Wild Geese Players of Seattle

About

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle are a diverse group of people who share a common interest in Irish literature. Some of us were born in Ireland, some of us are of Irish descent, and some of us are honorary Irish!

Originally, the Flight of the Wild Geese referred to thousands of Irish soldiers who were exiled to France after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. For generations, their descendants served in the Irish Brigades in continental European armies.

More generally, the term “Wild Geese” has become synonymous with the Irish diaspora.

The Wild Geese Players of Seattle were formed in 1998 by Dr Kieran O’Malley, following an earlier incarnation of the Wild Geese in Edmonton.

2024 Cast and Crew

Irene Calvo

Irene Calvo

Irene Calvo grew up in New York City immersed in the arts. After graduating in English and Classics from Stanford University, and after careers as an editor and textile print designer in New York, she migrated to Seattle to raise her kids in a less urban environment with access to mountain backpacking. Since 2017, Irene has enjoyed the wonders of reading Ulysses aloud in such a brilliant and welcoming community.

Maura Donegan

Maura Donegan has read with the Wild Geese since 2004. Her interests include embroidery, textiles and gardening.

Claudia Finn

Claudia Finn’s Irish ancestors were born in County Mayo and County Galway and came to the U.S. in 1872. A theatre buff, Francophile, and James Joyce fan, Claudia joined the Wild Geese Players in 2008. After a career writing, producing, and directing corporate videos and multimedia, she taught college courses in business and technology. Since moving to Seattle in 2003, she has worked as a writer, editor, and tech trainer. Claudia is our 2024 director.

Mark Gunning

Mark Gunning was born and reared in Dublin of the sixties and seventies. After moving to the USA in the eighties, he lived initially in Boston and then New Mexico. He found the Wild Geese when he moved to Seattle in 2004 and has been reading with the Wild Geese for almost 20 years.

Wendy Joseph

Wendy Joseph

Wendy Joseph is a published poet, playwright and novelist. Her plays, Gargoyles, Booking Hold, The Hamlet Interview and Oil in the Sound, have been produced to acclaim in Seattle. She holds Master’s degrees in English from UCLA and University of Washington. As a deck hand, she crewed the tall ship Lady Washington, the Virginia V, a WWII freighter, and cargo ships the world over, from the Bering Sea to Singapore. In 2006, she won First Prize at the Seattle Maritime Festival’s “Songs and Stories of the Sea” contest. Her song, “Tugboats Pullin’ on the Bridge Lines” won Seattle Maritime Folknet’s Bob Kotta Memorial Songwriting contest. She also won a Bad Hemingway contest.

Leon Mattigosh

Leon Mattigosh

Leon Mattigosh has been performing and studying performance in Seattle for 30 years. He is a member of the Red Earth Performing Arts theater group. Leon’s most memorable roles have been in Susan Simpson’s Moline and Bruce Miller’s northwest native creation epic Changer. Most recently, Leon was seen in Lucia Neare’s Lullaby Carriage and as a member of Seattle Novyi Theater’s year long repertory of Chekhov’s The Seagull and Uncle Vanya. Leon is an enrolled member of the Lac Du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians. Leon is confident that having taken part in a reading of Joyce’s Ulysses, he will go straight to hell.

George Reilly

George V. Reilly

George V. Reilly grew up in Dublin and moved to Seattle in 1992. He has degrees in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin and Brown University, and works as a software engineer. He first tried—and failed—to read Ulysses on the centenary of Joyce’s birth in 1982. He joined the Players in 2003. George leads the Geese, where he is the dramaturg, the webmaster, and sometimes directs readings.

Joseph Ryan

Joseph Ryan

Joseph Ryan grew up in Dublin and moved to Nenagh in Tipperary for high school. He attended University College in Dublin and later emigrated to Edmonton in 1981. While in Canada, he was a member of the original Wild Geese with Kieran O’Malley, where he supported front of house operations and played rugby with the ‘Geese. After a five year return to Wexford, he emigrated again, this time to Seattle in 1998. Eventually he caught up with the Wild Geese and Kieran O’Malley, and attended several of the annual Ulysses readings before he was roped in for reading in 2008. He has really enjoyed reading several parts, including Lenehan and Bloom, a couple of times.

Eric Swenson

Eric Swenson

Eric Swenson, a native New Yorker, has been a Hibernophile all his adult life. Eric taught writing and literature at colleges and universities in the Northwest for 20 years, then became a writer himself. He has co-authored six books and written more than 200 articles on subjects as diverse as commercial fishing, forensic DNA, child development, legal education, baseball, and drug use in America. Eric was also a Zen gardener, a senior editor at Microsoft and Ernst & Young, and a publicist. He now is a psychedelic activist.