Story ideas are all around. You just have to open your ears. You can find them in all manner of places, including a pub in Ireland in a town called Renvyle on the Connemara coast, a pub called Paddy Coynes, small and dark and warm, which would’ve been smoky in another era, over a pint of Guinness, naturally.

That’s where I first came up with the idea for my story, The Two Burials of Francisco Collins, recently published in Folklore Review.

I was in that pub with my cousin and his wife. We were spending the weekend in Renvyle celebrating their tenth anniversary (they were married there, not the pub but the town), and that night over that pint my cousin’s wife told me of an Irish documentary about a man in Ireland whose body was buried twice. The documentary is called Con Carey and the Twelve Apostles, and I never got around to listening to it (probably will today after I write this) but it gave me a hell of an idea for a story.

An idea that stuck. That’s what good ideas do. They stick. Often I’ll tell myself I’m going to use something I hear or see in a story, but oftentimes it doesn’t stick. This one did. The premise was simple enough, but the question I needed to confront was this: why would a person be buried twice?

For that I went to one of my neglected literary loves: magic realism. The king of that is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and truth be told I’m woefully deficient in my knowledge of magic realism, but to me it’s a close cousin of speculative fiction. It deals with events that are fantastical and improbable or impossible in our world, but totally in keeping with the fictional world in which they occur.

That’s my baseline for this story. In it, an old man recounts the true story of the events surrounding the two burials of the title character, a patriarch of a ranching family, and what led his son, Xavier to do what he did.

So the documentary gave me the idea, the genre gave me the vehicle, and for the heart of it all (every story needs a heart) I went to my own.

It’s been several years since my own father was killed in a plane crash, so I drew up my own personal experiences and feelings around his life and death, our relationship, and I funneled them into this story. Sometimes things get complicated. Sometimes people are complicated. Sometimes relationships are complicated. And truth be told it’s not always easy to reveal some personal things. But that’s my job as a writer: to put it all on the page, to leave a piece of myself behind, for the reader to see, for the world to witness.

Just as Xavier Collins needed his own witness.