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Red Thread Publishing

We are a dynamic publishing company that produces award-winning, nonfiction books that inspire, educate, and entertain our readers. Our small team is passionate about literature and committed to supporting authors in sharing their stories with the world.

Red Thread Publishing houses two imprints.
Red Thread Books was founded to support 10,000 women to become successful published authorpreneurs & thought leaders. We have expanded to incorporate a second imprint
Red Falcon Press for all genders, encouraging more silenced and marginalized folks to share their voices & stories.
To date, we have supported 280+ people from 26 countries to Write and Publish their books.

Hybrid publisher Worldwide 39 categories

1106 Design, LLC

Dear Author,

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If this sounds like a better way to publish your book, I invite you to browse our services, design samples, no-surprises pricing, outstanding customer reviews, and educational articles at https://1106design.com. You can download a free PDF of my book, "Publish Like the Pros: A Brief Guide to Quality Self-Publishing and an Insider's Look at a Misunderstood Industry," and request a free, no-obligation consultation.

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Michele DeFilippo, owner

Service publisher Worldwide All categories

Atmosphere Press

250 copies • Partial manuscript.
Atmosphere Press is an independent publisher dedicated to author rights. We publish in all genres and have an exceptional editorial, design, and promotional staff. We stand for Honesty, Transparency, Professionalism, and Kindness. We want our authors and their readers to be blown away when they first hold that book in their hands. It needs to look good inside and out, and feel good to the touch. And, of course, the words need to be top-notch, and our editors are devoted to making that the case.

Service publisher Worldwide 22 categories

eBooks2go

100 copies • Completed manuscript.
eBooks2go, Inc. was founded in 2011 to provide the missing link for all your publishing needs. Our end-to-end solutions provide the guidance and support that enable publishers and independent authors to pursue their passions. To date, we have helped more than 1,000 authors and 250 publishers worldwide. We offer an array of simple and affordable solutions to assist self-publishing authors at every stage of the book publishing process. Our comprehensive service offering includes editing, print and eBook production, book marketing, cover designs, ISBN registration, and even website designs. We are a single source for all of your publishing needs.

Service publisher Worldwide 22 categories

It means something to be, as was my father and his father, the second son. Or to put it very simply and in terms of the old farming days where my grandfather and beyond were born and raised: the one who will not inherit the farm. That farm might exist in your soul and not in acres. But it is there. You will not be the King.

My father was born into quite a particular constellation. He had a father with a daughter from a previous marriage, he had an older brother and he had a life of moving on seemingly every year as the family grew and his father followed work.

I know what it's like to live a transitory life – I have moved a lot in my adult life, having chalked up maybe thirty home addresses in the fifty years since I left my Leighlin Road home address at age twenty one – but for a child that must have its effect. Year after year in a new school, needing to make (or not make) new friends. New home, new bed. It's no wonder that in his adult life my father sought deep roots with family all around him. My late brother Kevin told me that in my Dad's last years he expressed to Kevin the fear that he would end up a lonely old man sitting on a park bench.

As if. Bookmark that thought for later. He was surrounded by love and adoration in his years as a father and grandfather.

But I am jumping far too far ahead: my Dad as a young boy had only one permanent true north. His parents. Everything else came and went and I even wonder about the scenes as he and growing collection of siblings moved from one home to another. How much did they even carry with them? And how? In the early years of the twentieth century you couldn't go online and hire U-Haul. And how did it feel for Dad to face new surroundings and kids time and time again? There were just a couple of years between him and older brother Peter and next in line after him Paddy. I imagine their being shoulder to shoulder together in those new scenarios. Don't fuck with the Duffy brothers when they walk into the schoolyard.

Speaking of school, the story goes that my Dad 'finished' his education by the age of eleven. This would match with the time when the family moved permanently to Brabazon Street in Dublin. It was also when he began his hard, hard working life. He started out as a messenger boy in this rough and rowdy capital city that was new to him and would be home for the rest of his life. I trust that by then he would have learned solid survival skills. After all, he had his father's Irish and Scottish blood in him.

While I know nothing of my father's childhood and only scraps until his later teens, the city that had become his home has more than enough recorded history to it for me to match its events with his youth. For instance, as Kevin was born in 1913 – the year of the trade union versus big industry showdown known as 'the big lock-out' – I know Dad, age ten, would at least have witnessed such turmoil. And of course the 1916 Easter Rebellion. with the Irish yet again fighting to free themselves from British rule, happened when he was a few months short of thirteen years old and was living no more than a ten minute cycle from O'Connell Street where the IRA had set up their battle headquarters in the General Post Office.

My Dad played his part in that rebellion. He acted as courier bringing messages back and forth between the GPO and the strategic outpost of Boland's Bakery in Ringsend where his lifelong hero Eamon de Valera was in command.

Dad's political activity grew from there. He was always committed to a free and independent Ireland. When the entire deadly farce of Michael Collins and Dev and the Treaty and Sinn Féin came along, he and his brothers were in on the fight. When the notorious Black and Tans were unleashed on Ireland I know that my Dad was part of the resistance. While his kid brother Kevin had memories of throwing stones and bottles at the Tan jeeps patrolling the streets, another family recollection (again, thanks to Joe Ennis) was of their being a pistol in the home that had to be smuggled out by Joe's mother, Nelly, to prevent all the Duffy men from being arrested if it were found.

It was the worst of times but also the best of times: because in the midst of all this Barney, working in a pub in the Summerhill area of north Dublin city, met the young woman who would become his wife: Molly Dowdall.

My Dad was a shy man. He was tall and handsome with dark hair framing very bright blue eyes and was for sure a head-turner for the ladies. But he had more of a way with the drink than he had with the ladies. My Mam was three years younger than him and was probably sweet sixteen when she set her sights on him. How they finally got together is a lovely story: Molly would look for any and every reason to go into the pub to get change or tobacco or whatever for her parents but Barney was always too shy to engage with her. Finally, one day Molly saw her chance: she was cycling along and saw Barney and 'accidentally on purpose' fell off the bike so that Barney would go to her and help her. Fourteen children and some thirty years later I came along.

When Barney met Molly's parents, they were unimpressed. They didn't feel he was up to the standard they expected for their daughter. Molly's mother, an austere woman, had probably hoped her daughter would find a young man with a trade or with better prospects. Molly met Barney's family. Barney and his brothers and sister adored their mother, Ellen. Molly said Ellen was a very beautiful woman, and remembered how, when she visited their home in Brabazon Street, Ellen would always be wearing a white apron and have a white cloth on the table. Ellen was very elegant, and she usually wore tops with the high-neck Victorian collars and kept her hair tied back in a bun. Ellen Duffy said to Molly 'please take care of my Barney.' He was the frail one in the family, always thin and delicate. He had always had problems with his stomach.

Barney and Molly were in love, and in the years of their courtship they accepted the hardships that lay in store for a young couple such as them in an impoverished Ireland.  Barney and Molly were married on 18th July 1926. Molly had just turned 19. It was the day before Barney's 23rd birthday. They had been courting for three years. The wedding took place in Our Lady of Lourdes church on Gloucester Street. Sadly, there is no photograph of the newlyweds. But events a few months later gave what was probably the reason for no photographs being passed down for posterity: Molly was five months pregnant.

My father was a very affable man. Perhaps I am over-thinking this when I say that as a younger son you learn to be so. You get to roll with the punches. I know that I, as the youngest son, am no alpha male. My Dad also had a quality that I believe I share: he was a good drunk. My cousin Joe Ennis told me that Dad's oldest brother Peter never drank but a younger brother, John, could become violent after as little as a couple of drinks. I mention this in relation to the way things worked between my parents. My Mam was quite volatile, whereas Dad was always the one who calmed the waters. However, as a shy and quiet man married to a fiery and emotional woman, maybe he sacrificed or suppressed more of his feelings than were good for him.

The first blast of this fusion would have hit Dad in the early months of the marriage. On November 5th, four months after the wedding, Barney's mother Ellen died. Later the same month, Molly gave birth to a daughter in the Rotunda Hospital. Barney and Molly named the child Ellen. Their address on the birth certificate is 41, Summerhill. This child died two months later on February 1st 1927. The cause of death is stated as 'convulsions and cardiac failure' – the baby had taken a seizure and died. By then Barney and Molly were living with Molly's parents at 8, Casino Road. The certificate also states that Barney witnessed and reported the death.

Again a fact I knew and an emotion I have never tried to enter. The scene when my father signed a form stating that he had witnessed the death of his first baby child. What impact does that have?

My father had lived through the loss of his mother, the birth of his first child and the death of that child in the space of  two months.

I have researched and written about these dates, but I never sat with them. Until now and this book. How did it feel? How did my father let this pain out? I can sense that Mam would have been bereft. And Dad was living with her and her parents when all this was happening. How much did he suffer? How much did he have to keep in?

That's the bridge I keep on trying to cross in this book.

Again I am trying to picture the scene when my Dad is at the graveside of his baby daughter. I am proud to say that through research our family found the grave of baby Ellen and had a renewed ceremony for her in the early 2000s. It is in an area of the cemetery that was a communal grave for babies, indicating how poor my parents were. But back then in 1927. That burial day in Mount Jerome cemetery: the thought that just months before and almost in direct sight of this grave my father had stood with his father and siblings as his mother's coffin was lowered into the ground.

I wish now that I could have gone out for a drink with my Dad that night. What would he have said? Would he have spoken at all? I believe he would have kept it all in. I believe he would have supported his grieving wife and then staunchly gotten on with his life: work to do.

One of my earliest produced works was a one-act play called 'Henry Ford Killed my Father'. The story was that a man dies and goes to the gates of Heaven only to find out, from Saint Peter, that the place has been taken over by Ford who runs it on the best rote for prayer productivity: humans turned into machine parts, a soul-destroying afterlife and the benefits of 'time and devotion work study'. I despised the numbing work my father went through without appreciating the stability it finally meant for him and my mother. Now, I wish I could have seen him there at work on the assembly line. In Robert Bly's book 'Iron John' he laments how, in the industrial age, sons were separated from he learning and sharing of their fathers at work. I envy my brother Luke who had worked with our father in Buckley's. Back then, however, as a moody teen, I wrote a scathing song about my father's working life:

I remember the dead look on my father's face

As he walked out each day to, to take up his place

On a car building line where he fitted on doors

Each one the same as the thousands before

And if that's really living I'd rather be dead

That's what I said: I'd rather be dead.

In trade for his soul (as I unkindly saw it), there was a modest enjoyment of life in these later years. Our family was no richer or poorer than our neighbours, but Dad could have his few drinks and smokes. I vividly recall that Dad bought ten-packs of Players, unfiltered, and would often light one up for a few drags and then carefully stub it out and prop it on his ear to light it up again later. Dad had a permanent dark mark on that niche of his ear. He enjoyed gambling, but never for more than pennies: the 'pitch and toss' games he loved so much, played at street corners, were played for the camaraderie and distraction he enjoyed rather than the lure of profit. Dad enjoyed the company of men, from factory floor to street corner. The same with poker games or betting on the horses. I remember Saturday afternoons when I, perhaps ten years old, would be sent to the local betting office down by Sundrive Park with a few coins and his list of bets. Imagine a kid nowadays walking into a betting office and handing over coins and a list of bets. Just as it was a delight for me to be allowed sit at the table of the regular Sunday afternoon poker games with Dad's sons and sons-in-law.

But wait.

I am not in the story yet. I am skipping over three key events of 1952 that need to be examined in much closer detail in terms of the emotional impact on my Dad: my birth, the arrest of my brother Peter, and the mental collapse of my mother.

It seems to me that another father to son trademark has been that traumatic events come not as a heavy rain but as a merciless storm.

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