“The motto of Nancy Lyon's collection of travel essays could be 'Have tin whistle, will travel.' Carting along an Irish harp, a button accordian and a pen and journal can't hurt either, provided you are, like Lyon, an accomplished musician who has a way with words. You might even consider bringing your 62-year-old mother along for the ride—that's another story, one that Lyon published in Ms. magazine and has wisely included in Scatter the Mud.

At the end of the 1970s , Lyon pursued her love of Irish traditional music to its birthplace. There she became an expert in pub etiquette and steak-and-kidney pie-making, had a nightmare-inspiring experience in a fairy circle outside Killarney and lived for a time on the hauntingly remote island of Inishbofin off the coast of Connemara where she survived Granuaille's Curse, 'a three-week siege of flu, colds, tonsillitis and wild stomach pains.'

Although Lyon chronicles various other encounters of the unusual kind with witch doctors and UFO abductees and discusses the perils of 'bilingual love' in Montreal, her experience as a teenage Druid at Stonehenge in the late 1960s and her memories of high school in Indianapolis with her classmate David Letterman (his yearbook photo is included), it is her Irish stories that are particularly resonant.

This is the perfect book for the armchair traveller with a penchant for perceptive character portraits. Lyon consistently combines an open heart and easygoing attitude with a fine journalistic eye for detail and a sharp story.”

— The Montreal Gazette

“Lyon is a virtuoso performer of traditional Irish music on the harp and other instruments and her musical talent has been her passport to the world. There seems to be hardly a place on earth she has not visited twice, and there's definitely no subject—UFO sites in Florida, Guadeloupe witch doctors, Arthurian legends, Dublin pub food—she is not interested in and cannot illuminate with prose that is by turns as frenetic as a Galway barroom jig, or as balefully evocative as the most mournful Celtic ballad. There are echoes here of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Jack Kerouac, Van Morrison and the Chieftains. But ultimately, you have to concede that it's pure Nancy Lyon, virtuoso as well of the lettered keyboard. As such, it also constitutes one of the most impressive literary debuts in recent memory.”

— The Toronto Star