I fell particularly in love with Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" when I saw it performed in Central Park in New York City — a perfect setting, long ago, outdoors on a summer night, with William Hurt as a bemused but domineering Oberon.

I loved the play not for its thin various plotlines, but for the metaphysical confrontation at its center. Two quarreling couples and a ragtag theater group wander separately into a forest near Athens where they fall into the clutches of the magical beings who live in wild nature: fairies, sprites, indeterminate magical troublemakers and vengeful rulers of the spirit world, whose various dramas parallel those of the mortals they observe. The play exists where the two realms meet, though the harried souls who populate both worlds are so lost in their private agonies and yearnings that they barely care to register the alternate worlds that exist nearby.

The pranks and romantic mishaps are light touches upon the possibilities Shakespeare's great engine of juxtaposition provides. "Midsummer Night's Dream" succeeds not so much for the play it actually is as for the suggestion of all the plays that could take place in this magical forest where mortals and spirits intersect. The key character is Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, who flits from story to story and laughs about what fools these mortals be. The play's most sublime scene offers the possibility that a hapless but vain local garment worker might find himself suddenly bearing a donkey's head and making love to the great Fairy Queen herself in a comfortable flower petal bed while being tended to by winged forest creatures named Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed and Moth.

Writers create whole worlds; we see this most often in the realms of science fiction and fantasy. Eamon Loingsigh is a Brooklyn writer whose world is fully grounded in urban reality — the rough waterfront docks of Auld Irishtown in Brooklyn, 100 years ago. His first novel Light of the Diddicoy introduced a teenage striver, Liam Garrity, who arrives from Ireland and quickly comes to understand how high the stakes for survival are in New York City. The second book in this trilogy, Exile on Bridge Street, came out in October. The boundaries of Eamon Loingsigh's own difficult literary exile can be mapped via the eclectic, inquisitive articles he has contributed to Literary Kicks over the past few years, including Revolt on Mount Parnassus: An Allegory in Copy/Paste, Lautreamont: The Other, The Salinger Mystique and Taylor Mead: A Bowery Glimpse.

Marc: When Light of the Diddicoy came out in 2014 you told us about your mission to represent the unknown history of Irish-Americans in Brooklyn, and in New York City. But your trilogy is not only about a chronicle of a people but also the story of one lonesome immigrant, struggling to survive in a frightening land. I think William Garrity is a great character, a teenager getting by (just barely) by the power of his courage and wit, and a tormented soul who is forced to make terrible choices without looking back. Is the hero of your book meant to symbolize the Irish-American experience, or does he symbolize something more personal to you?

Eamon: Liam Garrity is fourteen when he travels from a farm in Ireland to New York City, so obviously Liam represents innocence in the summation alone. When you introduce a reader to a new world, such as Brooklyn during the 1910s, it is helpful that the narrator was also experiencing it for the first time. Millions of Irish landed in New York City with no money, but gobs of hope and limitless will. Liam embodies these traits, but they are not just Irish traits, they are human, and the same can be said of our Italian, Jewish, Asian and German ancestors as well as today’s Latino or Arabic immigrants. Hoping for success in a new world so that he can his help his family, like so many immigrants have experienced in this city, is a sweeping, multi-generational theme.