The following is a guest post from author Peter Troy, explaining how he wove together history and hope to create the characters for his first novel, May the Road Rise Up to Meet You, available today.

This is a story that dates back to 1847, but for me it begins in 1985. That was the year I graduated high school, and the summer I spent in the countryside outside of Dublin. I was the youngest in a group of two dozen volunteers from Europe and America, part of a work camp building a playground out of dirt, old tires and railroad ties, for a settlement of Travelers. The Travelers were a window back in time, and theirs was a way of life on the brink of extinction. Akin to the gypsies of Ireland, they were increasingly being forced out of their nomadic lifestyle, and onto government settlements.
That particular settlement consisted of a collection of four-room, cinder-block houses, hastily built in the shadows of the thirty-foot wall of a maximum security prison. They were oppressively poor by my middle-class American standards. Their children wore clothes and shoes that were often far too big or small for them, or were practically torn to shreds. They played on a great pile of refuse from the prison, a few old stoves and refrigerators set atop a small mountain of discarded wooden pallets, nails exposed everywhere. And to line them up from youngest to oldest, was to see the progressive levels of hardness, distance from affection, and absence of hope, weaving themselves into the fabric of their hearts.