Author Talk with Shelter Island Reporter editor: ‘My Life In Pieces,’ a journalist looks back on a career

On Saturday, July 26 at 5 p.m., the Reporter’s Editor Ambrose Clancy will discuss his new book, “My Life in Pieces: Writers, Rogues, The Road and The Rock.”

When the book was published recently, his colleague Susan Carey Dempsey wrote, “Longtime readers of the Reporter have gotten to know Ambrose Clancy in black and white, through word images formed by squiggles of ink against the white pages of the newspaper each week. Since arriving in 2012 he’s helped illuminate events in the life of a small world sheltered by islands. Quietly standing to the side of an event like the Veteran’s Day service, Memorial Day or the Turkey Plunge, he draws out Islanders to give voice to the quirks and sentiments of the men, women and children who call home a place they affectionately refer to as ‘The Rock.’”

In “My Life in Pieces,” Mr. Clancy is looking back at four decades of his journalism for, among other outlets, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, GQ, The Nation and the Reporter. The book is divided into five distinct sections including a section called “Gimme Shelter” which examines Shelter Island history, small town gossip, an unsolved homicide and the stories of people who have intrigued him along the way.

John Colby, the publisher of Brick Tower Press and a Shelter Island resident, encouraged Mr. Clancy to put his journalism into book form. “My Life in Pieces” is available from Finley’s Fiction on Shelter Island, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Brick Tower Press.

Mr. Clancy is the author of two other books, “The Night Line: a Memoir of Work,” with the photographer Peter Donahoe, and a novel, “Blind Pilot,” which Brick Tower Press is reissuing as a paperback. The New York Times noted that the novel is, “A chillingly, well-informed thriller about Irish terrorism … A series of gripping and vividly narrated events … Striking pieces of imaginative writing. …” The Newsday reviewer said: “Blind Pilot is writing of the highest order, absolutely compelling, an astonishing accomplishment …”

In his foreword to “My Life In Pieces,” the accomplished author and journalist Robert Lipsyte, who is also a Reporter columnist, writes: “Clancy can uncoil a sentence like a silken rope, snap it like a whip, tie up a complicated thought. He can write long, he can write short, he can build a case, he can murmur a spooky tale.”

Don’t miss this very special Author’s Talk under the tent at the Community Center.