Irish magic from Jennifer Deibel – the best- selling and award-winning author of a series of charming Emerald Isle novels combining history, family, faith and romance.

Her newest book, The Irish Matchmaker…introduces matchmaker Catriona Daly.

Hi I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Jennifer talks about how a US born gal fell in love with Ireland. and her latest book The Irish Matchmaker. As daughter of a well-known matchmaker, Catríona Daly is no stranger to the business of love – and she sees it as her ticket away from the sleepy village that only comes alive during the annual matchmaking festival.

Our Giveaway this week

Our Giveaway this week is Summer Sleuthing – June Mystery Thrillers. Sadie’s Vow – Book #1 in my Home At Last San Francisco historical mystery series is included.

Stock up on some great summer reading here!

download free summer mysteries

​https://books.bookfunnel.com/summersleuthing/9mwtzhs5pv

Before we get to Jennifer – a reminder You can help defray the costs of production by buying me a cup of coffee on buymeacoffee.com/jennywheelx

And if you enjoy the show. Leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.

Links to things mentioned in the episode

A Dance In Donegal, Jennifer Deibel:  https://www.amazon.com/Dance-Donegal-Jennifer-Deibel/dp/0800738411

The Princess Bride (movie) Irish location:  https://giggster.com/guide/movie-location/where-was-the-princess-bride-filmed#:

Lisdoonvarna:  https://matchmakerireland.com/

https://www.ireland.com/en-us/destinations/county/clare/lisdoonvarna

The Maid of Ballymacool, Jennifer Deilbel: https://jenniferdeibel.com/books/the-maid-of-ballymacool/

Willie Daly, Irish matchmaker: https://www.williedaly.com/

Books Jennifer is reading:

Jaime Jo Wright, The Lost Boys of Barlow Theater: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90203406-the-lost-boys-of-barlowe-theater

Natalie Walters Snap agency series:  https://www.amazon.com/The-SNAP-Agency-3-book-series/dp/B08XW1LGC3

Where to find Jennifer Online

Website: www.jenniferdeibel.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferdeibel_author

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JenniferDeibelAuthor

Introducing author Jennifer Deibel

But now, here’s Jennifer Hello there, Jennifer,  and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Jennifer Deibel – Historical Irish mysteries with magic

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Jennifer. Hello there, Jennifer, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Jennifer Deibel: Hi Jenny. Thanks so much for having me. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Jenny Wheeler: These Irish stories are both best sellers and award winners.

 How did you come to start on the Irish story thread?

Jennifer Deibel: It all feels like it happened by accident, but I believe everything happens by design. My husband and I had lived in County Donegal for two years as students. We were studying the language and the culture. My husband had fallen in love with all things Celtic after spending a summer abroad in Wales during university.

We spent two years there and when we came back I was expecting our first baby. He went into graduate school in Texas and I was struggling to process all we had experienced in those two years.

An Irish American girl moves to Donegal

The idea for what would eventually become my debut novel, A Dance in Donegal, came to me, a story about an Irish American girl who moves to rural Donegal to teach.

I started writing it then and of course once my baby was born, it sat for a very long time. It took about 15 years for me to actually finish the whole manuscript.

During which time we moved back to Ireland and lived in County Galway. While we were there, we had our son and I heard about a parenting website that was starting up called The Better Mom and they were looking for contributors.

I applied there and was accepted and was encouraged to start my own blog, so readers would have a place to go to if they liked what I had to say on The Better Mom.

My blog opened the door for me to write for some other publications across the country, and that’s when I started making the connections that would eventually lead to my first book contract, which I signed, I believe in 2018.

It was a long road, and I never thought as a child that I would write a book. But I always thought it was something that would be fun to do. I just didn’t think I was capable of it. So that time in Ireland really is what planted the seeds of ideas for all of these stories.

Was there a little Celtic in their blood?

Jenny Wheeler: Did either you or your husband have Irish ancestry that might explain that magic thing that seemed to have captivated you?

Jennifer Deibel: Absolutely. My maiden name is Martin and where we lived in Galway was actually not too far from one of the main Martin strongholds in Ireland centuries ago.

So I’ve got that background is in my blood. My husband has English and Welsh on his side. His grandmother was born right on the border of Wales in England, so we’ve got the Celtic blood in our veins for sure.

Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s great. Now, the one we are talking about today is the fourth in this Irish series, The Irish Matchmaker. And I hadn’t realized until I read the book that matchmaking is closely woven into Ireland as a tradition. The idea of a village matchmaker… I gather that it still does exist today in these days of Tinder.

Tell us about the matchmaker in Irish village life.

Jennifer Deibel: So, it’s really fascinating. I first learned about it when we were living in Galway, and we would have tour groups come over that we would lead and we would take them all around and driving from Galway City down to the Cliffs of Mohr, which to some people might be better known as the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride (movie).

We passed through a little village called Lisdoonvarna, and there was always a huge billboard for their annual matchmaking festival.

The more I looked into it, I discovered that in this particular village it sarted in the late 18 hundreds when a doctor discovered the mineral content of the wells in that area were very high and could be used for medicinal purposes.

The fancy, rich, cultured folk would come in the fall to take the waters and use that opportunity to set their children up with each other because it was one of the few times that gentrified people were around other people of their stations to be able to do that.

A third generation Irish matchmaker

At the same time, the harvest had just ended and the farmers were coming into town to spend their money and make trades and do market days with their livestock and things like that.

The farmers finally had time and money to look for love. It was born out of this, seeming happenstance and it continues on for the entire month of September.

To this day, Willie Daly is the current matchmaker. He’s third generation, and he continues to match people up all throughout the festival and is pretty well known worldwide for it.

Jenny Wheeler: Did you get to talk to Willie Daly?

Jennifer Deibel: I did. We spoke over email multiple times. We tried to set up a phone call, but that was difficult to do with him, of course, being in Ireland and me being in America and he wasn’t super comfortable with Zoom.

But he was able to provide me with lots of valuable information about what it was like for him as a child growing up with a father who was a matchmaker, as well as his time as a matchmaker himself.

And he also wrote a memoir called Ireland’s Last Matchmaker. And it’s an absolutely charming read. If you’re ever wondering what it’s like. It reads like a novel almost and gives the details of what goes into matchmaking.

What’s the terminology for each different part of the process and what does that look like, and what goes into deciding who would be a good match and who wouldn’t be, and all of that.

It’s absolutely fascinating, and invaluable to me through the course of writing this book, for sure.

A successful family business

Jenny Wheeler: Catriona, your heroine and her father Jimmy, run a very successful family business as matchmakers.

They have inherited this down the generations, and I gather that there is an aspect of it that is an inherited skill as well as, perhaps some of it being learned almost like an intuition. Tell us about that aspect of it.

Jennifer Deibel: I think you can’t help – like any family business – if you grow up in that environment, you can’t help but naturally absorb a lot of the skills and thought processes and intuition that goes with it.

My husband’s family were a mechanic and auto family and it seems like they all are born knowing all this stuff about cars.

And I think that’s how it was for Catriona and Jimmy and certainly how it seemed to be for Willie, our real life matchmaker.

Being immersed in that from day one. And being able to have a front row seat to that. You get to learn how to read people in a way that I think other people might miss.

And you learn how to look beyond just the surface. While two people might seem good on paper for one another, sometimes there’s something within the meeting that a matchmaker might pick up on that someone in the general public might not.

And I think it’s a little bit genetic and a little bit learned just from being immersed in that process and in that culture and having a life of observation and reading people, which I think is really cool.

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Always the bridesmaid, never the bride

Jenny Wheeler: The sense of Irish village life very much comes through strongly in the story. And Catriona is wanting to change the direction of her life.

She’s been a matchmaker for quite some time, probably a decade or more, and she’s got to the point where she wants a match of her own. She decides in this book to perhaps do something that isn’t quite within the rules of matchmaking and that is manipulate a man for herself. Tell us a bit about that.

Jennifer Deibel: Yes, so poor Catriona. She’s reached the phase of always a bridesmaid, never the bride.

She’s very good at what she does and so everybody comes to her for their matches, her and her father. And she is at the point now where she wants that love for herself. She’s starting to get a little bit of a root of bitterness.

In the match that she’s making in the opening chapters of the book, we see she has a hard time watching the happiness of the bride and groom-to-be because she wants it so badly for herself and she doesn’t really see the kind of man that she wants in the tiny farming village of Lisdoonvarna.

She doesn’t want a life of poverty and the only way she can do it is to finagle a match with a man above her station,

Bringing the charm of Irish stories to the world

She doesn’t really think that’s possible until a gentleman returns who had been at the festival the previous year and was matched with or by a matchmaker from the neighbouring village and they’re going to use the Daly family services and that’s when her plan hatches. She plans to see if she can match him with herself and she sees it as her last chance to “get out of Dodge” and finally get to the life of luxury that she so deeply desires, or thinks she desires.

Jenny Wheeler: You say on your website that your books aim to bring all the charm of an Irish village to your story as well as hope and encouragement of faith.

I wonder if you’d like to expand on that a little bit and perhaps try and explain to us what is the special secret of Irish culture.

Jennifer Deibel: I think anybody who’s traveled to Ireland can attest to this. There is something about it that gets under your skin and haunts you forever, once you leave.

The people are warm and inviting. They’re far deeper, more spiritual and philosophical people, than others might think.

On the surface, they have the reputation of being the drinkers and the fighters and they’re happy-go-lucky, which they are in their own right, but they look at the world in a way that nobody else does.

And there’s some sort of magic mixture when you’ve got the Irish sea air, the rolling Green Hills, the music, the language, all coming together with that Irish spirit of life.

Seeing the fingerprint of the Creator

And it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve been blessed to be able to travel all over Europe and America, and I’ve never found anything like it. And in my own spiritual journey I think those years in Ireland, in some ways, I felt closer to God and more rooted in my faith than I have at any other time.

Everywhere you look you can’t help but see the fingerprints of the Creator and see the beauty of diversity in the language and the culture. It’s intoxicating. And I want to be able to bring that to people who will never be able to step on a plane and experience it for themselves.

Jenny Wheeler: You are very upfront about these being inspirational fiction books, so faith does play an element. How do you balance that for the people who perhaps don’t share your faith, to make the story still fun for them?

Jennifer Deibel: I try to approach it as organically as possible. If you were to read all four of my books, you would see the spiritual thread or arc is very different in each of them. In some it’s more upfront and more, articulated than in others and others it’s much more subtle, and I think that’s the way faith is for everybody.

For some people it’s very strong and they’re very vocal about it. For others, it’s more quiet.

Honesty an important part of faith

I try to make it be more about the character’s journey in their own faith, rather than trying to make it a sermon or telling other people what they should believe. I want them to get that experience through the lens of somebody else, which is why we read.

We want to be able to experience something through someone else’s eyes. I think that way it’s a little less intimidating and a little more accessible to people, no matter where they are on their faith journey.

Jenny Wheeler: In this book, most of the main characters have become a little bit disillusioned or disappointed in their faith. They express those feelings of doubt or uncertainty, don’t they?

Jennifer Deibel: Absolutely. And I think that’s important too for people who have been people of faith or followers of Jesus or a Christian, or however you want to say it for a long time, as well as people who have no idea what that might mean.

I think it is important that we’re honest with ourselves and with our Creator about our struggles and doubts because that’s what makes us human and that is what makes it so relatable

When you think, gosh, I’ve had those same questions. Like I’m not the only one. And it helps you be able to relate as well. And that’s where I hope readers are encouraged in their own journey. Whether they’ve never thought about God or they’ve been following him for, 50 years.

Broad romance of place as well as people

I want them to see that connection and see how they can use the lessons the characters learn to bolster their own faith along the way.

Jenny Wheeler: Obviously romance is important in this book because it is a matchmaker that we are talking about, but you’ve got a lot of themes going there with faith, hope, family, and the Irish culture. How essential do you see romance as being to your overall stories? I.

Jennifer Deibel: I think it’s central to the stories.  If you take the romantic element out of it there’s not a lot of the story left.

But I think you could even change how you view romance. Of course, it’s the romance that we tend to think of the hero and heroine falling in love.

But I like to think of it too as Ireland’s romancing the reader and drawing them into all things Irish and my prayers through the faith that they would be romanced by God and by the pull of his grace.

There’s lots of layers to what I consider romance beyond the typical love story, but I think the love story is the story in my books anyway.

Jenny Wheeler: I was curious about whether you began with historical fiction. I wondered if you’d had one of those careers where you’d started out writing for someone like Harlequin and then developed from there, but it wasn’t quite like that, although obviously you had a trainee ground with your blog and other writing. How important is the historical fiction aspect?

Making history fit the story

Jennifer Deibel: It’s integral to these stories because especially when you’re talking about Ireland, there’s such a rich history. You could fill a million books with stories of things that happened over the course of Ireland’s history and still barely scratch the surface.

It’s important for us to look back. They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It’s important to look back, but I also think it’s really fun to imagine what life might have been like back then because we have no way to tell.

A book is a great way to be able to experience things that we’ll never be able to experience on our own. And to continue that legacy and that rich heritage that is there in that country, I think is important to keep at the forefront so that we don’t forget.

Jenny Wheeler: Historical fiction authors always have that challenge of balancing the real-life history with their imagination and their stories.

Have you found anything particularly tricky about doing that? And is there one particular time when you really felt challenged about whether you should stick to the truth of what the facts were or may adapted for your story?

It’s perfectly acceptable to do it, but I just wondered how you approached that.

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