S4E15: Peter Quinn - Da Bard of Da Bronx

Speechwriter, novelist, essayist, and now memoirist Peter Quinn returns to Irish Stew to share tales from his home borough of New York City and beyond, captured in his new book, Cross Bronx: A Writing Life.Join us as Peter spins stories from his rise up through Irish American middle-class respectability in New York’s northernmost borough, The Bronx, which Quinn describes as “a small-scale Yugoslavia. Ethnic enclaves were interspersed amid areas in which, though physically mingled; groups lived psychically apart. We thought of ourselves in terms of neighborhoods and parishes.”Quinn charts his shift from collaborative but anonymous work as a speechwriter at the highest echelons of political and corporate America, to his solitary, but no longer anonymous work writing Banished Children of Eve, Hour of the Cat, and other novels, and finally to the inward-looking, self-reflecting, warts-and-all odyssey of writing his memoir…a gift to his family and to us.We drive along Peter Quinn’s personal Cross Bronx Expressway, though the twists and turns of his Irish American life, his family dynamics, his pull towards history, his dedication to the written word, his perceptions of the Irish in America, a few salty anecdotes on New York notables, and though it all, his on-again, off-again, ultimately eternally “on” love story with “The Girl from Hot Dog Beach.”Cross Bronx: A Writing Life is available at Fordham University Press and all major booksellers, including Amazon.Send us Fan Mail