You’ve given scores of public performances across Europe and North America. How does engaging a live audience compare with writing a book for unseen readers?

Treasa O’Driscoll: A live presentation exists only in the moment of performance whereas the written word remains and can be revisited. Also, as my editor and I discovered, you can constantly revise a manuscript but you cannot recast a performance once it has been given. So you just rehearse more before going on stage, instead!
          However, the engagement of either a visible audience or unseen readers requires striking a fine balance between the universal and the personal. Mood, venue and audience participation are variables, of course, in the performing experience. I found that my stage experience helped shape an art of communication that in fact prepared me for the more solitary and exacting enterprise that writing entails.

 What motivated you to write Celtic Woman?

O’Driscoll: My husband, a professor of English, a scholar, and champion of Celtic Studies, was always encouraging me to write. Then books and writers were a central feature of our life together, as well. I came into contact with several accomplished artists about whom I aspired to write, so that, too, was part of the motivation.
          My study of Rudolf Steiner’s writings was itself an inspiring and significant spur in getting me going, I realize, as was my ever-keen reading of poetry.
          I had already decided to write a book when unexpectedly a friend, Joy Redfield-Kwapien, commissioned this memoir after I accompanied her and her husband on a tour of Ireland. Our conversations on the road touched on such mutual interest as poetry, memory, spirituality, destiny, friendship and the Irish/Celtic tradition in which I had been reared. She urged me to put in writing what flowed so naturally from my experiences and learning as we spoke, so those touring talks actually provided content around which parts of this book was formed.

 Do you have a succinct definition for what love is, since you mention it so often in the book?

O’Driscoll: I approach love from the point of view of force rather than sentiment. This force expresses itself in and through us in a threefold way—as idea at the level of mind, as meaning or beauty at the level of feeling, and as action at the physical level of the body.
          The human soul, regardless of one’s cultural background, circumstance or belief, is eternally nourished and expanded by love. This is one of the great wonders of life, the stuff of relationship, and the true source of happiness. That kind of love, as force, is accessible to all.

 Your book will surely appeal to men and women of all ages, but among your early readers, women in particular have expressed appreciation for your chapter on sexual love. Can you explain why?

O’Driscoll: There is a psychological component to a woman’s sexual nature, which leads in turn to fascination with any methodology or philosophy that can advance her more conscious, and thus healthier, engagement with this aspect of the game of life.
          For most women, sex is primarily a function of relationship and not something to be cultivated for its own sake. A woman’s need for relationship is as compelling in her as the physical desire of the body is urgent in the man. Enduring attraction between the sexes depends on the perpetuation and recognition of these differences.
That particular chapter is my attempt to bridge the gap between the mystification that surrounded sex in the Ireland of my youth and the gathered wisdom of my own experience. I am, needless to say, still learning!

 Is there a central message you would like the book to convey?

O’Driscoll: My fundamental approach to life coincides with that of poet John Keats who characterized our world as a “vale of soul making” rather than the “vale of tears” it is often made out to be.
          Significantly, the original word for poetry in Greek is making, and what poetry makes is meaning. Every human life is a work of art in the making, like poetry, and that is my “message.” Also, there is satisfaction, as I discovered, in tracing the patterns of serendipity that weave through one’s life and story. So the message in that is for each person to see such patterns in his or her own life because they help keep us on the track of meaning and destiny.

 Robert Sardello, the internationally renowned author of Freeing the Soul from Fear and founder of the School of Spiritual Psychology in North Carolina, praises your book as the forerunner of a new genre he calls a “soul memoir.” What do you think he means by that term?

O’Driscoll: It’s a lovely expression, isn’t it? Dr. Sardello, like any other reader, finds that this memoir recalls events, ideas, and encounters that have variously tried, tempered, and enriched my soul. Of course the soul is where impressions of the senses and intuitions of the spirit are distilled into meaning. When feelings of sympathy and antipathy are brought into balance, soul qualities such as equanimity, courage, patience, and truthfulness arise of their own accord. The self-development of each individual in turn has its bearing on the whole, since the world soul reflects the evolutionary patterns of all human souls. Because I approach the journey of life from this point of view, Robert Sardello observed that reading my story “heightened the possibility of others consciously discovering their own soul life.”
          If Celtic Woman provides this key to unlock meaning in someone else’s life, I’ll be delighted—whatever genre the work itself gets classified under!