Don’t worry! Do not redirect your browser, or reach for the remote. It’s the same old site (and I mean that in the nicest way possible) filled with the same old insights and conventional wisdom I’ve been dispensing for years. Time for a redesign is all, which I pulled off with the help of Cy Culpin at Faded Halo. (The largish photo of me was taken by my friend Diane Epstein when we were in Rome over Christmas. Hence the scarf, the shades, the attitude.) There’s some new stuff on the site — check out the first chapter of my novel in Fiction, new stories in Memoir and Journalism, and the introduction to the book I did with Josh Rushing, Mission: Al Jazeera, in Books. Feel free to take things down off the shelves but remember: You break it, you own it. 

As if one Sean Elder wasn’t quite enough, I got a message on my Facebook wall from another Sean Elder, in Scotland, reminding me that I was not alone, and that Elder was a Scottish name. Point taken, Sean. The so-called Scots-Irish of the US were so called to a) avoid being lumped in with the more Catholic Irish who later swarmed these shores and b) to let all comers know that we would be happy to drink with them but not necessarily to pick up the tab. 

He’s not the only one, by the way. I have been contacted by several Sean Elder’s on the internet over the years, and heard-tell of others (including one that had a small role in American Pie). One gets email from my students and kindly forwards it to me; another explained the origins of my grandfather’s name to me. The latest just asked me to join a group called We Are Sean Elder. The membership bar was fairly low. 

I suggested we all get together some day. I mean, Keith Kelly has his Kelly Gang (which raises money each year for some worthy cause) and my old agent, Ellen Levine, once had lunch with a bunch of other women with the same name, all in NY media. I don’t know what all I have in common with the other Sean Elders of the world but it would be fun to break bread with them. When the waiter came with the check we could say, “Sean Elder is getting this one.”