SARAH STEWART TAYLOR

Getting ready for a journey . . .

I've always loved old graveyards. That's why the protagonist of my Sweeney St. George mystery series is an art historian specializing in funerary art and gravestone iconography. Like me, Sweeney finds cemeteries beautiful, intriguing, peaceful, melancholy, and . . . full of stories. Everywhere you turn in a graveyard you can find a story, or part of one. Who was Belinda? Besides the wife of Arad Evans, that is? Graveyards are full of questions and mysteries. On the slate and

WHAT IF . . ? The Expeditioners series started with a series of What-Ifs? What if the computers all crashed and it was discovered that the maps of the world were all wrong? What if there were new places to explore, places not on the official maps of the world? What if a 13-year-old boy, the son of a famous explorer who had disappeared while on an expedition, came into possession of half of a mysterious map? The Expeditioners series is my answer to these questions and more! Fi

Last week, I got to tell a story about Grace O'Malley (or Gráinne Mhaol, or Graunuile,) the Sea Queen (or Pirate Queen) of Connacht to a group of friends and strangers, and to play some Irish music on my cello. It was a wonderful night and a culmination of sorts for me. I lived in Dublin in the 1990s and got my Masters degree in Irish Literature at Trinity College. Ever since I returned home, I've experienced a need to regularly "Scratch my Irish," as I've come to think of it