Dingle Library “Leabharlann Chiarraí” There’s a driving rain today, unrelenting in its beating against the cottage windows. If anyone ever wonders why Ireland’s landscape is so exquisitely green on a sunny day in July, they need only visit the Emerald Isle in March. It is a perfect day to make my way to the library “Leabharlann Chiarraí.” The librarian, Bernard, recognizes me as soon as I approach the desk which, unlike last time I was there, is now protected behind a tall, clear plastic surround in these post-pandemic days. Very few people in town wear masks in the shops and no one in the library has one on. He expresses surprise when I tell him I hadn’t been in Dingle since 2016, but we all feel we’ve lost some sense of time because of the pandemic. Travel feels even more urgent now, as we can no longer take for granted the freedom to get on a plane and be transported to another world – whether for research, work, or pleasure. Every moment here feels all the more special because of that new reality. I had spent many days in the Dingle library, both in 2015 and 2016, when I had students with me. Bernard had always been so friendly, helping both me and the students with research. Today, it feels as if I had just left yesterday – his welcome is warm and familiar. Maybe I look like what the natives call “a blow-in” or someone who wasn’t born here – memorable in that way. No matter how long someone might have lived in Dingle, however, even native Irish from nearby, they still are considered “blow-ins.” Bernard has lived here over twenty years, but he was originally from the North, so he is definitely one. His unique background – born outside Belfast, settling in Dingle – makes him an extraordinary source of real-life experience that I might be able to weave into my character’s own. We chat briefly about my novel, and he helps me navigate the database of Irish newspapers which includes those published in Belfast. One key one, the Catholic Irish News, is not available in the database, however the Protestant-leaning News Letter and Belfast Telegraph are, so I begin there. Bad news is bad news from whichever side is reporting it, even if I have to read between the lines of Sectarian bias. I look for the time period of the novel’s Prologue and extended flashbacks, 1972-1977, when Brigid was involved in Sectarian activities. A bold headline from the News Letter reads “Two Hurt in Car Explosion” with a sidebar article that reads “Anger Over Priest’s Deference of IRA.” Both headlines relate to plot points in the novel but seeing them still brings a chill to my back. My fiction was played out in the real lives of people who suffered immeasurable loss. It is part of my reason for writing it. I want to examine the human tragedy, through fiction, that is so incomprehensible as nonfiction. I want to explore the need for luminosity, for transcendence, for beauty, in the face of dark despair and evil. The purpose of situating these ideas in the specific historical context of Belfast during the period of ‘The Troubles,’ stems from my own Irish Catholic background and memories of a trip to Belfast as a young girl. I am attempting to tell a story of complex, personal conflicts – both internal and external – within the larger story of the Northern Irish experience and one that examines universal themes of love and faith within the quest for reconciliation with a violent, fractured past. The” imaginative sphere” of literature allows for distance and perspective; it also offers a place from which to understand the possibility of reconciliation between seemingly intractable opposites. I think about how art, itself, can be a vehicle for healing and that is why my character is an artist. I’ve thought about Brigid’s continual return to her pure, white, unblemished, and “full of unrealized possibility” canvas. I wrote in one scene, “It was only when she was painting that she lost herself in that immediate moment, present only to form, texture, color. It was in the act of choosing which shade of green to best capture a field, or which brush would yield the desired stroke, that her mind and heart were arrested by the present enough to forget the past.” Brigid seeks to remove herself from the realities of her circumstances and to situate them in a neutral, creative space in the South. This is hinted at in the novel, when Brigid thinks about the sectarian murals she painted as a young woman, “Belfast’s walls were a visual history of hatred and violence rendered by artists like her and whoever her counterpart was on the other side. Someone, like her, who saw life through the lens of color and texture and form, and yet hated her because of her name, her school, the faith she no longer embraced. Yet someone, maybe, more like her than even her own sisters.” (WIP) My visit to Belfast, just before the start of ‘The Troubles,’ left a profound impression on me. My great-aunts were not wealthy, but they lived a life of simple elegance. There were delicate china tea cups, fine linens, Belleek vases, and beautiful pieces of art in their home on Cavendish Street. My grandfather’s six sisters had all remained behind when he emigrated to Brooklyn in the early part of the 20th c. to make a better life for himself. There is a beautiful line in Anne Enright’s novel, The Gathering, in which her narrator makes a poignant observation: “I look at the people queuing at the till, and I wonder are they going home, or are they going far away from the people they love. There are no other journeys.” When my parents, siblings, and I arrived at my great-aunts’ door on a rainy Irish day, it was to tell them, in person, that my grandfather had died. It was the only way my father wanted to share what he knew would be the devastating news about their youngest sibling and only brother. It was the first time any of us had met. We stayed a week, going back and forth between our hotel and their home, and I have never forgotten their hospitality, intelligence, or warm, loving ways. I also have never forgotten the children who lived on Cavendish Street, with whom I played when my parents sent us outside with money enough to treat all the children to ice-cream sandwiches from the corner shop. I don’t remember their names, but there are a few faded black and white photographs, taken from my brother’s then new polaroid camera, that remain from that visit. I see young girls in mismatched socks, beautiful round faces, with me and my sister in new lace-trimmed white anklets, all smiling and holding arms. The faces haunt me, frozen in a time before the Sectarian hatred took hold in that Catholic neighborhood just off the Falls Road. I’ll never know if I am reading about them on the pages of these archived newspapers in the Dingle Library. I’ll never know if any of those fast-made friends of my childhood were the victims of violence, or the perpetrators of it, only a few years after my visit. It is what compels me to explore all those possibilities in my writing. Several weeks after we arrived back in America, a large carton arrived from Belfast, unexpectedly. My great-aunts had sent all the beautiful items my mother admired in their home. It was an extraordinary gesture of generosity that had a profound effect on all of us; they had so little yet gave away their best. Our home was filled with memories of that visit to Belfast, so my great-aunts were never really absent from my life. There was a gilt-framed antique oil painting hanging over our piano, a beautiful cobalt blue and gold pitcher and bowl set that my mother kept filled with flowers, and many pieces of old Belleek in our dining room cupboard. The oil painting from Cavendish Street now hangs in my living room, inspiring me to never forget the children of Belfast. I leave with my new library card in hand and two books about Dingle in the 1970s to help me fill in the details of what Brigid found here when she arrived. I make plans to interview Bernard, the blow-in from Belfast, next week. The morning of research has filled me with both inspiration and sadness. It will be impossible to tell every story from those pages of the newspapers, the heartbreaks and circumstances of every family that suffered during those years. My only hope is that the story I tell reveals some truth, a deeper truth, behind the headlines. Brigid and her family have their own story and that is the only one I am attempting to write. Belfast News Letter
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I teach literature, creative writing, and a Great Books course in Catholic thought at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. I have also developed and taught a graduate course in academic writing as part of a fully online doctoral program in Educational Leadership for the College of Education at SHU. In addition, I have taught a First Year Writing Seminar at the undergraduate level and a special course on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition for post-graduate Nursing students.
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