Story Behind The Book
The Rollicking Adventures of Tam O'Hare was a long time in the making - nine years, to be precise. I started the book in December of 1998 after telling the stories to my, then, six-year-old twin daughters. At the time, their mother was away from our home undergoing in-patient treatment for her alcoholism (much to her credit, she has been dry ever since, and is still in recovery). So I was spending lots of extra time with Abby and Bryn, wanting to assure them that I was there, and that they were secure, in light of the fact that their mom was gone from us for such an extended period of time. One of the things I did with regularity was read to my daughters, but then I started telling little tales to them at bedtime and while we were just hanging around the house. After making up a few stories of a medieval Scottish mouse, they wanted to see what he looked like, so we all lay down on the living room floor and started drawing pictures with markers. When we first started drawing, Tam O'Hare wasn't Tam O'Hare at all, he was originally William the Mouse, bekilted and very Scottish - I think I still have the original magic marker sketch of him in a box somewhere. While playing with stick figures and sketches on that living room floor, William eventually evolved into a rabbit - an Irish rabbit named Tam O'Hare. (O'Hare = hare = rabbit... clever, eh...?) heh. Anyway, we were all laying on the living room floor, drawing pictures, and Tam just came out. He apparantly wanted to be born, and there was no denying him. The girls said they were "ok" with me changing William from a mouse into a rabbit. The Scottish-to-Irish thing had little affect on them, but it was a bit of a struggle for me to abandon my Welsh/Scot ancestry for Irish. But the girls liked the name change, so it stuck.