murder mystery risks turning real women into characters in somebody else's story.

They weren't characters.

They had families.

They had plans.

They were expected home.

And they never came home.

The Vanishing Triangle
During the 1990s, a series of disappearances involving women became increasingly prominent in Ireland.
Among the names generally associated with the so-called Vanishing Triangle are Annie McCarrick, Eva Brennan, Imelda Keenan, Jo Jo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Ciara Breen, Fiona Sinnott and Deirdre Jacob.

RTÉ's Beyond the Vanishing Triangle looked again at these cases in 2023 and at the question that inevitably followed them: were any of them connected? [1

Gardaí themselves examined that possibility. Operation TRACE was established in 1998 to look for links between a number of disappearances and to consider whether one offender might have been responsible for more than one.
That did not establish that there was a single killer.

That distinction matters.
For me, though, the connection to Why the Curlew Cries was never really about a serial killer.

It was about something simpler and, in some ways, more frightening.

A person can disappear.

A road can hold the last confirmed sighting of somebody.

Years can become decades.

And an investigation can remain alive long after almost everything else about the world has changed.

Jo Jo Dullard

Jo Jo Dullard was twenty-one.
On 9 November 1995, she travelled to Dublin and spent part of the day with friends. That night she missed her bus home to Callan, County Kilkenny.

So she did something that would not have seemed particularly extraordinary in Ireland at the time.

She hitchhiked.

She travelled by bus as far as Naas, got a lift to Kilcullen and another to Moone in County Kildare.

At 11.37 that night she telephoned her friend Mary Cullinan from Moone. During the call a car stopped. Jo Jo told her friend that she had got a lift. That was the last known interaction anyone had with her. She disappeared into the night. There is something horribly ordinary about that sequence.

A missed bus.

A phone box.

A lift home.

Those details probably mean more to people who remember Ireland before smartphones than they do now. There was no location being shared. No little blue dot moving across a screen. No message saying, I'm nearly home.

Sometimes somebody simply left one place and was expected at another. And between those two places there could be miles of dark road.
I

n 2020, Gardaí formally reclassified Jo Jo's disappearance as a murder investigation, stating that they were satisfied serious harm had come to her. Nobody has been brought to justice for her murder. And this is not merely an old file gathering dust.

In 2026, more than thirty years after Jo Jo disappeared, Gardaí carried out new searches on land near the Wicklow-Kildare border as part of the investigations into both Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob. The searches finished in July. Gardaí said the results would not be released for operational reasons.

The investigations remain ongoing.

Thirty years.
And somebody is still digging. That stayed with me.

Fiona Pender

Fiona Pender disappeared the following year. She was twenty-five years old and living in a flat on Church Street in Tullamore.
Fiona was also seven months pregnant.
She was last seen at approximately six o'clock on the morning of 23 August 1996.
The day before, she had been shopping for baby clothes with her mother.

Her body has never been found. There are details in missing-person cases that become unbearable precisely because they are so normal. Baby clothes are one of them. They tell you that somebody was planning for next month. Not contemplating disappearing.

Planning.
In May 2025, Gardaí announced that Fiona's case had formally been reclassified as a murder investigation. Extensive searches had taken place over the years and five people had been arrested and detained during the investigation, but nobody has been brought to justice.

Then, on the thirtieth anniversary of Fiona's disappearance in August 2026, Gardaí issued another appeal. Thirty years later her family still does not have her body or the body of her unborn child. Or an answer.

There are echoes here with Why the Curlew Cries, particularly around pregnancy and a woman in danger, but I want to be absolutely clear about something. My characters are not Fiona Pender. I did not take what happened to Fiona and turn it into entertainment.

It is the emotional truth surrounding cases like hers that found its way into the novel.
The idea of somebody expected to have an entire life ahead of them simply being gone.
And everybody left behind having to live with the empty space.

Deirdre Jacob

Deirdre Jacob was eighteen. On 28 July 1998 she walked into Newbridge, County Kildare. She was preparing to return to London, where she was studying to become a teacher. She went to the bank, the post office and visited her grandmother before walking home.

There are CCTV images of her in Newbridge shortly after half past two that afternoon.
She was last seen shortly after three o'clock near the gate of her family home at Roseberry. And then she was gone. That one has always disturbed me. Not because it happened somewhere wild. Quite the opposite. Deirdre made it home, almost.

She was not miles away on an isolated mountain road. She had not vanished during some journey across the country.She was near her own front gate. Twenty years after her disappearance, Gardaí reclassified the case as a murder investigation. A file has been submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions, but no prosecution has been directed.

And again, the investigation continues.
The land searched in Wicklow in 2026 was examined as part of the investigations into both Deirdre and Jo Jo.

Two young women.
Two cases separated by almost three years.
And nearly three decades later, Gardaí were still standing in a field looking for answers. [

That image could probably sit inside Why the Curlew Cries without me changing very much. Not because I wrote these cases into the book. Because that is the sort of thing the book is about. Old cases are not always dead cases.

Fiona Sinnott

Fiona Sinnott disappeared in February 1998.
She was nineteen years old and the mother of an eleven-month-old daughter. She lived at Ballyhitt near Broadway in County Wexford and was making plans for her daughter's first birthday. On 8 February, Fiona went to Butler's Pub in Broadway with friends. She left around midnight. It was the last confirmed sighting of her.

A motorist later reported seeing a man and woman near Kisha Cross around that time, with two other young men nearby. Gardaí have repeatedly appealed for those people to come forward. They never have. Again there is that awful simplicity. She left a pub.
That is it. A completely ordinary sentence until you add and she was never seen again.
In July 2025, Gardaí carried out another search on open ground in County Wexford. By that point the investigation had generated thousands of documents, more than 500 statements and six arrests over the years.

The search ended.
The investigation did not. The problem with a good story There is something we do as writers that becomes dangerous when we move from fiction into real crime.

We look for patterns.
It is almost impossible not to. Put several unexplained disappearances on a map and the mind immediately starts drawing lines between them. That is how stories work.

Cause.
Effect.

Connection.

Resolution.

Real life owes us none of those things.The phrase Vanishing Triangle itself creates a story before we know whether one actually exists. It suggests a defined place, a pattern and perhaps even one person operating inside it.

That may not be true.
These women may have been victims of entirely separate crimes.
Some of the cases historically grouped under the term may have no connection to any of the others.
We do not know.
And perhaps we do not know is the most important sentence in this entire article.
Because that is what their families have had to live with.
What found its way into the book
When I started writing Why the Curlew Cries, I was interested in what happens after everybody else has stopped looking.
What does an old investigation become?
A box?
A file number?
Photographs in an envelope?
Names in somebody's notebook?
And what happens if one person cannot leave it alone?
That became part of Jack Dawson.
Jack is not some brilliant detective who sees what everyone before him missed. I never wanted him to be.

He is a good, damaged man trying to finish something his dead partner started. He keeps going. Sometimes that matters more than brilliance.

The real investigations discussed here are obviously far larger and more complicated than anything in my novel. They involve generations of Gardaí, search teams, forensic specialists, witnesses and families who have spent decades refusing to let the names of the missing disappear with them.
But that refusal to stop looking lodged somewhere in the book.

So did the roads.
The fields.

The houses sitting alone.

The ordinary journey that suddenly has no end.

And the idea that somewhere, perhaps quite close to where everybody has already looked, there may still be an answer. They are still missing. It would be convenient for this article if these stories belonged to the past.

They don't.

Fiona Pender's thirtieth anniversary appeal was issued in August 2026. Gardaí searched land connected with the investigations into Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob in 2026.

Land was searched in connection with Fiona Sinnott's murder investigation in 2025. These are not legends. They are active investigations. That is the difference between this part of the story and Bridget Cleary. Bridget's grave is known. We know who killed her.

More than a century later we can argue about why, about folklore and gender and politics and everything that surrounded what happened inside that cottage.

The families of these women do not even have that certainty. For many of them there is still only the last sighting.

The last telephone call.

The last walk home.

And then nothing.

Why the Curlew Cries is fiction.

But some of the things casting shadows across its pages are not. And perhaps that is why the curlew seemed the right bird for the title.

You can hear its cry travelling across an empty landscape long after you have lost sight of where it came from.

Sources and further reading
RTÉ, “Why were these missing person cases not solved?” / Beyond the Vanishing Triangle (2023).

An Garda Síochána, 30th anniversary appeal: disappearance and murder of Josephine “Jo Jo” Dullard (2025).

An Garda Síochána, investigation into the disappearance and murder of Jo Jo Dullard (2020).

An Garda Síochána, update on 2026 searches in the investigations into Jo Jo Dullard and Deirdre Jacob.

An Garda Síochána, 30th anniversary of the disappearance and murder of Fiona Pender (2026).

An Garda Síochána, investigation into the disappearance and murder of Fiona Pender (2025).

An Garda Síochána, public appeal concerning the disappearance and murder of Deirdre Jacob (2023).

An Garda Síochána, renewed appeal on the disappearance and murder of Fiona Sinnott (2023).

An Garda Síochána, renewed appeal concerning Fiona Sinnott (2017).

An Garda Síochána, 2025 search in the investigation into the disappearance and murder of Fiona Sinnott.

Books and further reading

Barry Cummins, Missing: The Unsolved Cases of Ireland’s Vanished Women and Children (Gill Books). A detailed examination of Ireland’s long-term missing-person cases, including Jo Jo Dullard, Fiona Pender, Fiona Sinnott, Deirdre Jacob and Operation TRACE.

Further information
Alan Bailey, Missing, Presumed (Liberties Press). Bailey served for thirteen years as National Coordinator of Operation TRACE and writes from direct experience of Garda investigations into several of the women associated with the Vanishing Triangle. Further information

Claire McGowan, The Vanishing Triangle: The Murdered Women Ireland Forgot (Little A). A more recent examination of eight women who disappeared in Ireland during the 1990s, and of the wider social and cultural context surrounding the cases. Further information

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When Folklore Turns Deadly: Bridget Cleary and the Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

J.M Lane — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Part One: The Woman the Fairies Took

There is a phrase I have been careful with when talking about my forthcoming novel, Why the Curlew Cries.

Inspired by true events.
Not based on a true story. There is a difference.

Jack Dawson is fictional. So are Gerry, Angela and the people Jack encounters as he follows the case his dead partner left behind. But fiction does not grow in a vacuum, and there are real pieces of Irish history sitting underneath this book.
Some of them are surprisingly recent. Others are older, one of the oldest is the story of Bridget Cleary.

I had known the name before I really knew the story. I suspect a lot of Irish people are the same. Bridget Cleary, the woman burned as a witch. Ireland's last witch burning. It is usually reduced to something like that.

Except Bridget Cleary was not really accused of being a witch.

What happened to her was, somehow, stranger and much more Irish.

Bridget
Bridget Boland was born in Ballyvadlea, near Cloneen in County Tipperary. There is some disagreement over her exact year of birth, although contemporary accounts generally described her as twenty-six when she died.
She was educated, worked as a dressmaker and earned additional money selling eggs. She had been apprenticed to a dressmaker and owned a sewing machine, something worth noting in rural Ireland in the 1890s. She was making her own money. Her husband, Michael Cleary, was a cooper.
They had no children. The Dictionary of Irish Biography, in an entry written by folklorist Angela Bourke, describes the couple as being more prosperous than many of their neighbours. Bridget was not some mysterious old woman living alone at the edge of a bog. She was a young working woman living in a relatively new labourer's cottage, earning money from her own skills and going about an ordinary life. I think that matters.

It makes what happened next harder to comfortably push back into some ancient Ireland where people supposedly knew no better. This was 1895. There were doctors. There were newspapers. There were police. Trains crossed the country. Oscar Wilde's name would be all over the newspapers within weeks. And people still believed that the fairies could take you.

The illness
In early March, Bridget became ill with what the Dictionary of Irish Biography records as bronchitis. Her husband and father tried to get the local dispensary doctor, William Crean, to attend her. A priest, Father Cornelius Ryan, also came to the house.
That is another part of the story that tends to disappear in the retelling.
The family did not simply reject modern medicine and decide to call the fairies instead. A doctor was sought, a priest came. And folk belief entered the room alongside them.

When the doctor was slow in attending, the family also sought help from Denis Ganey, described as a "fairy doctor", and the idea began to take hold that the sick woman lying in Bridget Cleary's bed might not actually be Bridget Cleary at all. She might be a changeling. For anyone unfamiliar with the belief, a changeling was something left behind when the fairies took a human being. The stories most often concern babies and children, but adults could be taken too.
The thing left behind might look like the person. But it wasn't them and if you believed that completely, a horrifying bit of logic followed.

Hurting the thing in front of you was not necessarily hurting the person you loved.
You might even convince yourself that you were saving them.

Are you Bridget Cleary?
By 14 March the situation inside the Cleary house had become frightening. Bridget's cousin Johanna Burke later gave evidence about what she witnessed. Her testimony was reported by The Irish Times during the court proceedings and survives in the newspaper's archive.

Johanna arrived to find Bridget being held down by men including relatives, neighbour John Dunne and Michael Cleary. A mixture of herbs and milk was being forced into her.
Michael repeatedly demanded that his wife identify herself.

Was she Bridget Boland, wife of Michael Cleary?
She answered, he asked again, she answered again. When she did not answer as required the third time, the sick woman was taken from the bed and held above the embers of the kitchen fire. Eventually she gave them the answer they wanted.
The ritual appeared, for the moment, to have worked. The Dictionary of Irish Biography records that Bridget was pronounced recovered that night, whether from the illness or from whatever they believed the fairies had done to her. It should have ended there, it didn't.

The following night
On Friday, 15 March, relatives were again gathered in the house.
Bridget was dressed and brought into the kitchen. Michael gave her bread and again demanded that she identify herself three times. According to Johanna Burke's evidence, Bridget answered twice and ate two pieces. Michael forced the third piece into her mouth. Then he knocked her to the floor. He put his knee on her chest and a hand at her throat. He took a burning stick from the fire.

Eventually Bridget's clothes were set alight and lamp oil was thrown over her.
She burned to death in her own kitchen.
Johanna's evidence gives us something even more disturbing than the violence itself. Michael appears to have believed, or at least claimed to believe, that the woman burning in front of him was not his wife.
His real wife had been taken.
This was the thing the fairies had left behind.

That distinction is why calling Bridget Cleary "the last witch burned in Ireland" has always bothered me. A witch is a human being believed to possess supernatural powers.
That was not really the accusation here.
The horror of Bridget's case is that the people around her had begun denying that she was human at all.

The white horse
After Bridget was dead, Michael Cleary and her cousin Patrick Kennedy buried her body in a shallow grave.
Then Michael waited for his wife to come back.
This may be the part of the story that stayed with me most.
He went with others to the nearby ringfort at Kylenagranagh. He believed Bridget would emerge from it among the fairies, riding a white horse. Think about that for a moment.
His wife's burned body was lying in the earth. And somewhere nearby, men were watching an ancient fort for a woman on a white horse.

This was not a detail invented later to make the story more Gothic. Angela Bourke notes that the idea corresponds closely with existing Irish fairy stories and ballads. The belief had a structure. There were rules to it. There were stories already there telling people how someone taken by the fairies might return.

That frightens me far more than the idea of somebody simply losing his mind. Because stories shared by a community can become very powerful things. Usually they are harmless. Sometimes they are beautiful.
And occasionally somebody believes them enough to act.

The body
Rumours about Bridget's disappearance eventually reached the Royal Irish Constabulary. A search began. On 22 March, a week after her death, Bridget Cleary's burned body was found. Michael Cleary and eight others were arrested. Bridget was buried in Cloneen cemetery on 27 March. Most of her family could not attend because they were in prison. Michael Cleary eventually faced trial in Clonmel. The murder charge was reduced to manslaughter and he was sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Seven others were convicted in connection with the violence inflicted upon Bridget.

But the story did not end in the courtroom.
In some ways, that is where the next version of Bridget Cleary began.

Ireland on trial
The murder became international news.
And because this was Ireland in 1895, even the death of a woman in a small Tipperary cottage managed to become political.
Home Rule was still a live and bitter question. Opponents of Irish self-government seized upon the case as evidence of a backward, superstitious population incapable of governing itself. Newspapers sympathetic to Home Rule pushed back against the idea that the beliefs involved in Bridget's death represented rural Ireland as a whole.
Bridget became useful to everyone.
Her death became evidence of Irish barbarism to some and an embarrassing aberration to others. Angela Bourke's research has explored this collision between the oral culture surrounding Bridget and the written world of newspapers, courts and colonial politics.

And somewhere underneath all of that was Bridget.
A dressmaker.
An egg seller.
A wife.
A young woman who got sick. I think we owe it to her not to lose sight of that. Then the murder became folklore There is one final twist that I find fascinating. Decades later, the story turned up in the National Folklore Collection.

During the Schools' Collection of the 1930s, a local account was recorded under the title The Burning of the Woman. In it, the house where Bridget died is remembered as the "Fairy Cottage."

The details have already started to change. The account does not perfectly match the evidence presented at the trial. There is speculation that Bridget may have already been dead when she was burned, and the events have been reshaped by decades of telling and retelling.

That is almost the perfect ending to the story. Bridget Cleary was killed partly because people believed folklore. Then Bridget Cleary herself became folklore.
The murder entered the same oral world that had helped make the murder possible in the first place.

Black Stockings
I was also drawn back to Bridget's story through Aaron Mahnke's Lore podcast. Episode 11, Black Stockings, first released in 2015 and later remastered, places Bridget's murder within the wider tradition of changeling stories.
Mahnke opens from a simple idea: human beings create stories to explain things they cannot explain, and occasionally those stories stop being stories.
That episode is well worth listening to alongside Angela Bourke's much deeper historical work because it captures something difficult to get from dates and court records alone. It captures the unease of the belief itself.

And that brings me back to Why the Curlew Cries.
My novel does not retell Bridget Cleary's murder. There is no fictional Bridget Cleary hiding inside it.

What stayed with me was something else.
The idea of an Ireland where the rational and irrational can occupy the same room.

A doctor can be called.

A priest can arrive.

The police can investigate.

And, somewhere beyond the house, there can still be a fairy fort where someone is waiting for a woman to return on a white horse.

We like to imagine there is a clean line between folklore and reality. There isn't always. Sometimes one bleeds into the other. And sometimes there is blood.
Why the Curlew Cries grew, in part, out of that uncomfortable space.

In Part Two

I will move forward into modern Ireland and look at another shadow behind the novel: the women who disappeared, the cases that remain unresolved, and the terrible power of not knowing what happened.

Sources and further reading

Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (1999), and “Reading a Woman's Death: Colonial Text and Oral Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland”, Feminist Studies (1995).

Dictionary of Irish Biography, “Cleary, Bridget,” contributed by Angela Bourke, Royal Irish Academy.

The Irish Times, “The story of the last ‘witch’ burned alive in Ireland,” drawing on the paper's contemporary 1895 court reports.

National Folklore Collection, UCD / Dúchas.ie, The Burning of the Woman, Schools' Collection, Volume 0557.

Aaron Mahnke, Lore, Episode 11, Black Stockings, first released 27 July 2015 and remastered in 2021.

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JM Lane: Fourth Place in the Witty Wicklow Competition

J.M Lane — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Fourth Place in the Witty Wicklow Competition

I got some lovely news today.
A short story of mine came to my garden came fourth in Ring of Culture’s Witty Wicklow Competition.

Thank you to Ring of Culture and Witty Wicklow for reading it and giving it a place.

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Ring of Culture Turns One

J.M Lane — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Ring of Culture Turns One, and Writers Should Take Notice

There are never enough places for writers to put their work. Not just places to submit it, but places genuinely interested in giving new and emerging writers a chance to be read, heard and talked about.

That is why I wanted to give a quick mention to Ring of Culture, which celebrates its first birthday tonight.
Founded by author and publisher Vítor Vicente, Ring of Culture has grown into a cultural platform covering books, publishing, translation, workshops, podcasts and live events. In a relatively short space of time, it has already been involved with literary events and organisations in Ireland and further afield.

Ring Of Culture

For writers, one of the most interesting parts of what they are building is Witty Wicklow Writers Magazine.

Their first international writing competition invited poetry, short fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction, flash fiction and hybrid work, with the Top 10 being published in the first issue of the magazine. The competition itself has been featured by Poetry Ireland and Writing.ie, and Ring of Culture describes the magazine as a place for both emerging and established voices.

Tonight, Thursday 10 September at 8.30 p.m. Irish time, Ring of Culture will mark its first year with a livestream and announce the Witty Wicklow Writers Issue #1 Top 10 and prize winners.

I have no idea what names will be called out tonight, but I do think what is being built here is worth keeping an eye on.

Writing can be a fairly lonely business. Any new platform willing to create another stage for writers, particularly one that is looking beyond the usual boundaries and trying to connect writers through publication, conversation and events, is something I am happy to see.

So happy first birthday to Ring of Culture, and good luck to everyone waiting on tonight's results.

You can watch the livestream here

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Why the Curlew Cries: October Release and Final ARC Call

J.M Lane — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Chara,

A quick update on Why the Curlew Cries.

The book will be released this October, with advance reader copies being sent out in the middle of the month.

This is also the final call for anyone who would like to join the ARC team. If you have already signed up, thank you. You do not need to do anything else. If you would like to receive an advance copy and consider leaving an honest review after publication, you can sign up below.

[JOIN THE ARC TEAM]

For those hearing about the book for the first time, here is a little more about it.

Why the Curlew Cries

Some places keep their secrets.

In the remote Irish countryside, old grief has a way of settling into the walls, and the Roddys have lived with theirs for generations.

When a long-buried darkness begins to surface, former Garda Jack Dawson is drawn into a story shaped by silence, loyalty and the things families do to survive.

As the past presses closer, Jack must decide how much truth one small community can bear, and what it will cost to uncover it.

Haunting, intimate and steeped in the unease of the rural west, Why the Curlew Cries is an Irish Gothic crime novel about memory, inheritance and the secrets we carry home.

The novel was inspired in part by the 1895 Tipperary changeling murder of Bridget Cleary and the unresolved disappearances associated with Ireland’s Vanishing Triangle.

Why the Curlew Cries is entirely fictional. It does not retell any of those cases or turn the people involved into characters. Instead, it draws on the old beliefs, unanswered questions and terrible silences surrounding them, as well as the families who have never stopped searching for answers.

It has been a long road getting this book finished, and I am looking forward to finally putting it into readers’ hands.

Thank you for staying with me.

J.M. Lane

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Why the Curlew Cries

J.M Lane — Wed, 9 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Coming October 2026

I’m delighted to announce that my first crime novel, Why the Curlew Cries, will be released this October.

Synopsis

Pre-Order now on Kindle

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Knowledge Is Only Powerful When We Share It

J.M Lane — Sun, 6 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Knowledge Is Only Powerful When We Share It

I’ve been working on a new series of articles that will be appearing on Writing.ie, and the idea behind them is actually very simple.

I don’t believe in holding on to knowledge.

We hear the phrase knowledge is power all the time, but I’m not sure I completely agree with it. Knowledge sitting in someone’s head, or hidden behind a locked door, isn’t particularly powerful.

The power is in sharing it.

One of the things I have noticed since becoming more involved in writing and publishing is just how much information is out there, but also how difficult some of it can be to access.

There are courses.

Webinars.

Masterclasses.
Consultations.
Marketing programmes.
Publishing programmes.

And, of course, plenty of people promising to tell you the secret of selling books if you hand over €99, €199 or €499 first.

Some of those services are excellent. People deserve to be paid for their expertise and their time, and I certainly don’t have an issue with that.

The problem comes when basic knowledge becomes a commodity.

Because once knowledge has a price tag attached to it, somebody is automatically standing outside the door.

For an independent writer, particularly someone publishing their first book, there may simply not be hundreds of euro available for courses, consultants and advertising programmes.

That shouldn’t mean they have to learn everything the hard way. And God knows there is enough to learn. Writing the book is only the beginning.

Suddenly you are trying to understand publishing platforms, covers, blurbs, keywords, social media, websites, mailing lists, reviews, advertising, bookshops, festivals and a dozen other things nobody mentioned when you sat down and typed Chapter One.

There is an entire industry built around writers wanting to know what to do next.

I have learned a lot by getting things wrong.

Probably more than I have learned by getting things right.

So with this series for Writing.ie, I want to share as much of that as I can.

Not theory for the sake of theory.

Not marketing language designed to make something simple sound complicated.

And definitely no suggestion that there is some secret formula I possess that will suddenly turn everybody into a bestselling author.

There isn’t.

What there are, however, are practical things writers can do.

Ways of helping people discover that your book actually exists.

Ways of using social media without spending your entire life shouting BUY MY BOOK into the internet.

Ways of thinking about marketing when your budget is small.

Things worth spending money on.

Things that probably aren’t.

Mistakes I’ve made.

Things that worked better than I expected.

And things I wish somebody had explained to me at the beginning.

That, for me, is what sharing knowledge should look like.

Someone learns something, turns around, and holds the door open for the person coming behind them.

Because gatekeeping knowledge doesn’t make an industry stronger.

It makes the gatekeepers stronger.

There is a difference.

Writing is difficult enough already. Publishing can be confusing, marketing can feel completely alien, and independent writers are often expected to somehow become writers, editors, designers, advertisers, publicists and social-media managers overnight.

If I know something that might make that road even slightly easier for somebody else, I would rather tell them.

So that is what this series is going to be about.

Practical information.
Accessible information.
Things you can actually try.

Some of it will work for you. Some of it won’t. There is no single route through publishing, and anyone telling you otherwise is probably trying to sell you the map.

But at least we can share what we have learned along the way. Knowledge is power.

But only when we pass it on.

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J.M Lane | Updates

Wild Atlantic Words

Samhain Harvest Festival

Joining Ragaire Issue 6 in Galway This November

My Haiku Have Found a Home in Rain and Roots

A poem for my prostate

Annie:The Ministry of Presence by John Lane

Absence

Know Where the Story Came From.

A strange start to October

Reading at Wild Atlantic Words 2026

Saturday, 10 October 20267pmFestival Dome, Bridge Lane, Castlebar, Co. Mayo

A New Project: Bringing My Poetry to Life Through Music

Ragaire Issue 6 Launch

Why the Curlew Cries Is Coming This October

The Modern Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

The Vanishing Triangle.

Jo Jo Dullard

Fiona Pender

Deirdre Jacob

Fiona Sinnott

Why the Curlew Cries is fiction.

When Folklore Turns Deadly: Bridget Cleary and the Shadow Behind Why the Curlew Cries

Sources and further reading

JM Lane: Fourth Place in the Witty Wicklow Competition

Ring of Culture Turns One

Why the Curlew Cries: October Release and Final ARC Call

[JOIN THE ARC TEAM]

Why the Curlew Cries

Why the Curlew Cries

Synopsis

Knowledge Is Only Powerful When We Share It

Saturday, 10 October 2026
7pm
Festival Dome, Bridge Lane, Castlebar, Co. Mayo