Author Malachy McCourt to speak at the Field’s End conference.

Malachy McCourt’s accomplishments produce a portrait of the classic Renaissance man – an author, actor, tavern owner and storyteller with a breadth of passions an an eclectic literary oeuvre that includes two memoirs, numerous political essays, a newspaper column and a history of the beloved Irish ballad “Danny Boy.”

McCourt casts himself in a less grand light.

“I would say that I’ve got severe attention deficit disorder,” he said. “I’m like a bee. I have to get to the next flower…I have to keep moving.”

Today McCourt adds an Irish brogue and a New York sensibility to “Writing in the Garden of the Gods,” the second annual Field’s End conference.

The immersive series of talks and workshops, held at the idyllic Kiana Lodge, will give budding writers a day of practice and tutelage with McCourt along with local published notables Debra Dean, George Shannon, Mary Guterson, Robert Dugoni, Susan Wiggs and others.

McCourt says he loves to give talks because they keep him from having to sit down and write.

The working title of his keynote talk, “I Can’t Wait to Hear What I Have to Say,” exemplifies his philosophy of speechifying, which he says he isn’t always prepared for but can usually find his way into by arrival time.

“I think the best thing always is, ‘Well, here’s what happened to me.’ It’s about as good a way as you can start,” he said.

Hiw brother Frank’s best-selling memoir “Angela’s Ashes” captured the McCourt children’s early history, following the family from the boys’ birthplace, Brooklyn, back to Ireland, where mother and children subsisted in squalor as McCourt senior drank away his wages.

McCourt left school at age 13 and then returned to New York at 20, getting by on manual labor until he discovered acting. That landed him on and off Broadway, in films and soap operas and more recently, in the HBO prison drama “Oz.”

His own memoirs, “A Monk Swimming” and “Singing My Him Song,” chronicle his take on an Irish childhood and later life as a raconteur and hard-living New York man about town.

In 2006, prompted by a listener of his WBAI radio talk show, McCourt even ran for governor of New York state on the Green Party ticket.

He stumped to raise awareness of high school drop-out rates, his state’s obesity epidemic, and the risks of smoking around children, an act he proposed making a misdemeanor.

McCourt’s campaign themes mirrored some of the human excesses and anxiety that he’s found himself prey to. A former drinker and smoker, he speaks matter-of-factly about his existing foibles.

“I eat too much. I’m fat. I’m so messy and untidy. I’m a procrastinator,” he said. “The only thing I really feel justified in procrastinating is dying. I’ll put that off.”

McCourt believes that lack of a formal education contributed to his bee-like tendencies because he was never taught “how to think.”

“I thought that I was so deficient in so many ways as far as education and experience, or wisdom, or literacy even,” he said. “It took me a long while to realize I’m not too bad.”

Northwest audiences delight and bolster McCourt.

“I’ve never had the crowds when I went to bookstores that I did in Seattle,” he said. “It’s a great reading community, and the libraries are fantastic.” In contrast to New Yorkers, whom his brother calls “constipated with cynicism,” McCourt observes an openness in Northwesterners every time he visits.

“Folks there are so friendly and ready to let go,” he said. “They don’t say ‘Show me,’ they say ‘Welcome. Let’s have a chat. Tell us a story. We’d love to hear it.’”

While a light tone characterizes McCourt’s conversation and storytelling, he’s also a stickler for usage and bemoans the lack of precision in current vernacular, particularly that of the media.

He cites coverage of the recent slayings at Virginia Tech.

“They say ‘this senseless act,’” as if there are other forms of killing that are sensible,” McCourt said. “(It’s) totally inaccurate, because the man was in possession of all his senses.”

McCourt elaborates, describing what he believes the shooter must have seen, heard, smelled, tasted and touched.

“What people mean is that it’s a ‘savage’ act,” McCourt said. “When it comes to life and death, I think we’d better be quite clear what we’re talking about.”

McCourt thinks human fear is based on uncertainty of the future, which culminates in the dread that “nobody will come to your funeral and you will not be honored in death,” he said.

He’s now trying to cultivate a certain peace. He says he used to walk into a library or bookstore and be “filled with an overwhelming feeling of despair that I would not live long enough to read everything that was in there.”

Now, he says, “I’ll read what I can today…I’ll live as best as I can today. And that is it.”