Category Archives: Student Blog

Must a CW PhD be creative twice?

writing-between-the-linesGetting to Cardiff for the “Writing Between the Lines” , a post-graduate symposium exploring Creative Writing as research methodology, wasn’t easy, writes PhD student Laura Mc Kenna. Door to door, the trip took ten hours – car-bus-train-bus-plane-bus-taxi. Here she shares her notes on what she found at the other end.

Was it worth it?  Yes!

There were three parallel panel sessions on offer at three points in the day reflecting the range of creative writing projects.

I found I could take something from almost every presentation (almost) – ideas, methodologies, references – but, mostly, it seemed that, indirectly, it got me thinking about my own work and seeing it in a different light. I was writing two sets of notes – conference notes and notes to self!

The conference also provided an opportunity for poster presentations. The posters were displayed in the communal coffee area, and in the afternoon the writers gave a very speedy one-minute (timed!) oral presentation on their work.

It was a great pleasure to meet so many others who also are engaged in this odd creative/academic conundrum of a CW PhD. Delegates were interested in each other’s work, and there were lively conversations over coffee and food.

One reassuring theme was evident throughout the conference.

Everyone is struggling with the notion of creative writing as a research methodology – the question of how to frame the critical exegesis rightly formed the basis of much of the enquiry. Why was this reassuring? Because we need to know that while there is no particular “answer”, no “right way”, events like this can fuel discourse and discussion and illuminate alternative methodological possibilities.

The following are my conference notes necessarily abbreviated but hopefully reasonably coherent!

And, reader. . . breakfast and lunch were excellent and. . .I had a direct flight home to Cork.

Key Note Speaker:

Professor Kevin Mills University South Wales used Shakespeare’s Sonnet 108 to discuss the oft-repeated view that there is nothing new in writing. Yet Shakespeare’s very creation of this sonnet despite its allusions and its nod to its predecessors, is new – inserting itself between the lines of its predecessors; finding its form and language in what has already been written.  Here was the concept of creativity as blasphemy slandering its forebears.

Ideas which represent the problems of “new”:

  • Karl Marx’ observation that people “make their own history but not spontaneously, under conditions they have chosen for themselves”.
  • Martin Heidegger’s delineation geworfenheit or throwness: we find ourselves and we interpret our existence in a ready-made world.
  • Bakhtin’s insistence that language is a material, social phenomenon which precedes and exceeds us.
  • Pierre Macherey’s substitution of creation with production
  • Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of intertextuality
  • Derrida’s formulations of trace, dissemination and difference.

“What is expressed is as much a product of external forms, codes and systems as of internal urges ideas and experiences.”

In Rob Pope’s book, “Creativity: Theory, history and practice”  (Routledge, 2005) he examines the use of the word “intervention”. Prof Mills has his own neologism: Epomagesis (based on Epomai – from Greek) and modeled on exegesis and eisegesis.  Epomagesis “remakes the old”.

According to Oscar Wilde, to create anything, you’re in constant dialogue with the past.

Book: Eamonn Dunne: Reading Theory Now: An ABC of Good Reading with J Hillis Mitter: 2013

Prof Mills finished his fascinating talk with a new sonnet  – a response to 108. Self-reflexive, intertextual, funny (and very good!)

 

Panel 1:

Naomi Kruger: University Central Lancashire – PhD in CW in 2014

Consciousness and the anti-novel: Representing Dementia in Theory and Praxis

The creative part of the thesis was an experimental novel  – polyphonic, all 1st person and present tense (after many rewrites and considerations).  The critical part was a thesis on  “the story of story telling”.

David Lodge talks about how writers interpret their own writing but it’s always retrospective.

Kruger used multiple methodological approaches including reader response theory and cognitive narratology.

According to Steven Goddard. “The exegesis can be as creative, playful and full of conjecture as the creative element.”

So Kruger decided to make her critical as experimental and creative as her novel.

  • She placed alternating quotes on opposing blank pages with no explanation eg quotes about dementia from the Daily Mail on one page and a reader response on the other.
  • She also included in her critical essay, outline of “three novels I didn’t write about dementia”. Examples given.
  • Also creative non-fiction memoir pieces regarding her uncle.
  • Spoof book club questions about her novel!!
  • An account of her work experience in an Alzheimer’s day care centre
  • A short play

But, in the end she also included a more formal critique which, she felt, added the appropriate balance: linguistic and structural research, narrative theory and the struggle with truth, identity and memory

She conceived the critical creative process as a circulating exchange i.e. each one flows into the other round and round.

Susan Morgan: Creative non-fiction PhD looking at Essays as Experiments: writing creatively and critically about anatomy:

The speaker outlined how her original idea was to write a novel about the representation of women’s bodies in anatomy texts (current and historical) but instead is doing creative non-fiction essays on the topic. She was asked for her own view on the status of this concept within creative writing but said there was no clear delineation, even by her own understanding (though the essays were undoubtedly interesting).

Interesting facts!

Two interesting concepts (etymologically speaking!)

Autopsy – implies what is seen with the eye.

Essay – meaning test, trial and experimentation.

And from her anatomy studies: Pudenda – meaning shameful (not a lot of people know that!)

Panel 2: Education

Vanessa Dodd: Auto-ethnography: Creative writing as viable research data in theatre and consciousness studies.

Her thesis “Explores the correspondence between the constellated constituents of “my” waking human consciousness and the elements and language of the contemporary play.”

Book: Patricia Leavy: Method meets Art on narrative inquiry as a methodology. Integrates research and practice.

Narrative autoethnography views the researcher as a viable data source (Leavy 2009;37) and endorses the use of creative forms such as creative writing.

Carolyn Ellis 2004 (quoted in Leavy 2009) says it involves

  • Research writing and story that connects autobiographical and personal to the social cultural and political.
  • Claims the conventions of literary writing
  • Adopts creative forms exercising the creativity of the author
  • Stories provide reflecting frames helping us make sense of our experiences.

Disadvantages of this method:

Invites public criticism of your work and your character

Can be self-indulgent at the expense of academic rigour

Julia Kristeva; one technique includes putting the creative work on one page and the critical/process on the opposing page.

Robert Ward:

The REF Guide to Creative Writing Research

According to Graham Harper. there are four modes of creative writing research

Critical understanding

  • Reflection, reflexivity, response
  • Research about CW (meta CW discourse)
  • Research using CW – unearthing knowledge in areas covered by other discipline

According to Ward, a CW PhD must be creative twice.

Anne Mari Rautiainen

To start studies in writing: Enjoyment and hesitation.

Looking at the role of a Learning Journal and response of students to its use.

Written after every module as a personal narrative and a reflection.

  • Allows for play with language and ideas.
  • A place to increase understanding of oneself and one’s writer self.

Rautiainen’s work examines the connection between personal writing and learning.

  • Conceptions of writing: drawn from an examination of 66 journals. (Roz Ivanic, 2004)

Creativity: “There’s a writer in me”.

  • Process: “Words bend”.
  • Genre: You don’t build with your bare hands” – you rely on tools and techniques
  • Social practices: “We were inspired by each other’s texts.”
  • Socio-political practices: “Words have power”

Initial responses to the Writing Journal: Enjoyment and hesitation

Enjoyment: One student reported her/his discoveries.

“. . . some texts are linen-thick, coarse and eternally wrinkled.  Not everything needs smoothing. . . . some of the texts straighten out by themselves like silk and they spill, spread and shine beautifully.”

Hesitation: Another side of self-expression includes hesitation.  Doubt –  can I, may I? – permission to step into someone else’s skin and be a first-person narrator.

“The amount of choice is too great: where to start, who to be, what voice, what tense?”

Benefits of a personal journal:

For the student:

  • A flexible genre for personal narrative.
  • A place to play with language and experience.
  • Better understanding about self.

For the teacher:

  • To support students with different thoughts and feelings during their studies

It would have been interesting to have had more detail on the individual journals and the requirements i.e. re content, frequency of entries, and primary aim (who are they for?).

 

Coast to coast poetry

Atlantic Spotted Dolphin - Stenella Plagiodon

Atlantic Spotted Dolphin – Stenella Plagiodon

Poet and PhD student Kathy D’Arcy travelled coast to coast during her recent visit to the US. Her literary odyssey included attending the AWP conference in Los Angeles, the Split the Rock poetry festival in Washington DC and stepping into two oceans with dolphins.  Here she shares her impressions along with extracts from her journal and some poetic resolutions for the future.

“Then AWP – 2 days of labile, scorched explosion.  See attached to-do list.”

When I got out my AWP journal to write this blog post, I  found an enormous list on the first page: names of conferences, organisations, publishing houses, poets, and at the bottom, in capitals, “I NEED TO TAKE POETRY MORE SERIOUSLY.”

who is the ‘you’?  To whom am I reaching off the page?

It’s an oasis, with row after row of every kind of book and bookmaker imaginable, although if you don’t want to have to throw away most of the clothes you brought you have to avoid catching too many eyes and coming away with too many gift bags.  I wasn’t there for the very end, but am told that that’s the time to collect freebies, since nobody wants to drag loads of books back to the office.  There’s a sense of flow, thousands of people are wandering around in book-loving daydreams, and random meetings and conversations abound.

make sure that where I want to be present, I am, and where not, I am not.

The building itself seemed too big for human-sized inhabitants, as did the Marriott Hotel, in a very debsy ballroom of which us non-performing plebs lashed into the two hours of free drink laid on for us each night.  The enormity of everything hammered home how seriously literature and the pursuit of excellence therein are taken by the AWP and its members.  I think in Ireland we have a habit of allowing our ingrained self-deprecation to leak into the way we talk and think about writing, and this was a thrilling wake-up call.

in your poem, are you the host or the guest?

Some events that stand out for me are: the keynote lecture by Elizabeth Alexander, who compared Zora Neale Hurston’s dream of a kind of Père Lachaise for illustrious black artists to ideas about restructuring libraries and canons; Rigoberto Gonzalez’ s beautiful reading of his long poem about a young drowned man (the speaker’s lover) – mermen, marlin, the filthy water from the factory, the 1911 Mexican Revolution; the incredibly moving tribute to Eloise Klein Healy, whose closing address (“it’s really worth it; it’s worth feeling things,”) brought the room to tears – and where I met Alicia Suskin Ostriker, a long-time hero; the panel on intention versus inspiration in poetry, which included Mark Doty.

sometimes you have just pieces of a thing, and they will remain pieces for some time.

 There was also a very inspiring and reassuring panel discussion on poetry book prizes – of which there are of course so many in America and so few elsewhere.  Most of the panelists had been sending their poetry collections out for around ten years, constantly taking feedback and rejections, before winning prestigious prizes.

reward people for being there – page after page after page.

 I knew the poets Jan Beatty and Celeste Gainey, and their workshop initiative The Madwomen in the Attic through Pittsburgh poet and fellow madwoman Tess Barry, and I went with them in Celeste’s tiny rental car to an off-site event in Chevalier Books, in the more tree-lined part of LA; the launch of the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, put together by Carolyne Wright, M.L. Lyons and Eugenia Toledo to celebrate and highlight Ledbetter’s victory over workplace gender discrimination.  It was a small, refreshing event after the hugeness of the convention centre.

a beautiful morning walk here where I was human again and could feel the world,

 On the last night I performed at the slam, getting probably extra-generous votes for my accent.  Then Jan and I ended up in an other-worldly conversation with Richard Blanco and Tim Seibles on the steps of the Marriott, before I retreated to the upstairs debs one last time.

the fearful metro (red line to North Hollywood, blue line to Long Beach), a guy gets on and            plays a song called Fuck Donald Trump then gets off again.

Before leaving, Celeste told me to visit the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in LACMA, and I spent a day wandering through that huge, sprawling collection of buildings beside the La Brea tarpits, discovering colourful close-ups of genitals subtly superimposed on magazine articles, admiring beautiful nudes and Mapplethorpe’s groundbreaking self-portrait with a bullwhip in his anus, and wondering if the exhibit would attract the same admiring crowds in Ireland (a group of elderly ladies followed an enthusiastic guide through the rooms after me).  On the purple line back, a homeless man sang softly into my ear from just behind me, growing ever more threatening as his voice lowered (or was that just my imagination?).

she’s just a daydream girl, just a daydream girl

After that, I drove across America to the Split This Rock festival in Washington DC, where Jan, Celeste and their fellow Madwomen were presenting again.  Pilgrimage is a huge part of my writing practice (and, increasingly, of my identity), and I felt that with eleven days between the two events, America was calling me to traverse it for a future piece.

Day after day I drove through deserts, over mountains, into and out of strange towns and past stranger signposts.  I got incredibly good at stealing lunch from breakfast buffets, and hid plastic forks variously about my person.  I discovered that in gas stations “chicken salad sandwich” means a beige chicken-flavoured paste, vacuum-sealed into beige bread, and that I could have as much beef as I wanted for a few dollars pretty much anywhere.

I saw the Lincoln Memorial in the distance from a taxi, the oblong head of the giant statue a silhouette against celebratory floodlights.   Less than two weeks after I put my feet in the freezing Pacific at Pismo Beach, I walked into the Atlantic in Delaware: on both coasts, dolphins jumped through the waves at sunrise.

truckers: no fine for use of runaway truck ramp. 

 Split This Rock was on the opposite end of the spectrum of literary events as well as on the opposite side of the continent.  Founded in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, its mission is to “celebrate, teach and cultivate poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.  Also unlike AWP and so many other literary events, it’s poetry-specific.

Young people were everywhere, including on stage, and there were street events and loud, exuberant slams that seem to happen around DC all the time, outside of the two-yearly festival.  At the Madwomen event Jan, Celeste, Tess and other teachers of the workshop at Carlow University (Emily Mohn-Slate, Sheila Carter-Jones and Maritza Mosquera) outlined their feminist teaching practices and read poetry about blowjobs, Obama, lesbian love and casual sexism.

Their aim was to spread madwomen workshops around America and further afield, and I was one of several participants who agreed to try to set a branch up (I’m talking to Tess about this).  We discussed VIDA and the exclusion of women writers from the canon(s), but the event was a celebration.

           “less top

            than bottom

            least top

            more bottom

            less ’s’

            more ‘m’

            more bottom

            more bottom

            less homo

            more sexual”

           Celeste Gainey

Later there was a reading by young slam poet Cedric Harper, STR poetry contest winner Lauren Alleyne (whose winning poem, Self Portrait with Neo Nazi Demonstration, is at http://www.splitthisrock.org/programs/contests-awards/2016-annual-poetry-contest) Jennifer Bartlett, Jan Beatty and Regie Cabico.

            “. . . the mother might

            say your child must be angry

            because you are disabled

             so I told her, your child

            must be angry

            because you are a bitch…”

 Jennifer Bartlett

 

         “Dear American Poetry

          I see youre publishing

         straightman/straightman/white white white how

         nice.

        Are you kidding me? . . .”

        Jan Beatty

  

                                                                                                “queer me    

                                                                                                shift me    

                                                                                                transgress me  

                                                                                                tell my students i’m gay   

                                                                                                tell chick fil a im queer 

                                                                                                tell the new york times im straight   

                                                                                                tell the mail man i’m a lesbian            

                                                                                                tell american airlines 

                                                                                                i don’t know what my gender is . . .”                                                                                                  

Regie Cabico  

           

The end of the journal, as with all of my other attempts at journals, dissolves into fragments of poetry during the interminable return to an Ireland that seems so poetically stagnant after all this.  I am dreaming now about huge, winding roads and a landscape that Heaney never turned into a woman.  As usual, the next part of the journey has already overtaken me.

            I have a place to write and when I’m there, things happen, and I’m not going to tell you                 what they are because you’ll think I’m crazy” – Mark Doty (AWP)

Kathy blogs at http://www.kathydarcy.com/

Losing your AWP virginity

Los-Angeles

The AWP (The Association of Writing and Writing Programs) represents 50,000 writers, 550 college and university creative writing programmes and 150 writing conferences and centres.  Every year the association holds a conference in a US city.  This year’s was in Los Angeles. PhD student Niamh Prior was there.

I am not a numbers person and chances are if you are on this site, you might not be either. So let me illustrate. I’m from Kinsale, a town with four hotels, four churches, three supermarkets, countless shops, restaurants and somewhere in the region of twenty or so housing estates blending is edges into the countryside. Over five times the population of Kinsale attended the AWP conference. (And yet I still managed to bump into someone from Cork before I’d even made it to the queue for registration.)

I’d spent weeks preparing to get to this writers’ Mecca. I had printed and bound the programme in advance and spent at least two in-flight movies’ worth of time on colour-coded highlighting which events I planned to attend. The AWP conference is a mongrel of a beast: a literary festival, book fair and academic conference all in one, from the light to the super nerdy, with events categorised into talks, panel discussions and readings.

So, suddenly, there I was in the middle of the Los Angeles Convention Centre with my free AWP tote bag, name badge dangling from my neck, feeling, and possibly looking, like a child in an airport attempting to figure out the flight schedule board. With between 30 and 40 events on simultaneously, from 9am until late, in a conference centre the size of an Irish village, it would be easy to drive yourself crazy trying to get to as many of them as you think you want to attend.

Thankfully, I had received advice from an an American friend who had been before, telling me to only go to a few panels a day, lest I burn myself out. Damn good advise which I heeded. There is after all only so much any set of ears or brain can take in in a day.

First stop was a talk titled “In case you think you don’t belong here: Impostor syndrome at AWP.” This talk gave some good tips on keeping a notebook, talking to people and so on; it was a sort of primer for the first timer. One highlight for me was seeing Ellen Bass, who wrote one of my favourite poems of all time (“What Did I Love”), read. Another was Ocean Voung, whose distinctively fragile voice challenged my hearing to the max and whose poems blew me away.

Other events I attended included an intriguingly titled “Poetry of Comics”, Readings by Red Rock writers and a panel discussion on the influence of music on writing. I dipped in and out of various panel discussions and readings as it is set up so that you can easily leave or arrive between readers.

The book fair was, yes, a large affair. Seven hundred…or was it eight hundred?…stands filled the main hall, manned (and womanned) by people representing university programmes, literary journals, publishers, residencies, agencies and any other business the mind can invent to do with writing. Meandering up and down aisle after aisle of stalls was quite an experience; it was almost obscene to be surrounded by so much writing relatedness.

At every stand there was someone friendly with time to chat, which is a special thing when they represent something that until then had been an ethereal entity, such as for me, Poetry (Chicago). To find myself chatting to actual people at this stand, who gave me a free badge and as many free back copies as I wanted, brought this journal down to a physical reality — something that seemed no longer quite so out of reach. And so it was for all the other levitating literary institutions; here they all suddenly were, material and present.

I went to the poetry slam, which turned out to also be an open mic. I went to it to see how it’s done, expecting it to be a massive affair. Yes, the room was massive. What came as a shock was that at a conference which 12,000 people attended, the audience for the poetry slam and open mic was no bigger than at our local poetry night here in Cork, Ó Bheal. I realised that reading for the open mic part would not result in my death by palpitation.

However, I had come unprepared to read and there was no wireless access in that part of the building. So, advice for all writers: always have something to hand to read should an open mic present itself!

I was also there to support fellow PhD student, Kathy, who was not just brave enough, but eager to pitch her slamming skills against the Americans. She held her own, coming in with very high scores and making a big impression on everyone there. After the event, I had to prise her from the clutches of some newly-won fans in order to get back to the hotel before jet lag could get the chance to drop us unconscious on the floor.

On the last night, we finally managed to stay awake long enough to attend the public reception and dance party (with an hour of free bar) which had been on every night. It turned out not to be the life-changing networking event I thought it might me. Sorry, Kathy, I’m stealing your description of it as there is none more apt: it was like being at a debs where you don’t know anyone. Let me add to that: a debs where you don’t know anyone and there is a dancefloor full of young Americans doing synchronised dances to songs you’ve never heard. Let’s leave it at that. And we did.

A big part of AWP is that is in a different city in the USA every year. Which city that happens to be adds to the experience. There will, of course, be a tussle between the writer in you and the tourist in you, if you attend. This is natural seeing as the writer in anyone is a tourist, hungry for new places, experiences, people.  Because all of it, all of it is fodder for settings, characters, plots… So, it’s best to prepare for this eventuality.

LA itself is notoriously hard to get around, so I was lucky to see what little of it I did. After the conference, however, I took a few days extra to drive up the coast, following Route 1, along the winding roads of Big Sur, a stretch of land that has housed and inspired artists for years, bordered on one side by cliffs and surf and on the other by redwood-forested hills.

This road trip felt like a sort of pilgrimage in the footsteps (or tyre-tracks rather) of so many writers, ending in San Francisco where I spent two nights and three days. Everywhere along the way literature and songs I had been exposed to throughout my life suddenly clicked and made sense as if by travelling this road I’d been given a deciphering key. (I might add here that this was also my first time in the USA.) Words by artists from Kerouac to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers took on a new resonance.

The main thing I got from going to the AWP conference… is that I have been to an AWP conference. That is the only way I can think of putting it. As soon as I got home I made a list of things to do to prepare for the next one, all of it far too practical and itemised to include here. I’m not yet sure how or when the next trip to AWP will be, but I certainly plan on putting that to do list to use.

 

 

 

Blackamoors and “noble savages”

Bold Sir William, a Barb, and an East Indian Black - a 1772 painting by Thomas Roberts.

Bold Sir William, a Barb, and an East Indian Black – a 1772 painting by Thomas Roberts.

Researching a novel can lead a writer down some interesting roads, writes PhD student, Laura McKenna.  

When the novel is historical, there is always the lure of the twisting tracks and shadowy alleys where you can lose yourself – or chance upon some fascinating stories and background material.

My novel is set in the eighteenth century, and one of the characters is a black man who lives for a time in Ireland. The question that arises when writing such a character, is what would Ireland have been like for him. How would he have been perceived and received here in the eighteenth century?

What would his experiences of Ireland have been? What was it like for black[1] or Asian travellers and settlers two or three hundred years ago?

In the first place, it seems such travellers and immigrants were not as uncommon as one might expect. The historian, W.A. Hart, has estimated the black population in Ireland at between 2,000 and 3,000 – over the course of the latter half of the eighteenth century, rather than at any one time. As might be expected, most accounts – from newspapers, memoirs and official records – refer to individuals living near coastal towns such as Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Waterford.

Bold Sir William, a Barb, and an East Indian Black by Thomas Roberts, 1772

One of the earliest accounts of a black man in Ireland is in 1578 when Sir William Drury, in Kilkenny, ordered a blackamoor and two witches to be burnt at the stake. One hundred years later, there are sporadic mentions – a “blackamoor soldier”, one of 1500 men laying siege to Blackhall Castle in Kildare and a black servant boy at Macroom Castle brought back from Jamaica by Sir William Penn.

By the eighteenth century, there was a more significant presence, including slaves. Contemporary newspapers have occasional reports of runaways though they are mostly referred to as servants. Finn’s Leinster Journal in July 1767 cites a runaway Jonathan Rose, a black man, “who left his master’s service, Captain Kearney of Blanchville, near Gowran”, and was proficient in the French Horn and violin. Another from the Dublin Journal of 1762, advertises a runaway “black Servant Maid… We hope no Person will employ her as she is the Slave and Property of Mrs. Heyliger.” Though the advertisements regarding slaves are arresting and poignant, they are not all that different from similar ones concerning runaway native Irish indentured servants. Indeed one or two “owners” even promised to pay wages should their estranged “slave” return. Despite these advertisements, most accounts of black people in Ireland in the eighteenth century do not refer to slaves.

So who were they and how did they find themselves in this tiny outpost of Empire? Some accompanied their employers to Ireland, or were attached to a particular ship or army. A few were the result of illegitimate liaisons. For example many Protestant Irish men, middle sons, worked in the East India Company or the Bengal army and on occasion brought home a child. A smaller number came voluntarily, to preach or to work. John Jea, captured in Africa, sold into slavery in New York, eventually made his way to Ireland, where he settled and married before moving on to England. There’s a fascinating account of a company of salvage divers, working on a sunken ship in Dublin Bay, in the late 1700s using a diving bell. When the company’s owner Charles Spalding was killed (overcome by fumes in the wreck), his “Negro associate” took over. On a successful outcome, “his wife, his sister, and his moors appeared almost frantic with joy.”

There are mentions of black people throughout the eighteenth century – servants; soldiers – several accounts during the 1798 rebellion of fighters on the British and the rebel side; musicians – private, army, even an opera singer Rachel Baptiste. The first record of a black actor onstage took place in Smock Alley in Dublin in the 1770s, some fifty years before Ira Aldridge appeared in the same role of Mungo in The Padlock, in London.

What did Irish people know of other races? The theatre provided some exposure. Many productions  – often by Irish playwrights – featured black roles, played by white actors in “blackface” – usually burnt cork. These roles varied from “noble savage” caricatures in the mid-1700s to grateful or desperate slaves towards the close of the century as the opposing sides of the abolition movement became more political. The abolition debate also expanded the public’s consciousness of the plight of black slaves in the colonies. The sugar boycott was a successful propaganda coup, which spread to the major towns in Ireland. In the 1790s, one of the most influential black people of the era conducted a book tour in Ireland, promoting his biographical account of his enslavement – The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. He travelled for six months, releasing two further editions of his best seller.

Olaudah Equiano

So how were black people received in Ireland? There is some sugolaudah - lmckgestion of superstition in earlier Irish perceptions but this seems largely to do with heightened situations of battles. In two separate accounts, enemy “blackamoor” soldiers are credited with immense courage and strength – one said to be possessed of “a devil or a witch”, the other to have had “the life of a cat”.[2] These, however, are the exception. In most cases, rather than a negative response, it seems curiosity was probably more common.

An interesting illustration of the public attitude was documented in The Freeman’s Journal in 1777. The paper sets the scene in St Stephen’s Green at noon, when a crowd of people surrounded a black woman and her child, staring and pressing so close that they frightened the woman and caused the child to cry. It took some “reasonable persons” to extricate her and help her “safe out of the walks”. The article goes on, “Had she in any manner differed from others of her colour or country so common to meet with, it might have been some apology to satisfy curiosity”. The writer goes further saying such behavior reflected scandal and ignorance on the entire assembly. The words “so common to meet with” are particularly striking.

Another marker of public attitudes is their response to mixed marriages. The few accounts that exist, suggest interest rather than racism.  Freeman’s Journal in 1785 gives an account of an “extraordinary match” which took place in Drumcar, Co. Louth between a local woman and a black man. “No young girl could behave with more propriety or modesty; there was a very elegant supper prepared, and the bride and bridegroom seemed as happy as possible, and are now enjoying all the comforts of married life.” Tony Small, the escaped slave who worked for Lord Edward Fitzgerald, married the family nursemaid. John Jea, the preacher, married Mary, a “native of Ireland” (his third marriage).

These examples provide only a snapshot of life for early immigrants. But they suggest that Ireland was perhaps more racially “literate” and diverse during the eighteenth century than might be expected. Unfortunately by the end of the century, more deliberate negative ideas about race – including the “Irish race” – were being propagated, to support the vested interests of British Imperialist expansion. The Age of Enlightenment was over.

 

[1] From the fifteenth century onwards, the terms black, negro, moor and blackamoor were applied to a wide group of people: from those of African origin, to Muslims and Arabs, to Asians, and to indigenous people of Australia etc.

[2] Mathieu Boyd has written about the origin of the Irish phrase Fir Ghorma (blue men), meaning black men, which “corresponds to old Norse Blámenn from which the Welsh word of the same meaning, Blowmen or Blewmon, may (indirectly) derive.” In old Norse-Icelandic literature, the term blámenn is used for supernatural adversaries and “berserks” as well as “dark-skinned Muslims, and a similar development occurs in Irish.”

Further Reading

W.A. Hart. Africans in Eighteenth-Century Ireland. Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 33, No. 129 (May, 2002), pp. 19-32

Nini Rodgers. Ireland, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: 1612-1865. Palgrave Macmillan UK. 2007

Poetry in the wild

Exhaling - an inspiring view from Dzoghen Beara

Exhaling – an inspiring view from Dzogchen Beara

Not all of the MA in Creative Writing takes place in the classroom. Luckily for the 2016 students of the spring semester poetry module, the final workshop took place in the west Cork writers retreat, Anam Cara http://www.anamcararetreat.com/, on the Beara peninsula, writes PhD student Maeve Bancroft.

The workshop  – like all of the poetry elements of the MA – is led by west Cork poet Leanne O’Sullivanhttp://creativewritingucc.com/www/people/leanne-osullivan/, who was born and grew up on Beara, so this is her native – and poetic – territory.

Leanne has published three acclaimed collections with the Bloodaxe imprint and was the winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2010.  She has also been awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry.

Beara is only two hours from Cork city yet it’s a world apart, a place steeped in Celtic mythology and literature, where the stories and poems are written in the landscape, waiting, through the centuries, to be transcribed.

Our retreat ran from Friday to Monday in April. To shake off the minor trials and tribulations of the previous week (life!) a couple of us attended the nearby Buddhist Meditation Centre, Dzogchen Beara, http://dzogchen beara.org for the free Friday afternoon meditation. An hour later (two, if you add in the coffee and cake we had at the café), we felt renewed and ready to move forward while stepping back in time.

As part of the retreat, Leanne guided us to some of the ancient sites dotted around the Beara peninsula. We listened to the stories of place – and this part of west Cork is poetically very much her place –  then took out our notebooks to write, to sketch or to daydream to inspire future writing.

Leanne OSullivan - showing the way

Leanne OSullivan – showing the way

One of our first stops of the weekend was on the coast road between Eyeries and Ardgroom to visit the Cailleach Beara (The Hag of Beara).  This is a lump of weathered rock said to be the mythological crone of Beara who gazes out to sea in search of her husband, Manannan, the god of the sea. The Cailleach is said to have ruled winter months – being turned to stone at Bealtine (1 May) and regaining human form at Samhain (November 1).

The Cailleach is the focus of many poems and spiritual writings  – including Leanne’s 2009 collection, Cailleach: The Hag of Beara – and going back as far as the 10th century poem, “Lament of the Old Woman of Beara”.

We took in the nearby Kilcatherine Church, dating to the 7th century, and stood amongst gravestone and daffodils overlooking Coulagh Bay.

On the edge of a quiet country road just outside the seaside village of Allihies we visited another  site associated with the legend of the Children of Lir. The stone is said to be the grave of the three children who were said to be turned into swans by their jealous stepmother.  Finally we stopped at  Dereenatagart stone circle near Castletownbere, standing on the spot where the stones are arranged to catch the light once a year. As Leanne put it, trying to snare the light in Dereenatagart is very much like writing poetry. “We create a space to try to let the light through, fleetingly but lastingly.”

The stone circle at Dereenatagart

The stone circle at Dereenatagart

Photographs: Maeve Bancroft