A MEMOIR BY TIMOTHY BERNARD 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 man 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.
It is not a sailing book. Its lessons were learned at sea, where you steer by the compass and travel by the tide, and the work of life is knowing the two. 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 filmed everything, a hundred years of family shaped by what went unsaid. Against that inheritance he built a life of his own: the computer years, the financial practice, the band that never quite stopped, the canvases stacked against the walls.
Then the archive arrived. Among the papers was a letter in his great-grandmother's hand — the record of a family fighting to get her daughter out, and fighting again when the girl was turned back at the American border. His grandmother became an American because her sister refused to let it go.
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. He came by it honestly.
The memoir moves between the passage, the childhood, and the present-day reckoning, arriving somewhere quieter than resolution: a man still working, finally able to hold the whole of it at once.
That letter is dated 1923. It is not the oldest one.
THE AUTHOR
A LIFE IN WORDS,
MUSIC AND IMAGES.
Timothy Bernard 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
Five volumes of original songs — two written inside the story, three written alongside the telling. Player below.
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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.