A MEMOIR BY TIM COONEY
TAKING THE HELM
COMPASS AND TIDES
ABOUT THE BOOK
In 2023 a carefully assembled archive came into his keeping. Inside was a manuscript his mother never published — and the answer to a question he had been circling his whole life: what makes a person a black sheep?
Taking the Helm: Compass and Tides begins on the water. At twenty-one, with more nerve than seamanship, he sailed a passage from Newport to Fort Lauderdale — a stretch of ocean that became the measure he returned to for the next four decades, whenever he needed to know what he was made of.
He learned his lessons at sea, where you steer by the compass and travel by the tide, and the journeyman's work is knowing both. It is the story of a family that kept its secrets carefully and passed them down anyway — a mother who wrote and never published, a grandfather who was a Renaissance man and filmed everything, a hundred years of family shaped by what went unsaid in those silent films. Against that inheritance he built a life of his own: the computer years with Apple and IBM, the financial practice, the music that never quite stopped, the canvases stacked against the walls in his studio, and an unlikely love story thirty-eight years in the making.
Then the rest of the archive arrived. Among the papers was a letter in his great-grandmother's hand from 1923 — the record of a family fighting to get a daughter out of Ireland, and fighting again when the girl was turned back at the American border. His grandmother became an American because her sister, already in America, rescued her and refused to leave her behind.
He is an American because of a letter that sat in a box for a hundred years. And the question turned out to be older than he was: the Irish were Europe's black sheep, and then America's. His parents were black sheep too. He came by it honestly, and came to know why his father would say it was a compliment.
The memoir moves between childhood, the passage, and the present-day reckoning. It doesn't end in resolution. It ends with a man still creating, and a hundred years of family history finally in one room.
THE AUTHOR
A LIFE IN WORDS,
MUSIC AND IMAGES.
Tim Cooney is a writer, singer-songwriter, painter, photographer, and founder of SunTurtle Studios®. His creative work spans more than six decades, from early recordings and photographs to the memoir, paintings, and music of The Journeyman Project.
COMPANION MUSIC
The Journeyman
Love Songs of the Post Modern Man I–II — written during the years the memoir covers.
The Journeyman I–III — written alongside the book. Volume III is in final production, timed to arrive with it.
The book, the music, and the paintings — plus letters and film from the archive as I open them. Members see it first.