January

Now we are in the very throes on another Irish winter, and what a winter! The Atlantic sends us lashing rain, with storm after storm. Interminable rain. The fields are heavy with it. The drains and rivers are rushing with it. The windows are streaming with it. Henrich Boll in his Irish Journal wrote,"the rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather."

Nor are we only inflicted with this incessant rain. The wind is its co conspirator. I remember one January not too long ago the enormous ash tree in the grove had a giant tear down its side. A section of the great tree had split off in the night and lay a few yards away, a severed limb. Poor old thing. It's been hit before by storm and lightening, and yet stands still.

I went out for a walk in a burst of rainless wind, the wet and mucky road an eyesore but in the dark wet shade of the ditch where the blackthorn grows hides the green leaves of wood sorrel and wall pennywort. The skinny trunks of the blackthorn are clothed in green moss. The new twin leaves of woodbine are like green nodes on the brown vine. Even in this wet and wind and darkening skies, spring is getting ready.

Roll on! Roll on quickly!

Come this spring, when April birthdays come around again, Niall's novel John will be out in paperback preceded a month earlier by the paperback of Boy and Man. And Deirdre will be on the telly! She is one of the eight finalists for the Persil Irish Fashion Awards 2009. As a young girl Deirdre watched the televised awards on The Late Late Show, secretly harboring a dream to one day be one of the finalists. Needless to say, all of Kiltumper are cheering for her.

Stay tuned...

Samhain

It's a long time ago now that there was a summer in Ireland. August days were, one after the other, following in deluge succession but here for a few days we did have sunshine galore. Eight writers from as far away Washington State and Canada and as near as West Clare with Scotland and Norway and England and Italy in between came to the second Kiltumper Writing Workshop. And by all accounts it was a great success. (Check out Niall's webpage... and read their comments.) With our eldest away in NYC working as a fashion intern, the laying on of lunches and tea breaks during the workshop was left to the son, J, and me. As one participant put it,

'I enjoyed the fact that your lunches for us were as much a surprise to you as to us!'

It was true. J and I cooked things we had never made before like Tuscan Bean Soup and Roasted Red Pepper and Tomato Soup and everyday was a surprise. We are already looking forward to next summer's menus when we once again open our house to interested writers and they sit by the turf fire and write and share and listen to each other under the ever encouraging eye of Niall.

Now, we come into Samhain, into the season of the spirit, and the ripening and dying of living things according to the Druid calendar. The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, the poet Keats called it. The house is quiet these days with the son and daughter back into the rhythm of their school lives. With memories of their childhood apple bobbing and trick-or-treating tucked away forever, and no one on the road under 12, we wonder if any witches or goblins will knock on our door this year. The husband, meanwhile, is, as ever, busy writing. The leaves blow down past where he sits at the window. Do his characters think of getting out a rake, I wonder?
With dark skies returning, 200 billion stars of the Milky Way are lighting up the sky. (The ancient Irish called it Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow. And I like that, easy to imagine that great cow slowly crossing the heavens.) The sky holds such history and myth for our imaginations to consider. On a dark night your eye can see over two million light years away: A humbling and sobering thought. Like the stars spiralling above in the Milky Way Galaxy, petals of pink and red roses lie starkly in a whorl on the ground in front of the cottage. A somewhat dramatic show of amber sycamore leaves falls on the grass in such perfection you’d think someone had scattered them there by design. Elsewhere, the leaves of blueberry bushes and acers and salix turn a brilliant crimson. Rosehips as large as crab apples wait to be feasted on by winter-hungry robins. It’s time for the great autumn clean-up in Kiltumper, but instead I watch the leaves fall from the quiet of the house and pray for a great wind to tidy them away.
Donald Culross Peattie wrote in An Almanac for Moderns “It is nearly impossible to be sad, even listless, on a blue and gold October day, when the leaves rain down, rain down, not on a harsh wind, but quietly on the tingling air.” Whereas September was a month of contrasts with summer lingering and winter approaching, autumn has turned the corner with certitude in October. One time, long ago, my father was speaking to me from lines of a poem he thought to write. ‘October, teach me how to die’, he said. We were driving on an autumn day in a suburb of New York City along a highway stippled with red, orange and yellow leaves. At the time, it seemed rather curious to me, a teenager, and my father a Wall Street lawyer, but I have never forgotten it. And now that image comes back to me. October is a month of endings with its last day marking the end of autumn in Ireland. Now, in the starry nights of October, the light is above, the Way of the White Cow brightens all our paths.

Knickers on Buddleia

We've been busy here in Kiltumper...

I write from the garden wet with rain as another summer in Kiltumper passes wetly by. St Swithins' Day was mixed, so perhaps the rest of of the summer will send us sunshine as well as the usual rain. The swallows have nested in the open cabin once more and magpies, rather a nuisance, have made a home in the top of the cedar tree. Luckily they're too big to fly through the open cabin and up into the rafters, so the swallows should feel safe to return next April.

For Niall it began with a lot of teaching. Following his now usual session at Listowel Writers Week, where he gave a workshop in fiction writing, he headed to County Carlow where he began working with MFA students from Carlow University of Pittsburg for an intensive 10 day residential series of workshops. By all accounts it was very successful. Carlo Gebler and poets Mary O Donnell and Mark Rowe were also teaching, and a number of other Irish writers came for readings or lectures, among them Anne Enright and Aidan Matthews. Niall will continue to mentor the MFA students work for the next six months. After that he headed to New Jersey where at Monmouth University the Shadow Lawn Players www.monmouth.edu/shadowlawnstage produced his play The Way You Look Tonight. He said their production was even better than the original one at Druid in Galway. And he got to swim on the Jersey Shore.

He returned just in time for our first ever Kiltumper Writing Workshop. We welcomed participants from as far away as Abu Dhabi and Maryland. A beginning playwright, one of Co Clare's own darling girls from Corofin, wrote: 'I really enjoyed the workshop and boy, did I learn a lot. Niall certainly put the fire into my writing... I will always be greatfull and appreciative for that. ...Thank you all once more, and I thank God for guiding me towards such wonderful, talented people.' Guess she enjoyed herself. And, she added, 'I loved your cooking Christine, and the beautiful rendition of the 'Homeruler' played by the very talented son of the house.'

Speaking of the son, he participated in this year's Willie Clancy Week up in Miltown Malbay and learned a good few more tunes on his fiddle. So next year when our Corofin playwright returns he can play her a set of reels and jigs, and her toe tapping might very well turn into a full blown Clare set. Our daughter is in New York interning with Tommy Hilfiger's company and Rag and Bone, and loving every minute of it. I'm half afraid that next year when she gets her B.S. in fashion design from NCAD she'll be moving back there and another love relationship with New York will have begun. She writes, 'Oh guys, just found a cool apartment in the East Village!'

At the beginning of April, I was engaged in designing and refurbising the garden at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis. Working with the owner, Allen Flynn, we've revamped it entirely, planting a boxwood hedge 50 metres long, a laurel hedge, a herbaceous border in front of the hotel, and laying two Doolin stone patios--with the help of my friend Mark of http://www.artatthepark.net/ . Then, we laid 100 sq yards of turf for a new lawn and made a shrub border with three multi-stem birch trees (betula utilis jacquemonti) and some specimen shrubs from Tully Nurseries in Dublin. A lighting designer from Feakle, John Maloney of http://www.outdoorlights.ie/ has done a stunning job with lights--up lights, and down lights that he calls moonlights, and copper spotlights. Looks great. Allen would be delighted if you stopped by to tell him so!


And now, after all that activity, things are returning to normal for a while. Normal summer in Kiltumper that is. I awoke this morning to a hay mower cutting the back meadow. Maybe that will mean the weather will hold for a few days. God bless the farmers and their secret understanding of nature's ways. The hedgerows are full of grass and the scent of clover is filling the road that we walk along. The clothes are hanging on the line to dry in the sunshine while the extras that didn't fit are set out to dry on the butterfly bush in the garden. (You'll have to imagine the knickers on the buddelia yourself.) J is playing the guitar with notes of Blackbird flying out the window while Niall is clipping the front hedge so he can get down the path to the postbox. Every year we mean to cut it way back and every year it beats us.

Elsewhere in the garden, the carrots that I planted last year are well and truly up! Their lacey tops looking like iron lattice work on tall green stilts at the top end of the garden. As cut flowers, who knew they'd last such a long time in the vase? Lettuces and cabbages too I let go to seed and I don't mind one bit. Trying to keep up with a garden that outpaces me in my 5th decade is hard work and just when you think you're finished one job another rears its head.

Ahead, on the August Bank Holiday we hold the second workshop here with attendees this time coming from Washington State, Canada, Norway, Italy, and the British Isles, as well as one from County Clare! http://www.niallwilliams.com/workshops It's a family affair between the organising and the getting ready and the catering...and its wonderful! In a way its everything we first dreamed of for this place, where people can come and enjoy the garden and the house and hopefully be inspired in their own work.

So here's to August and tomatoes and basil from the glasshouse and, well, more weeding, and writing, I suppose...

April Again

The news from Kiltumper. It is April and three of us here are turning a year older. The son will be 17 on April 1st and the daughter 21 on the 16th. Me, well, let's just say I've started to lie about my age.

Meanwhile, readers have been asking for more blogging and so here I am upstairs in the cottage in an April evening trying to gather in all the news and send it out there. We've been busy. Niall's newest novel 'John' has been published in the US and Canada and is in bookshops now. News of it's success is slowly filtering in. The Montreal Gazette reviewer writes, "Themes of love, faith, redemption and survival inform his (Williams) smoothly lyrical, powerfully dramatic prose in John", and ends his review with "If Hollywood producer Cecil B. DeMille of the Ten Commandments were alive today, he'd be angling for the film rights." Niall has just finished a six month appointment in Co Sligo as the writer in residence. In Yeats Country he was inspired and is a quarter of the way through a new novel. He tells me it's 'an Irish novel' and that's all we have for now. Meanwhile, John will be published on this side of the Atlantic in September, while Boy in the World was reissued in small format paper in the UK and Ireland in February. It's companion, Boy and Man will be published in June. As well as the next novel he is concurrently writing a non fiction book called A Writing Year, and some short stories. Niall is giving several workshops this summer (including two here in Kiltumper, one in Listowel Writers' Week and one in Kenmare). See website for more details: http://www.niallwilliams.com/ He has been invited to the first ever international writers' festival in Jerusalem in May. In July, Monmouth University in New Jersey are staging Niall's play, The Way You Look Tonight. It runs for two weeks. And he has agreed to mentor the MFA students in Creative Writing from Pittsburg's Carlow University for two weeks in June when they come to Co Carlow as part of their studies. How does he do it? And cut the lawn as well!



Designing daughter has secured herself two internships this summer in NYC with top fashion designers. She'll finish up at New York Fashion Week in September and return home to begin her final year at Dublin's National College of Art and Design. Our son, in fifth year, has one year to go at the secondary school he attends where he studies, Latin, French, Irish, Music, English, History, Geography, and Math. And, he studies Greek on the side with one of the wonderful old monks.

As for myself, I continue to write weekly articles for The Clare People on gardening and books and health. And, I have high hopes for a children's story I wrote called Tom's Cat. It's about a cat with no name. Fingers crossed the cat finds not only a name but a publisher! And as ever, I am preoccupied with gardening. The other day I was ordering plants on line at Tully Nurseries http://www.tullynurseries.ie/ -- a delphinium here and kniphofia there and three multi stem silver birch for a garden I'm designing in Ennis and I thought, 'now this is what I want to do', spend other people's money for a change and make something beautiful for them'.

With April greening, we now await the next sure sign of Spring... the singing of the cuckoo. She's due in any day now. She'll be flying in over Commodore's Crossroads and down the hill past Mary Breen and the Downes and up the hill past Hehirs' new house, and finally she'll settle on one of the high branches of the sycamore or ash trees. It'll be afternoon and the sun will be shining and our spirits will lift as we go full speed ahead into a new season....

About the novel JOHN by Niall Williams

It begins like this. I am sitting in the front room looking down the garden. It is a day in early summer. My mind is idling. I am in the kind of lazy stillness where I am not thinking anything at all, just looking out through the long windows on the coming blossoms of the Japanese maple. Down in front of me stretches the view I have been looking at for twenty years, the big green valley that dips away from Kiltumper, where now there are rising the tips of a spruce plantation that will one day take the view. Right now I can still make out the steeple of the church down in the village three miles away. I look to it, not because it is a church I attend very often, but it is directly in the centre of the view on the horizon and I like the link that exists somehow between the dot-cattle moving in the green fields to the left and right and the still point of that church in the distance. I am looking so, no different to any other day, laptop open in front of me where I am finishing a novel I am writing called BOY IN THE WORLD. I am writing it for my teenage son, and have been sending him the chapters in boarding school. Now he is home for the holidays and I am at the last chapter. In one of those gaps in time that come in the course of a morning’s writing, when I seem to come to a stop for no particular reason, I stare out into the coming summer. A good while passes. I am no hurry. I treasure the empty fullness of such time the writing life affords; that in this life it is all right to just sit and look out. To look out long enough until you are looking in would be overstating it. I am not aware of any inwardness. I am just paused, as it were, when a phrase comes to me. It has nothing to do with the book I am writing. It has no apparent connection to anything, and comes almost literally out of the blue. It is this question: what was John doing the day before he wrote the gospel?


The question is so clear, so surprising, that I lean over and find a small notebook I keep and write it down. Just that. I write the question mark and draw a line under it. Then, to return my mind to where it should be, I read back the last four or five pages of BOY IN THE WORLD, and work on to finish it.


This was two years ago.


A couple of clarifications. First, I am not in the habit of having such questions float into my mind. Second, I had not been thinking in any conscious way of the John gospel prior tot hat day. I had not even read it fully. Nor had I read all of any of the others. I knew nothing of the possible answer to the question. But its hook became embedded. Later, I would find all kinds of prompts and hints in my earlier work that would seem to have been leading me here. An editor-in-chief would read the first hundred pages of the book I started and tell me this was the one I was born to write. But in the beginning there was a sense of mystery. I began the research not yet knowing that it would lead me to a novel. At the time, BOY IN THE WORLD finished, I was looking at the year ahead for working on my fourth play. ‘THAT WE MIGHT SING’ had been commissioned by the Abbey Theatre under Ben Barnes, and its third draft had received a wonderful response, and was now scheduled to move toward production. I didn’t know then that the new administration would after a year’s wait return the play to me praising its ambition and craft but saying no place could be found for it in the theatre’s program. In the hurt that followed I would find myself despairing a little of theatre, and thinking again of the question.


I started by sitting in the front room and reading the John gospel. Then I read it again. What I was looking for was the man not the Apostle. I was drawn to the human dimension, the idea that John was most likely the youngest of the Apostles, maybe even a teenager, and that the most significant event of his life happened then, that everything else is aftermath. His is by most agreed accounts the last of the four main gospels written. So, why does he wait so long? Why does he wait until old age to write of an event in his youth? Such questions kept coming. I read widely among the very many resources on John and the Johnanine community in the first century after Christ. I found—as any who do even minimal research into this period will—innumerable contradictions. To some there are two distinct Johns, the Apostle and the Evangelist, to others these are certainly the same person. To some the gospel is the culmination of years of preaching, to others it is the work of a committee. I spent week after week in the front room of Kiltumper overlooking the green valley while away in the thousands of pages of Raymond Brown, the acknowledged expert on the John gospel.


And somewhere along the way, realising that the research quickly reaches a place of speculation, I stopped reading further in the commentaries and theological studies. Instead I sat and tried to imagine. As Colum McCann wrote in the summer issue of The Irish Book Review,’ instead of writing what we know, we write towards what we want to know.’ SO I began with an image of an ancient man banished on the island of Patmos. I began to invent my own answer to the question.


In the nearly two years that followed there was scarcely a day that I did not ask myself what was I doing writing this book. I am no expert. I know little of theology. One evening, on the phone to a relative in America, I made the mistake of answering the fatal question: ‘What are you writing about now?’
‘The Apostle John.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Silence on the other end.
Then: ‘You think people will want to read about that?’


The more you immerse yourself in the writing of a book the more you lose perspective. In my experience, while you bring every ounce of concentration, sheer utter focus, you don’t really know where you are or where you are going. You are trying to do the absolute best you can do. It is your life. And you are entirely alone. So then, day after day, I try to imagine John. I find the John I am writing is a man full of yearning. I find he is waiting all his life for the return of Jesus. I find it is a love story.

I work on the book here in Kiltumper and in the course of the writing feel more powerfully than before the cross-currents of doubt and rapture. Sometimes I come from the white screen thinking what I have written is not only the best I have ever written, but will ever write. Sometimes I am lost utterly. The book is hopeless, worse, pointless. I lose all faith while writing about faith.

In the big quiet where you go as a writer engaged on a novel there are always such transports of joy and despair, but this time they feel more extreme. Perhaps it is the outside world pressing, the knowledge the book is bigger gamble than any, that two years are gone into it, and finances dwindling. One day, in a fit of panic or rationality, I am not sure which, I decide I need some support in carrying on. I call the Arts Council to ask about ‘writers in residence’ schemes. I have never called the Arts Council before. Living twenty years in west Clare I mostly feel, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, an ‘inner émigré.’ On the phone I am told I need to speak to the Literature Officer. I am put through and get an answering machine and leave a message, sounding exactly like a novelist in the mire of mid-novel, when its hard to explain what you are doing, and you feel you need to find an excuse. To the machine I mumble something about circumstances and writers in residence and leave my number. But no one ever calls back, and I don’t call again.

Instead I return to the strange comfort of the isolation. I am writing John’s experience of banishment, his disappointments in the world, and his long enduring. I am writing of belief from the inside where the doubts are. As, at last, I approach the ending, the galleys of BOY IN THE WORLD arrive. As always, for the four weeks or so around publication I will buy no newspapers and avoid anything that might have a review. I will try to keep my own faith, my own valuation of the strengths and weaknesses. This religion of one. But here, I rise from the front room where the postman hands me the book. I take it and give it to my son. My heart lifts as I watch his smile.

November News

First of all... many thanks to all the readers who are wondering and waiting patiently to receive our Kiltumper Newsletter. (I'm wondering myself where it is.) In the meantime, until we get our act together, this blog will have to suffice. And don't be shy. Go ahead and write your comments.

Niall has two novels coming out next year. John is due out in February in the US and Canada(you can already order on Amazon) and it comes out in September in the UK and Ireland, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. The sequel to Boy in the World, called Boy and Man is scheduled for publication in June 2008. Meanwhile a new paperback of Boy in the World comes out in January.

For any of you who have read what we call our 'Kiltumper Books', which are in short supply or weak demand now judging from our last royalty cheque you'll know about our children. Our daughter is a third year student at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin studying fashion and our son is a fifth year student in secondary school. Two terrific people and the loves of our lives.

When I'm not in the garden or nagging the Husband about something or another I'm at the computer writing. I write bi monthly columns for The Clare People: one on health and one on gardening and a monthly book column. It keeps me busy and lets me believe I am communicating with the world from what feels like the middle of nowhere. Also, I am hanging out my shingle again to say that I am once again a practicing homeopath. Next month should see me working one day at week at The Henry Street Clinic in Kilrush.

So there you go. That's what we're up to. Watching the leaves fall. November here sees Rudbeckia and Sedum and Nasturtiums highlighting the garden. The delphiniums are fooling themselves into thinking they can bloom again. Will they beat the first frost? The hopeless summer redeemed itself in the glasshouse where tomatoes are ripening faster than we can harvest them. It'll be pasta and tomato sauce from now until Spring....

June Days

The past few weeks have given us Mediterrean like weather making The view from Kiltumper, quite stunning. The Husband says we no longer need to go to France for our holidays because here the sun is blazing away upon flower and human alike. The Son has returned from his 2 month exchange in Maredsous in Belguim. His French is nearly perfect and the Daughter, who has just finished her second year studying Fashion at NCAD, (The National College of Art and Design in Dublin) is happily working away on Oxford Street in London as an intern for Harpers Bazaar. She says it's not at all like Ugly Betty or The Devil Wears Prada. In fact she is sitting on the floor in an unairconditioned room tagging clothes and returning them to Bond Street. I remind her that we all started somewhere, most of us at the bottom. The Husband is busy writing on his laptop as he sits at the long table overlooking the garden. Last year this time he was conjuring images of a sun-soaked landscape for his characters who walk sandal-footed across herb encrusted hills somehere on a Turkish island. ('John' comes out in the US in February 2008 and in the UK/Ireland the followng autumn.) Now the characters of his next book 'Boy and Man', the sequel to 'Boy in the World', (Harper Collins, UK) are in Ethiopia.

Meanwhile in Kiltumper’s garden the last of the poppies are fading. Their petals scatter on the flower bed like discarded coloured tissue paper that has been left too long in the sun. They leave as big a mess behind them as the great show they perform in the month of June. Truth is they are a bit sloppy after their grand appearance but the garden wouldn’t be the same without them, especially this season when they held the setting sun in their crimson cups.

I took a walk one evening when the cottage was quiet. Everyone was away. I followed the small road that borders the big meadow behind us and climbed over the gate into the field known locally as ‘Lower Tumper’. Before most of the lower hill field was planted with hardwood trees and spruce, the field was home to our grazing cows and their calves. Back in the days when the Husband and I tried our hand at farming we walked up these hill fields to count our small stock and stand amongst them, listening to the bird song. It was a different time in our life. It was a different view. I never thought I’d be thankful for that massive monument of metal that stands in the corner of the big meadow but I am. It has saved a remnant of the field-that-was as a long swath beneath the wires of the pylon. A fifty yard path separates an emerging forest on either side. Without the pylon the field would be total plantation. It occurred to me that as the rest of the country is becoming more developed, here things are becoming more wild. You can sense wildlife everywhere. I was walking across the thistle and tall grass into the heart of the hardwoods when some movement in the edge of my vision made me stop. I turned in time to see a fox climbing over the stone wall and into the field at the back of the house where two brown horses stay for summer grazing. Sensing me, the fox stopped still. Then it turned and looked at me, and I looked at it, both of us perhaps marvelling like neighbours at the stillness and beauty of the warm evening. In a snapshot second it was pastoral picture perfect. Sometimes everything comes together, and alone on the hill I recalled last year when the Husband and the Student were discussing Robert Frost’s poem, 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' for his honour english Junior Cert exam. And now here I was, a single and yet not so single viewer in the silent landscape of ash and oak, of fox and horse, of meadow and sky. My brother, Stephen, who passed away under the first full moon of May, would have loved that image. He would have loved the idea of me standing alone in the field of my ancestors and thinking not of Yeats but of Frost.