WELCOME AND APPRECIATION 2025

It’s lovely to be back here in Kilmore Quay, at Write by the Sea 2025, this very special writing festival. Thank you to the organising committee for inviting me to be here and especially to Sasha Wilson and Elena Winch for their support and warmth to me personally and their efficiency in managing the logistics of such an event. To make an event like this work, for TEN YEARS, takes a lot of behind the scenes willing hands – a big thank you to the hardworking committee and volunteers – your warm welcome and general air of hospitality is what makes this weekend so special for us all.

I want to thank my fellow adjudicators… the founders and editors of The Waxed Lemon, Joanne McCarthy and Derek Flynn, Joanne Touhey (winner of the memoir section at this very festival in 2024 with her powerful piece, Shattered Light) and award-winning poet, Nithy Kasa. The winners in each category will be published in the next issue of The Waxed Lemon, to be launched on Sunday, 26th October, during Waterford Writers’ Week.

So here we are, living in ‘interesting’ times to say the least – wars and conflict, climate chaos, AI with its potential to disrupt, contaminate and lay waste the creative arts. So what now is the role of the writer, the role of the creative arts? What I consider to be these utterly human and necessary endeavours. Why should we do this work? Why bother?

I became a member of PEN Ireland a couple of years ago, a chapter of PEN International, that great organisation that enables writers to support writers who are silenced and / or incarcerated under oppressive regimes around the world. I want to offer you something from the great Margaret Atwood, an extract from her speech at a recent PEN International Congress in Krakow, Poland, on 2^nd September, just three weeks ago:

“Above all, [writers] say things that autocrats don’t want to hear, and don’t want others to hear. This is true whether the autocrat is of the right or of the left, and whether religious or secular. Artists are a threat to such people because their art presents full humanity, in all its complexity – the good, the bad, and the ugly. This full humanity is what autocrats wish to destroy, in order to replace it with propaganda featuring perfect versions of themselves.” extract from Margaret Atwood's PEN speech

I think that perhaps gives us reason enough to take up our pens, put fingers to keyboards and persist rather than desist.2

Writer Oliver Burkeman ask us “… to remember that the whole point of what I’m doing is that I’m a conscious, thinking, emoting sensibility, explaining how I see the world to other conscious, thinking, emoting sensibilities—or vice versa when I’m the reader.”

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I now want to thank all who entered the Write by the Sea writing competition. This year again had four categories: poetry, short fiction, flash fiction and memoir. There was a huge international entry, and my thanks to the early readers who brought the vast entry list from a long list to the short list that we worked with. Reading the shortlisted entries was a great privilege and gave us judges opportunities for interesting discussions as we fine-tuned our selections.

THE PROCESS OF READING AND ASSESSING

My own process when I do my initial read through the shortlisted entries is to look for what my late, great mentor, Pat Schneider, described as writing that ‘gives the reader a complete experience’. This criteria applies across all genres. Does the beginning issue an invitation into a world, is that invitation fulfilled in the body of the piece, does the writer resist the rush to summarise, to explain, to tie things down at the end? Does the title do some work?

As readers we are in a way a co-writer, we want to be offered the space to also imagine. I think that is an implicit part of the writer / reader contract. Too often one of my own anguished refrains in reading the work of others is, ‘why didn’t the writer trust the reader?’. None of this is to suggest that any of this is easy to achieve, ask me how I know. Most of the time it’s about going back, over and over, until the piece becomes the best it can possibly be, becomes itself. Rarely are any of us gifted with an almost perfect initial draft. This is the process, this is the work, this is what creativity asks of us.

Across the genres, and the varied topics, the writing we responded to over and over had some combination of beauty and resonance, the skill of the writer found small moments and amplified them in such a way that we felt it at a deeper level and were grateful for the experience.

To quote Simone Weil, when we encounter writing that ‘acts like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space’, we know we have something special.

So, on to the First Prize winners, and the pieces you will hear read by the writers now are real examples of Margaret Atwood’s ‘art [that] presents full humanity, in all its complexity’. Thank you all!

Flash fiction: First Prize: The Ghost Child — Rachel Gough

“We loved how the writing here keeps the balance between the goosebump creepiness of ‘It’ in the household, threaded through details of the quotidian, with both the narrator and reader almost accepting ‘It’. A great example of ‘flash fiction’, artfully compressed yet sends a flare that lingers.”

Poetry: First Prize: Sister Dear Sister — Claudia Rangel

“This is a poem with the confidence to suggest rather than be explicit, to delay the real subject, to build towards it masterfully. This is a poem that shows so much power in restraint.”

Memoir: First Prize: In Heaven There Are Beaches — Brenda Drumm

“For the reader there is no looking away, the skill of the writing ensures we stay with the narrator and are moved by writing that treats a most difficult subject with both tenderness and an unflinching rigour.”

Short Story: First Prize: Flaunt — Jay McKenzie

“This is original writing and glorious. Yes there is a message but it is delayed to great effect. The snatches of dialogue serve the story well and are a great example of how to do this to best effect.”

2

Read the full text of Margaret Atwood’s PEN speech at this link.

On Friday night, June 20th, I disembarked from the tall ship, 'Maybe', at Poolbeg in Dublin Port, completing a week of sailing that began on the river Liffey as we sailed out on Monday, 16th June.

I was the volunteer mentor with Sail Training Ireland on this trip1, with a group of adult students from Dublin's North East Inner City (NIEC)2. It was my first time in the role of mentor after doing the training earlier this year and to be clear, my role of mentor has nothing to do with sailing, the professional crew are the ones who are the experts at that.3 As a mentor the Irish word, ‘tionlacan’, appeals to me. A mentor as one who accompanies, in this case accompanying those who have embarked on a journey, both in the actual and metaphorical sense.

Day #1 Sunday, 15th June 2025 - journal extract

It’s almost 9pm and it’s been a very full day. I’m out on deck now, taking a few quiet minutes in the evening light, gathering myself. I have met the trainee crew, of mixed nationalities, two women, five men. I felt a little shiver of delight when I learned that we will be sailing towards the summer solstice with a trainee crew that includes one woman whose name starts with Sol (for sun) and the other whose first name is Lucy (for light)! The trainee crew are returners to further education in Dublin’s North East Inner City (NEIC). We’ve all been inducted by the three person crew of Adam (Skipper), Leo (Mate) and Sarah (Deckhand) into the geography of our small home for the week, assigned to cabins and watches and have already completed some tasks, including prepping the ingredients for our first dinner together - roast ham, vegetables, potatoes - all cooked from scratch in the tiny cabin and later enjoyed together around the dining table in the saloon.

Now, to close today, some church bells ring out the hour of 9pm. I can hear gulls screech and the every-present city sounds, hums and growls of traffic in the city centre streets of Dublin, behind me. The breeze is freshening and it is getting chilly here on deck. Tomorrow we set sail.

Day #2 Monday, 16th June 2025 - journal extract

It’s Bloomsday, the day on which Joyce set his novel Ulysses, choosing the date as a homage to the day on which he and Nora Barnacle first walked out together. I’m on the River Liffey, on board the TS ‘Maybe’ and waiting for skipper Adam to get confirmation of a bridge lift at 11am, the bridge officially named as the Tom Clarke Bridge but more commonly known to commuters as the East Link Bridge. The trainee crew have been busy getting this vessel shipshape, under instruction from mate Leo, both on deck and below. On deck two trainees are giving the deck a salt water scrub to allow the original teak deck timbers to swell and thus become proof against rain. Below deck others are busy vacuuming floors and wiping around the kitchen / galley area, the cabins, sanitising the two bathrooms. The sun is shining, there’s a breeze and all seems good. I take a conscious breath here at the table as I write. Even though I doubt I will have much opportunity to read, I have with me the book The Flow by Amy-Jane Beer4, chosen because it’s been on my to-read pile for quite a while, because I cannot travel without a book, and because it is water-related.

10.15am: We are all to be up on deck at 10.45 wearing our life jackets for the bridge lift at 11. Then we will be off! I have distributed their sky blue T shirts with the Sail Training Ireland logo and now trainee Lucy is writing the first of the daily blogs on the Notes app on my phone for me to send on to Sail Training Ireland. Lots of photos taken, knots practised - our induction has been fun!

22.50: We are about to drop anchor in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. Day #1 of sailing is complete. I popped my head up on deck and there were twinkling lights of houses and buildings on both sides of the lough. Here in the galley the lighting has turned to red, for restful night vision. Now there’s the noise of the anchor chain being lowered. Leo is shouting some instructions. A very early start is planned for tomorrow to cross the Irish Sea and get to Peel on the Isle of Man. 4.30am!

**

In The Flow Amy-Jane Beer writes, ‘water is an imperative’, as she practices using divining-rods to locate hidden water sources on a ‘tussocky hillside’. It is an element that is not just essential to life, but something we are energetically drawn towards. As we set sail over the coming days on the ‘Maybe’, blessed with sunshine, blue skies and blue sea, any of us can be found on deck, between tasks and duties, simply gazing at the water. As we experience the swell and dip of the ship, watch the terns in pairs flying low to the water, we become mesmerised by the rhythm. The sea at times satin-smooth, sometimes with a certain surface effect as if a net had been cast across it. We fall under a spell.

**
Sailing on a tall ship is all about teamwork, hand work, body work. We eat well, and everything is prepared from scratch and freshly cooked. Big pots of soup, salads, roast veg. I chop chorizo into dice and beside me Richie chops peppers, onions and leaves for a large salad. This is a lovely way to get to know the trainees as we chop and chat. There was a great laugh the day Vincent, fishing for mackerel, had his hat blow off into the sea. Then he caught it on his line and reeled it in. He also had a fine catch of mackerel, which we later cooked and relished.

Hoisting sails is a complete body and team workout. Mate Leo’s command, ‘two, six, heave’, gives everyone the rhythm as we lean back, rope in hand, straining hard to get each sail hoisted. There is something healing about the physical aspect of engaging both rope and muscle, about the effort and the control required, about exerting ourselves as one body to get those large canvas squares and triangles to rise above us, to harness the air, to move this vessel across the body of water that is the Irish Sea, as coastal communities have been doing since the time of the ancients. We are truly out of our minds, fully into our bodies. We breathe, sweat, glow. We know we are alive.

We continue to cross the Irish Sea, over to the Isle of Man with overnight stops at the port of Peel and another at the beautiful Port St. Mary, back to Strangford Lough and the town of Warrenpoint with its background of the green and purple hills of County Down. We adapt to the strict limits, the confined physical area of this almost one hundred year old vessel, tiny against the breadth and depth of the sea we sail upon, the sky that is wide and bright above us. There is something about these kinds of limits that are, paradoxically, expansive and life-enhancing. And that is the point of these voyages, the vision of Sail Training Ireland. I’m there in the role of mentor, but of course I also learn a lot - about my own capacities and about the capacities and generosity of each person on this tall ship. It occurs to me that ‘Maybe’ is a good name - ‘maybe’ we are capable of far more than we have suspected?

Day #6 Friday, 20th June 2025 - journal extract

The sun is warm, the sky is a pale blue with wisps of cloud, it becomes almost milky towards the horizon. The sea is slightly rolling, a rhythmic soothing slap of water against the boat. The east coast of Ireland is now faintly visible. All sails are up as we make for home on the eve of midsummer, this turning of the year. We all took the risk to leave the familiar and embark on a voyage. We said 'yes' when we might have said 'not yet'. The discoveries and rewards are personal to each of us, difficult to quantify or name as most such things are. But I can see it in the light in everyone’s face as we say our farewells before disembarking at Poolbeg. This is about sailing but it's about so much more too.

“At midsummer, we are midsummer. We are summer with the sun on our face.” (Myozan Ian Kilroy)5

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Two weeks ago today we gathered at the Ormond Castle for the event, Creative Activism Connections1, and listened and interacted as our three speakers shared from their varied experiences across continents, decades and generations. In the days since, what we heard on May 31st in this small town of Carrick-on-Suir has been gaining ever more relevance as we are daily appalled to learn of fresh horrors playing out across the world, from Los Angeles to Gaza, from Ballymena in Northern Ireland to the Ukraine and numerous other sites of trauma and trouble around the world. However, our speakers’ presentations reminded us that what is happening now has happened many times in the past, so what have we learned, what are we going to do?2

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My Past / Your Future, with Rehan Ali

Writer and filmmaker Rehan Ali shared not only his life story, growing up in the Direct Provision system in Ireland, but how he transformed it using story and film, made it into art that can touch hearts, the art that might move us to change and to act for change. The title of the new film he is working on is, ‘My Past / Your Future’, and we were privileged to view some of Rehan’s storyboarding of this project and I can hardly wait to see what will finally emerge as the finished film, which includes climate change chaos, and is simultaneously prescient, chilling and a call to action.

The Power of Love, in conversation with Joann Malone

I had the privilege of being in conversation in the afternoon with creative activist Joann Malone before a lively audience, discussing her latest book, The Power of Love3. We discussed her long history of being an activist at various difficult times, most notably her actions as part of the DC9 in protest against the Vietnam War and in particular the use of the chemical napalm, manufactured by Dow Chemicals. We spoke about the subsequent high-profile trial and the great risks, the high stakes, of being a peace activist in that era and through all her decades since the 1960s. Each morning we wake up to news of atrocities happening around the world—in Los Angeles, chaos being deliberately manufactured by those in power; to news last week of the ‘Madleen’, the aid boat in the Mediterranean, forcibly stopped and boarded while still in international waters, now the latest news of the expanding aggression between Israel and Iran. Like those today who risk so much for a more just world, Joann Malone has persisted in making what she calls ‘good trouble’ and she insists that, despite the horrors, ‘we are made for these times’. Now in her mid-80s she knows absolutely that the work is never done. This, she told us, is why she continues to write and publish, to be a witness and to continue her work as an activist in the world.

The Wisdom of Elephants, with Kathy Karn

Canadian wildlife photographer gave a heartfelt presentation on her beloved elephants of the Amboselli region of Kenya, how much they have taught her, how much they and the humans who are stewards of their African ‘roamlands’, have to teach us about living on this planet, with care for the earth, for all species, for each other. Kathy, with absolute clarity, insists that, 'the only one who needs ivory is an elephant’.

The key message from these three very different activists on this day of Creative Activism Connections is that we are all connected. When we lose sight of that, we create division which sows racism and which Joann Malone says leads inexorably to war.

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In troubled times, (maybe there have rarely been other kinds of times), there have always been people who roll up their sleeves and get into action in their own immediate environment. Without fanfare, without publicity, simply seeing something that needs to be done and doing it for the greater good. Yesterday outside my local supermarket there was a ‘flag-day’ fundraiser for St. Nicholas’ Boxing Club, a local club for young people. This is one of countless such initiatives here in Carrick-on-Suir, across sport and the arts, and is replicated in small towns across Ireland and elsewhere. All of these are run by volunteers who simply turn up and ‘do the thing’, who patiently week by week work to make good change happen in small communities. They are all around us, these people. Look for them, join with them, let’s make good change happen.

As Joann Malone reminds us, ‘the work is never done, but we are made for these times!’ Yes, the power of love is real.

Tomorrow I leave on a trip with Sail Training Ireland, my first as a volunteer mentor, on the beautiful tall ship, the ‘Maybe’. Read my post from last September, below, on how I fell in love with the work of this amazing organisation.

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I once heard the writer Colm McCann say that every so often we should do something that ‘does not compute’. My recent solo trip to Leitrim for dancer Edwina Guckian’s2 May Eve celebration and reclamation of the joy of dance, of music, of song at a secret location was certainly one of those.

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On Wednesday, 30th April, May Eve, we gathered in the car park of the Bush Hotel behind Carrick-on-Shannon’s Main Street, as we’d been instructed by email. We would be brought to a secret location by bus. We were not to bring our phones. The designated time of 7.30pm passed and there was still no sign of a bus. We chatted to each other, everyone wondering in a state of quiet excitement what would be in store over the coming hours. The delicious sense of anticipation was palpable; a secret location! Dancing! The subversiveness of it. One person took out a bug repellent aerosol and offered it around. I had forgotten something like this might be needed in a field in Leitrim at dusk. Obviously an amateur at this. When I revealed that I had travelled up especially for this, from the other Carrick3, a three and a half hour drive, a young woman asked if I often travelled for these kind of things. My response was a laughing, ‘not often enough!’

Then, as if part of that old joke, three buses arrived along together and pulled into the car park. We climbed on board to find all the windows obscured by newspapers secured with some silver adhesive tape. We were going on a real mystery tour! We chugged along country roads with reading material at our shoulders on ‘lamb finishers’ (sheep farming country) and ads telling of ‘what CBT can do for you’. On each seat there was an inch square piece of iron, with a hole in the centre. Mysterious. There would be instructions on this later.

We disembarked from the buses and were met by the actor Mikel Murfi, dark suited, standing in suitably dramatic pose. Then he silently led us over ditches and through a couple of fields. On the way a fiddler played lively music from a ditch, some lights glimmered and danced in the near distance, the sclimpíní leading us on. We walked on, careful of tufts of rushes and mindful of our footing on rough ground. Whenever I glanced up, the evening sun was an orange orb peeping through benign wisps of mauve/grey clouds. Everything was still, not a breath of wind, as we continued to wend our way to the dancing place under the Hawthorn tree.

And under the Hawthorn tree nothing would remain still.

The stillness was first broken by the sound of a man singing, a sound as if it rose out of the earth itself; deep, nasal, sean-nós. Then three slumbering female figures stirred beneath the tree, rose up and began to move in ever more free and wild dance. A musician took a fiddle down from the branch of the tree where it had been hanging and began to play, the singer took up a concertina and joined him. As the evening developed the dancing, music and singing became more and more playful, more physically abandoned, became a call-and-response, even ecstatic.

We sat around on straw bales on this May Eve in Leitrim, entranced. Above us the Norse goddess Friga4 had combed through the finest celestial silk and given us Cirrus. Dusk fell, the sun had set without us being aware. Now the sliver of moon rose as the dancers and musicians returned to their slumber under the May tree. Then Mikel Murfi stood up, said not a word, took off his coat and turned it inside out, put it back on again (that’s how you break the spell of the fairies) and silently led us out to the waiting buses. In my pocket I fingered a special folded sheet of paper, part of the web that had brought me here.

Come Dance…

In December 1990, Mary Robinson, in her inaugural Presidential address as the first female President of Ireland issued the stirring invitation to, ‘come dance with me in Ireland’. This was more than a call to dance, but to what dance represented.

The 1935 Dance Hall Act forced dancing into a controlled environment under the watchful eye of state and church where they ensured lots of room was left between dancing couples bodies for the holy spirit. Traditional Irish céilí dances only. No disrespectful foreign dances allowed. Set dancing being one of those foreign dances… Only 9 days after the 1935 Dance Hall Act became law, contraception was made illegal under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. Both the Dance Hall Act and contraception ban came from the same Carrigan Report recommendations.
Source: Edwina Guckian (emphasis mine)

It is hardly coincidental that Mary Robinson, as lawyer and Senator, played a key role in the long and difficult struggle to have access to contraception made legal in Ireland. Her rallying call to ‘come dance’ in her inaugural speech resonated in 1990, gave a thrilling glimpse of what might be.

The folded sheet of paper I had in my pocket at that imaginative and magical dance session in Leitrim is an account, written by my late dad in 1994, of outdoor dancing at Piggott’s Cross in County Waterford in the 1930s and 40s, near to where I still live. He details the building of the wooden platform, made of tongued and grooved boards, with a small raised platform beside it for musicians. People loved dancing ‘Lancers’, he wrote, and also waltzes. He notes that the local priests weren’t at all in favour, and used their privilege from the pulpit to speak against it at Mass, one priest describing the girls who would go dancing there as ‘skibs, skibs, that couldn’t boil water’. In other words, not even fit for ‘domestic duties’, the true role of women. Remember, these were young women and men who by day, in 1930s rural Ireland, worked hard physically for long hours and still had the energy, joy and vitality to dance outdoors for several hours a couple of evenings a week.

Edwina Guckian reminds us that:

The 1935 Dance Hall Act is still an active law in Ireland today. If I were to hold a dance tonight in my local hall and hadn’t acquired a license, I could be prosecuted if they felt the need to enforce it. And it is enforced in certain situations all across the country, especially if the event doesn’t comply with today’s social norms.

And that inch-square piece of iron? This was to be used in case there was a danger of being so entranced by the fairy music and sclimpíní that we might cross through the portal to the ‘other world’. By looking through the hole in the centre we would have the power to resist the pull of the enchanters. I will keep it close by, in the hope to have need of it again in my future. That, again, I will be enchanted5 by creative spirits6.

The sky this morning, early on this first day of March, was visible, blue, and patterned by lovely high cirrus clouds. A sense of spring in the air. The mountain too was fully visible; tawny in places, dark blue in others. If I focussed I could pick out specks of white, the houses of Kilcash village on the lower slope. Above, a fat dispersing contrail across the high bowl of blue from east to west.

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From east to west. What can I say? I watched ‘that’ disgraceful drama in the Oval Office on my phone last night before heading down to Brewery Lane Theatre to host the open mic Poetry Plus. In my view there was just one man in the Oval Office, just one. A real man, a real hero, a real leader. And he was wearing battle fatigues, as he always does. How he keeps going I will never know. As he wears fatigues, so he must be fatigued, physically and spiritually. Yet he carries on against what seems impossible odds. Make no mistake he was not humiliated yesterday (as I have heard reported on various news bulletins today). On the contrary he remained dignified as the office of one of the most powerful and influential global ‘democracies’ was violated, live on TV.

In the latter part of this morning I dropped in on a felt-making workshop upstairs in the Tudor Artisan Hub on the Main Street here. In the centre of the table was a colourful collection of balls of merino wool, like a multicoloured bundle of cumulus clouds. The instructor Liz Martin invited the participants to choose a ball and showed them how to pull the wool, to turn it from a ball (cumulus) into a wispy cirrus cloud. She held up her own to show a golden yellow cloud.1

At last night’s open mic, Poetry Plus, we had two special guest writers, Anna O’Laoghaire and Annette Condon, who shared a remarkable story of their uncovering of a family history they had unknowingly shared. One that generations ago, in 1919, put their families on opposing sides in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence. There was killing and bloodshed, families boycotted, long decades of bitterness.

But thanks to an innovative nationwide creative initiative, aimed at commemoration and reconciliation, they serendipitously met each other, were frank and courageous about their own stories and have become creative collaborators and now celebrate a lovely friendship.

Last night the tearoom was packed and you could have heard a pin drop as Anna and Annette shared their stories, their poetry. It was a night where empathy and mutual understanding were cultivated, where more stories emerged from the audience and were shared, where hearts were touched.

This morning’s felting workshop was a gathering of people around a table, sharing skills and talents, connecting and learning under the guidance of Liz—making beauty2.

If such things can be done in two tiny venues in a small rural town in Ireland it can be done (and is being done I know full well) anywhere and everywhere. Is it our work to create the conditions where empathy, fellow-feeling, love can be cultivated and then flourish? If it’s not then I don’t know why we are here.

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Today is the first of February and the days are visibly lengthening here, crocuses are appearing over ground, offering us promise and simple beauty. We are at Imbolc, moving towards the spring equinox. It is also of course the feast day of St. Bridget, one of the patron saints of Ireland in the Christian tradition and who may also have been a goddess. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours upstairs in the Tudor Artisan Hub last Saturday morning learning, from an actual Druid, how to make a St. Bridget’s cross with traditional reeds. While my fingers struggled to control the reeds, which seemed to have a life of their own, the conversation ranged from the legends associated with Bridget to the sport of axe-throwing. That’s the delight of being together in-person and working with our hands. Conversations can roam wide and wild!

To mark this significant day I have included two pieces below, one for my late mother whose name was Bridget1, and the second includes another Bridget, this time Bridget Cleary. It’s a strange fact for me that my mother’s father, my grandfather, is buried beside the latter Bridget.

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1. BRAT BRÍD or Bridget’s Cloak

“Something happens when your mother dies. Something, many things, unravel. Today I picked the card, The Spindle of Loss. It has snakes—two of them, wrapped around the spindle—their heads arched, tongues extended, poised for a victim.

I was aged five and my mother made dresses from polka dot cotton, summer dresses, one for me and one for her. She moved the fabric along under the needle of the singing machine as it stepped its way stitch by stitch along the seams. Bigger, smaller, we matched perfectly.

She was Bridget and she died in February, the month of Bridget or in the Celtic calendar, Imbolc, one of the four points of transition in the year. The saint named Bridget was also a goddess and she had special powers with cloth. When she gained the promise of land for her monastery from her bishop, it would be just enough to match the area of her cloak2. But Bridget had powers to draw on that were more than a match for the bishop. She agreed, we can imagine how that pleased him, and then trusted her powers that she would be given what was needed. The legend tells us that her cloak extended to cover a great area of Co. Kildare.

In a similar way, those dresses of polka dot cotton that made us a matching pair for that summer under the apple trees, have extended themselves in time and memory and those spitting snakes will gain no power of poison over them.”

2. Marked and unmarked (extract)

“We began our search in the obviously newer part of Cloneen graveyard with its shiny marble headstones in regular rows. Some had the surname I was looking for, Maher or Meagher, it’s not uncommon around here, but I come from poor stock and I knew my grandfather wouldn’t have had a fine marble headstone.

We stepped across the stile into the older more elevated part of the graveyard, with its crumbling ruin of some early church, roofless, open to the sky. Rooks flew among the trees in the next field and caw cawed their news to each other. Here, ancient headstones tottered at precarious angles, slowly but inevitably losing their initial thrust towards the sky. The wet grass began to seep through my shoes as I walked around, pausing here and there to attempt to decipher some script, and my feet became cold. We could see a couple of men working at some farm machinery beside a barn in the near distance but they showed no interest in our activities.

Bridget Cleary is also interred in this graveyard and I had heard that her grave was beside my grandfather’s. In the year 1895 Bridget, a young childless woman who earned her living as a seamstress, had been burned to death in her home by her husband Michael and some of her relatives, suspected by them, it was reported at the time, of being a changeling. She was not her real self, they claimed, but an inferior replacement left by the malevolent underworld. The ensuing trial was a cause célebre, with headlines such as the New York Times’ ‘barbarous episode near Fethard’ and from The Manchester Guardian, ‘Revolting Affair in Ireland: A Woman Burned to Death’.3

We continued to wander around this old graveyard, searching for Maher or Meagher, and Cleary. We had the place entirely to ourselves. As we were obviously searching and, on this elevated site, visible on all sides, I half-expected, even hoped, some curious local person would wander in to try to find out what we were after and maybe offer some local knowledge and guidance. Then Joe found the name Maher. A small stone marker upright in the grass by the boundary wall, the lettering almost indecipherable. We rubbed it with a fistful of damp grass and read: In loving memory of Ed Maher, Ballinard / His mother Ellen / Grandmother Norrie / May the Lord have mercy on their soles [sic]. Nothing else. No dates, no surname except his.

We stood in the wet grass as I rang my youngest brother and he confirmed that yes, that most likely was it. And he added that Grandad had made the headstone himself, that the misspelling of ‘souls / soles’ was his little joke. That he made it himself would explain why there was no date of death on it but what is not clear is why he chose to be buried here and not with his wife, Anastasia, who had predeceased him by some thirty years. She is instead buried in St. Mary’s, the cemetery over our back garden wall, with their son, my Uncle Johnny. Although I never knew her, this Anastasia—she died a couple of years before I was born—I carry her name in my middle initial, ‘A’. I puzzled over why my grandfather gave his address as Ballinard. He had lived all his mature adult life until his death in Carrick-on-Suir, many decades of married, family life with his two sons and his daughter, my mother. He left us no clues regarding dates of his own life or his mother or grandmother, no dates of birth or death. Nor their surnames.

Beside my grandfather’s grave there was no marker for Bridget Cleary, instead just bare rough grass and some low upright stones. I spoke to a writer friend in the locality who has an interest in local history. She cautioned that local people, more than a century later, still do not want to speak of this awful event. They still carry the shame, the stigma, both of the event and the reporting of it. Politically Ireland was struggling for Home Rule from Great Britain at the time and was, subsequent to the trial, cast as a people who were superstitious and incapable of governing themselves. That seems to explain why we had no curious locals come to see what two strangers were looking for, traipsing around among the ancient, toppling grave markers. But I don’t wish to come to a facile conclusion. Shame, and the resulting silence, can be easily explained but maybe not so easily understood. And further research I’ve carried out since indicates that Bridget Cleary’s grave does, in fact, remain unmarked4.

We found a grave that was marked, but which to me had maddeningly incomplete information. And we found that a grave was unmarked, in the expected sense, but yet present and freighted with tragedy and history.”

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When I was on watch duty on the tall ship, The Pelican of London, I learned that it really was about ‘watching’. Especially at night, watching for anything that might change on that dark and heaving sea between the ship and the horizon, particularly other shipping, although it could be buoys or a light flashing, anything at all that had changed. Then to tell the officer on duty about it, who would if necessary factor it in to course calculations. Dan, the second mate on duty one night with our Mizzen watch, came to me as I stood at the port side and he then pointed to a cargo vessel he could spot on the horizon. I couldn’t see it no matter how I peered and concentrated. He shared a trick with me, to not look directly but instead to look a little further along the horizon, to one side, and allow my peripheral vision to catch it.

I have a writing mini-deadline agreed with my mentor that I have committed to for midweek, around the 17th or 18th. This is for my novel-in-progress. But for the past few days I have instead worked on a creative non-fiction piece that I have wanted to bring to submission stage. It’s memoir and a lot of it was written in bits and scraps in the company of others online during lockdowns and I have been intermittently working to make it a coherent whole ever since. Over recent days I read it through again, printed it out, caught inconsistencies, printed it out again, smoothed out what I thought clunky, repeated this several times and yesterday at midday I called it done (for now) and pressed the send button in Submittable on almost 5k words .

This time, instead of my usual tendency to berate myself for not focusing on my novel I granted myself permission to look slightly to one side of what I really want to capture (they are not unrelated to be fair) and allow my creative peripheral vision to be tricked into getting a more complete view. Bearing in mind of course, that I do need to bring the thing itself into my full focus now.

After I had written the above I randomly opened Peter Elbow’s1 evergreen (to me) book, Writing with Power, which I always have close by, and found this, with the section heading, The Voyage Home:

If you want to end up with new insights, you have to allow yourself to lose sight of your topic during much of the voyage out… But the voyage home is a process of bending the curve back toward the original goal… Then go back over all that writing you did during the voyage out and look for useful ideas and insights.

If you are in this kind of creative space too, maybe getting back in the boat2 for the voyage home, I wish you fair winds and let us hold in mind that there can be ‘magic in chaos’.

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A user’s guide to my book, Weather Report: a 90-day journal for reflection and well-being, with the aid of the Beaufort Wind Scale.

I am back home a full week now, after my trip on board the tall ship The Pelican of London. I have been saying, to those who have asked me about it, that this trip will take me a long time to process. But I think the other ‘p’ word is also apt - procrastinate. Don’t I know well that the best way for me to process an experience is to write about it?

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This trip has been twice booked, twice cancelled but third time was indeed a charm. The original impulse to sail on a tall ship was of course linked to my use of the Beaufort Wind Scale as a support for daily journaling in my book, Weather Report.1 In common with most others I knew of the Beaufort Wind Scale through its mention in weather forecasts and reports. But as I researched the development of the scale I fell in love with the elegance and effectiveness of it, with the devotion of this 19th century Irishman to noting down details, of things as they were, to eventually use his observations to codify the wind, make it communicable. The wind made visible. It could not be a more perfect match for a daily journaling practice, with the invitation to pay attention and allow the senses to reveal both outer and inner weather.

However, this trip on the tall ship The Pelican of London was way, way more than I had expected. One of the quotes I included in Weather Report (Day 72) is from the journal of Charles Darwin, as he wrote home from HMS Beagle2 on his impressions of the Brazilian rain forest, ‘My mind is a chaos of delight’.3 Yes, exactly that.

The Pelican of London is a sail training vessel so everyone was part of the crew and had duties, including round-the-clock rotas on-watch. I experienced a force 8 gale as we went north, up the Irish Sea on Monday night - our watch duty was from midnight to 4am. It was dramatic and exhilarating to be on deck, to sway with the ship, see the waves tumbling, to feel the strength of the wind as I clipped my safety harness to a rope for security. To hear with surprise the occasional cries of guillemots through the dark.

My second time on that midnight watch was on our final night as we sailed south toward Dun Laoghaire and was, in complete contrast, a clear, calm starry night, with above us The Plough and the Milky Way and a dazzling array of stars wherever I looked. My fellow trainee Josh was the first to spot an orange sliver of a crescent moon rising above the horizon behind us to the north-east. As the night hours passed we saw it rise higher in the sky and send a stream of silver light across the barely-stirring sea. Just one of a multitude of beautiful memories. Magic!

When The Pelican was anchored and we were on ‘harbour’ or ‘anchor’ watch all the measurements and metrics had to be checked and written up by the watch team every thirty minutes. I was instructed, by my watch leader Alina, how to calculate the wind speed, using, guess what, the Beaufort Wind Scale and enter it in the log. While we were anchored in Strangford Lough, and not on watch, it was mesmerizing to sit on deck and be still, except for the soothing rocking of the boat. Before me the sea like flowing silk set alight by the setting sun.

The professional crew were wonderfully patient, generous with their knowledge and clear with instructions, all the time laced with robust humour. My fellow trainees, the amazing mentors, the volunteer deckhands and others on board made for a wonderful experience. We were all crew, we all had our roles to play to keep Pelican on course and shipshape. On my day on galley duty with ship's cook Jay and my cabin-mate Susie, I learned among many other skills during the day, how to butterfly a chicken breast4, as Jay kept us going with tunes from Beluga Lagoon (check them out!) and others, with plenty of yarns and stories to spice up the hours.

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I donned my safety harness and climbed ‘up and over’, under instruction from Stu, and was gratified to find that going up (or coming down) didn’t trigger any fear response for me. I could do this! But I found the going ‘over’ to be the really challenging part, as the platform extended beyond the rope rigging and manoeuvring myself up and on to it was not so easy. My brain screamed, ‘don’t let go you fool!’ even though I couldn’t make progress without letting go of something - metaphors galore here. But it gradually became doable as I trusted volunteer crew member Aoife, who was already on the platform, as she leaned over to offer guidance, support and encouragement.

Something I have long known to be true is that we simply need to create the conditions for people to flourish and it will inevitably happen5. This is the model followed on this sail training programme and all kudos to Sail Training Ireland, Ocean College UK, Seas Your Future and The Pelican crew. The age range was from young adult up and represented a myriad of life experiences. We became a wonderful community within hours, a beautiful living system that over the days together instinctively began to course correct on many levels. We worked hard, met many challenges (internal and external), we took delight in each other’s flourishing.

We also had tremendous fun. Believe me, Pelicans can party6! We disembarked in Dun Laoghaire harbour after five nights at sea, many eyes shining with tears as we hugged, as we struggled to express our thanks, as we said our farewells. I discovered quickly that walking on solid ground was now discombobulating. So much had changed. Yes, I will be processing this experience for some time.

Would I do it all again? In a heartbeat. I have already put my name down to train as a mentor with Sail Training Ireland in February7. Who knows what other course corrections might lie ahead.

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Omós1

The mountain of the women2 is hazy this morning, the lower slopes visible but softened by a haze to a white / grey palette. The summit is covered with a cap of cloud. From here it would be impossible to say how high it goes, definitely not advisable to climb, you could easily lose your footing.

My father rose every day for decades to go to work in the local tannery. There were cow hides to be processed, the only sure employment in the town for men. I think of him and who he was. A countryman who lost his footing, the first time when our mother died from cancer leaving him with five young children to rear. Despite this unutterable loss3, the stress and struggles of his situation, he somehow found the will to get up each morning and do what had to be done. He went to work in the mornings, in the evenings he baked bread, he shopped for the makings of dinners that Josie, his cousin, would come and cook for us while we were at school. He regularly nodded off at the dinner table in the evenings, chin in his hands, then woke up cross because my brothers and I had taken some advantage of his exhausted slumber. We, of course, bickered over which of us did the clearing-off, the washing-up, the drying, not wanting to give a sibling an inch.

He lost his footing again, years later, when the tannery closed, as did the entire town. But he wasn’t really a townie, the countryside was in his blood. We were all reared by then and gone out into the world, so when the protests were done he accepted the inevitable and moved on. He sold our terraced house at 51 Ard Mhuire, bought a cottage with a field a few miles outside of Carrick-on-Suir, in the townland of Reatagh4, beside where he had been born and reared. He fixed up the cottage, did a lot of the work himself, acquired a Collie dog (that he trained to obey commands in Irish) and some sheep and went on to learn how to shear, to learn through experience about lambing, and that the latter almost always happened in the wee dark hours.

When his first great-grandchild was born, our first grandchild, he visited the new arrival and the new parents with a bunch of flowers picked from his garden and simply wrapped in newspaper. Recounting this visit to me at the time, my daughter-in-love commented that, ‘it must have been lovely to be courted by him’.

Right to the end he continued to get up every morning to do what had to be done. He died unexpectedly just weeks before his 80th birthday. All five of us, his grown children, were then to learn that grief is cumulative. The view across the valley from his home in Reatagh was from a different angle to mine this morning, but equally wide and beautiful, across the river Suir towards the mountain of the women. Ever-changing yet constant.

I lifted my head and my pen from the page to consider what I would enter as my ‘beautiful thing’ from the day. Right then a tiny insect landed on my car windscreen. There it was, my beautiful thing - four legs so slender, wings like gauze. Everything about it delicate, perfect, enough. When I raised my head and pen again it had gone. A single moment; tiny, undramatic but all the more beautiful for that.

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I have a quote from writer 1 on the opening page of another notebook I use, which is something of a compass point for me:

“Start with the wonder, or we won’t have the heart for the journey”.

This quote captures for me the importance of being attentive, for each of us to decide on what is beautiful, what gives us pause for a moment of wonder, in the ordinary of our days. Experiencing wonder, beauty, is a way of bolstering us when we might indeed falter in the face of the pummelling we get constantly in the ‘news from everywhere’.

It seems auspicious to me that I came to Day 912 of my most recent copy of Weather Report on February 28th and I begin again in a fresh copy, with the date of the 29th February as Day 1, this special extra ‘leap’ day.

Then I did what I always do before I start to write my entries on the inside of a fresh copy, I colour all the outer edges, mark them with crayons or markers. Why? So that the book is no longer pristine and is already marked. It’s so much less intimidating then to mark it with my scribbles on the inside . Plus, I like to personalise it.

I hope there is at least one thing you found beautiful, that filled you with wonder, that made your heart leap today?

I will be hosting my next monthly early morning writing sessions, The Bag of Stars, the week beginning Monday, 11th through to Friday, 15th March, at 7am GMT, on Zoom. The title, ‘The Bag of Stars’, comes from the final line of Ursula K. Le Guin's wonderful essay / book, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction;:

'Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.'

If you would like to join me just get in touch.

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Yes, there are 91 days of writing in this ‘90-day’ journal - an extra day in each copy, a bit like the extra day in February this year.

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I took a meandering route to the pharmacy this morning, looking for something for a cough that is becoming persistent. A head cold that I’ve had all week is easing, less tissues being used at last, but a cough is taking up home now. It’s not Covid, I have tested, and for that I am thankful.

As I walked by the river, glittering and restless in the noon sun, I spotted a couple of teenagers under the arches of the ‘new’ bridge1, in shadow. She with long dark hair that moved and flowed as she talked, the guy with his back to me. They both wore t-shirts, no jackets, it is so mild here for February! A couple of sports bags lay on the ground between them. Young love, maybe? Maybe not?

Spring is making its appearance, the sap is rising in us all. As I took a photo of the river I could hear birdsong from the far side.

I have identified another opportunity for my WIP, for this I need to choose <1k words to send with my application. A writing friend in Scotland has generously offered to help me choose what would best represent this. I am also considering sending an extract from it to a lit mag, I’m now just dithering about a title for this extract.

A couple of weeks ago I could hardly bear to look at it. Now I’m beginning to feel there’s a rising momentum with this ‘far too long in gestation’ piece of writing, and not before time I hear some folk close to me say!

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We have two bridges here, one is always referred to as the Old Bridge, the other as the New Bridge. The latter actually has an official name, but nobody here uses it. The Old Bridge? It dates from the mid 1400s, so yes, ‘old’.

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Since I joined our new kayaking club here last summer I find myself paying even more attention to the river, the Suir, that I criss-cross very regularly both on foot and driving. Something about this tidal body of water, always changing, now calls my attention in a new way.

I was intrigued to learn recently that water has a very high surface tension, second only to mercury - a metal. Not that I can understand this exactly, and I quite like the mystery of not-knowing, but wonder if this is why the river is drawing my eyes, why I try to pin it down on paper, this ever-changing, supple artery that our town is named for. Today, is the surface like a rasp, or beaten silver or, or… ? I wrote something on this in yesterday’s entry in my journal, Weather Report, as I stood at the kitchen sink looking out at the grey afternoon, rain starting to drift over the valley obliterating the mountain. Rain that always follows frost.

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Getting Back in the Boat

I’ve been for too long in the messy muddle of my WIP, one that has been more often in the doldrums than progressing of late to be truthful. Now, a bit like having to heave myself back into the kayak on Sunday at training in the pool, I must make what feels like an extraordinary effort to get back into good position. For the kayak, I first had to leave it, drop into the water, feel it rise over my head, then push the kayak away from my head and float back up. Our instructor, Anna, directed me to jump and grab the far side of the kayak with my left hand, lie flat back in the water, then bring my left leg across to the far side of the kayak and lift my butt up into it. The most important part of the manoeuvre at this point is to keep my head back in the water and focus on lifting my butt in. The rest would follow. The next most important thing is that I didn’t succeed the first time. The next most important thing is that I tried again. And again. And that the instructor, Anna, stayed with me. And then, miraculously, I was back in the boat. And Anna celebrated with me, vigorously cheering me - I had done it!

How does this relate to my writing. I try again. I figure out how to make some slight changes, see what might need to happen to bring me from stuck and disheartened to a complete execution. I get help, others who will stay with me while I make the attempts to get back into it. I started (again) with the RESET programme in January with (authors of Written). I breathe. As I write here I notice that my left leg is crossed over my right. My right heel is propped against the leg of my stool. The green clock ticks away on my desk. The timer I set shows ten minutes left of this writing. I love the flow of this pen on the page, free, no hindrance. I love this page, smooth, offering no resistance to this blue stream of ink, these marks of mine. I breathe. It will be fine, I will be fine. I breathe.

The lights of the town shimmer and glow in this early morning dark. A frosty one too. Although I can’t see the frost, I can imagine the white roofs as they have been every day this week. As is the way when it’s frosty the sounds are carrying very clearly to me. Planks are being moved, dropped - I’m guessing from the building works going on at Duggan’s field nearby. I’m dressed this morning in my coral polo neck jumper and it’s quite a while since I wore it and it feels so lovely and cosy. Why does writing feel so overwhelming and scattered? How can I get clarity and a strategy, techniques for landing back in the boat, positioned for paddling on?

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Read, Edit, Redraft

Then the universe sent help from an unexpected quarter. I saw a competition listed, with details that matched what I’m trying to achieve with my WIP. I stare in disbelief. I see the scattered folders of drafts, both soft and hard copies, and almost wail in dismay. There is less than a week to the deadline! But, and here’s the thing, I was now energised to tackle it. Deadlines are my friend. Repeat. A fire was lit under me and I somehow did what only days earlier had seemed impossible and I brought together the disparate strands of files and folders into some semblance of order. This order was improved by some cheerleaders who generously read and pointed out some inconsistancies that were easy to fix. The prize? For me it’s being able to do what had seemed entirely beyond me only days earlier. I have now spotted another competition deadline. I will read, edit, redraft. I will send it out. I am back in the boat.

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Do I dare to eat a peach?

I was in the greenhouse at Carraig Dúlra1 last summer, with the cat who of course had the best chair, complete with cushion. Rory had left a sketchbook on the ground just to the right of the entrance door, with a handwritten note poking out of it inviting anyone who wished, to use it to draw / write. Plus some pencils and crayons to make the invitation irresistible.

So I hunkered down and did just that, made some marks on one of the creamy pages; allowed the pencils to wander around, circle around, leaving red, purple, yellow trails, vaguely spherical and deeply satisfying.

I tucked it all away, ready for the next wanderer, went further into the greenhouse and found peaches growing, yellow skinned, warm to my touch and blushed with red. I plucked one, bit into it and tasted its distinctive dry freshness in my mouth. Not messy and juicy as I expected, but instead clean and fresh. Maybe I can still taste it, maybe the cat continues its vigil.

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Carraig Dúlra is a permaculture farm in Co. Wicklow run by Suzie and Mike Cahn https://www.dulra.org/about

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