This week’s story, “Chuck Murphy’s Last Run,” is about a gang of aging Irish bikers who are fulfilling the dying wish of their departed compatriot, Chuck (Boyo) Murphy. When did you start thinking about this group of men?

Late last summer, I was coming back from a swim at Tramore, a famous beach in County Waterford, when I walked into the middle of a bike show on the seafront. There were hundreds of bikers milling around cheerfully in the showery sunshine and proudly displaying their hogs. A dude of a certain age walked past me in full Hells Angels-type leather regalia, but then I saw that his T-shirt read “Sons of Arthritis—Ibuprofen Chapter,” and at once I offered up my thanks to the short-story gods. My experience and belief is that the best stories come in at a glance like this, in a single visual image.

These are, in fact, real T-shirts, sold by an American company. Do you have one yourself?

Not yet—I’m biding my time. When I read the T-shirt caption, I thought, This is too good; if the dude came up with it himself, it doesn’t seem fair to just steal it. But it was so good, I reckoned it must be a meme of some kind. I looked it up and it turned out that the T-shirts are indeed a very popular gift item for the elderly biker in your life.

The men—six in total, now that Chuck Murphy has died—are in their sixties and seventies. They’re going on a run to Strandhill, on the Sligo coast, to scatter his ashes. Why did you choose that particular place?

I live in south County Sligo and it’s just a half-hour spin to go and walk the very long and beautiful beach at Strandhill. It’s familiar and majestic terrain and I know its light and feeling very well. I’m always interested, too, in the anthropology of the seafront, the way that it has always been a natural habitat for what we used to call “youth cults.” But, of course, this is all very elderly stuff now—we’re going back more than sixty years to the mods and rockers first battling it out on Brighton beach. One of the things the story is interested in is what happens when those “youths” have reached the three-score-years-and-ten mark, or thereabouts. The title of the great Raymond Carver story “After the Denim” comes to mind here.

Did you imagine there’d be a run-in between bikers and surfers when you began the story?

These things are inevitable. I’m not a surfer but I am always on the beach, and maybe this is an outrageous statement, but I wonder: Is it possible to notice an ever so slightly sniffy quality about the surfing crowd? There’s a kind of sense with them of, This whole beach thing is really our vibe and the rest of you are just spectators. This is the sort of attitude that our bikers are going to pick up on, and not in an amused way.

As the narrator, Stephen, observes, “It is a dismaying aspect of the Irish bike tramp’s lot that even the most epic of journeys tend to run out of road after three or four hours. This is a small island, our horizons are cruelly foreshortened.” Do you think their American counterparts would recognize these men? Or does something about the size and culture of Ireland change the lot of the biker there?

The fact of Ireland infects and taints everything—emotions naturally tend to heighten here and events can quickly incline towards the operatic—but, yes, I think their American cousins would still recognize these lads well enough. There are biker clubs, chartered and otherwise, all over the country, and there have been since the late nineteen-sixties. I suppose that, added to the natural romance of the open road, there is an added tang for the Irish biker, which is the still potent romance of the old fading Americana—dreams of big skies, gleaming machines, endless highways.

Chuck’s ashes are not so much scattered as taken by the wind. Afterward, the men make the most of Strandhill’s small-plates scene. Did you want to subvert expectations by way of the food they eat? Or is it a given that, in the Ireland of 2026, small plates are going to be in the picture?

Given that we’re a people traditionally reared on buckets of potatoes and lumps of boiled ham the size of your father’s head, the transition to a most delicate and refined small-plates scene has really been something to see. There’s been an incredible improvement in the Irish seaside-dining experience over the last twenty years or so, and the best of it now is as innovative and edgy as you’ll get in Denmark, and priced accordingly. You honestly can’t throw a Frisbee on an Irish beach these days without it passing over at least a couple of small-plates joints.

The men have known each other for decades, but grief over Murphy’s death introduces a vulnerability that they don’t necessarily always reveal to one another. How important is their friendship in helping them navigate the vicissitudes of life? And how awkward is it for them to acknowledge this in any way?

They’re on a kind of spectrum as regards emotional intimacy—in terms of their feelings, our narrator, Stephen, and Rog Dockery are still holding it all back, while Tall Paul and Barney are moving with the times, and more inclined to put it all out there, more inclined to share. I think the story is primarily concerned with fraternity, in the original sense of brotherhood, and how important it can be in getting men through the hard times. It amazes me, actually, how infrequently men write about fraternity.

Was this a fun story to write?

I loved the characters and I had a ball with them and I really missed them when they had disappeared over the horizon. ♦