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8.
AOTW: There's a rich strain of mysticism in Ireland. Has it touched you? How does Catholicism figure into your work, if at all?
Martin Roper: I think there's probably as much mysticism beneath my feet here in Brooklyn, and beneath your feet wherever you may be standing. We would only have to look for it. I think when people talk about mysticism in relation to Ireland it's a selling point for tourism. The Irish tourist board sells Ireland as mysterious and magical, especially to the Germans. The Germans need mysticism and so they come to Ireland and they find it. Mystery has touched me through the death of someone I loved. Mystery is in people and tree and flowers and building that are no longer standing.
I'm afraid Catholicism does figure in Gone and that's unfortunate. There's a priest who isn't a particularly nice man. He has no religion in him. I dreaded writing him because it's one of the less interesting stereotypes. But he was based on a real person and the real person was much worse than the fellow in the book. I toned it down because it wouldn't have sounded authentic. Besides, the church does much good in the world, and we only ever talk about it's ills.
Máire B. de Paor: Yes, I am conscious that we are profoundly influenced by the Irish cremitical and monastic movements. Monks and hermits always chose locations of great scenic beauty like Ardmhór Déaglan, Gleann Dá Loch, Tigh Moling, Doire Colm Cille, to name a few. The laity surrounding the monastery were closely associated with the monks. Eight times a day the bell rang out from the monastic belfry or Cloigteach calling the people to join with the monks in the singing of psalms, hymns and spiritual canticles and to join with them at least in spirit if duty prevented them from being physically present. Consequently our forebears, who were educated in those monastic schools, knew the Sacred Scriptures and excerpts from the Fathers of the Church by heart. One can see this liturgical influence coming through in our lyrical poetry down to the sacred songs of Tadheg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin, the great poet of Penal Ireland whose devotion the Passion of Christ is noteworthy. This rich heritage has touched and influenced me profoundly. While I am a Catholic to the marrow of my bones I have been a committed ecumenist all my life. We are all my brothers and sisters in Christ.
Andrew M. Greeley: I don't think so. I tell stories and don't worry about the influence. On the other hand all my stories are explicitly and deeply Catholic.
Emma Donoghue: Catholicism is most important in my second novel, HOOD, which is about the first week of a bereavement, and structured round the funeral rituals. Also I suspect I have explored the bullish dominance of Irish Catholicism at one remove, in several recent stories about things like an American born-again-Christian conversion or an eighteenth-century Scottish doomsday cult.
Eoin Colfer: I am a big fan of mysticism and it is a strong them in several of my books. I did deal with the Catholic Church in earlier work --- but only from an educational point of view i.e. the church's involvement with the Christian Brothers.
Malachy McCourt: I'm in a constant state of wonder at the world: the sun, the moon, thoughts, telephones and thrombosis and what is God and what is fog and I can't grasp either of them. For years I fulminated at the Catholic Church --- giving it the power to make me angry. I was alternately a retired Catholic, a collapsed Catholic and when drinking I'd loudly proclaim "I'm an atheist, Thank God!"
Morgan Llywelyn: I'm very interested in the pre-Christian belief system as it pertained here in Ireland. Writing about contemporary Ireland I also explore the ways in which the Church has influenced both the people and history. My personal beliefs crop up in a number of my books, such as the novel, Druids, which described the Celtic mysticism of the era immediately preceding Christianity, and also in my current series covering life in Ireland in the 20th century.
Niall Williams: I am not sure if I am a Catholic writer, but God has featured in some shape or form in all three of my novels. I have actually seen myself type Him in to the story and thought "O God, not again." Why does He keep showing up? Haven't I finished with HIM??
Maureen Dezell: I don't do mysticism, which is probably among reasons I write nonfiction. Though I left the fold of institutional Catholicism more than 25 years ago, I don't believe there is such a thing as an ex-Catholic --- at least not an ex-Irish Catholic. The influence of devotional Irish Catholicism on anyone who grew up in its glory days (1870-1970, or thereabouts) is, for better and for worse, profound.
Jamie O'Neill: I was raised a Catholic, and went, naturally, to a Catholic school. Catholicism, if not its faith, runs deep in my bones. Not the continental mysticism, which to my mind is quite alien to Ireland, but the majestic structure of thought and logic, the Church of Aquinas, magnificent and complex as the old cathedrals. As a child it amazed me (as it amazes Jim, one of the boys in my book) that the Church should "see so far, so deeply inside the soul, that no contingency was overlooked but she planned for all the twistings and quibblings of conscience." I love the ritual, the discriminations and distinctions, the very words for sins: desiderium, the desire for what is sinful; morose delectation, the pleasure taken in a sinful thought; gaudium, the dwelling with complacency on sins already committed. The modern Celtic mysticism leaves me cold, I'm afraid: anything druidic or to do with trees.
Regina McBride: I am besotted with ghosts and magic and myth. This mysticism is very much alive and on one side of the Irish psyche. On the other side is the Catholicism. My Catholic childhood and education (I am no longer a practicing Catholic) is both the bane of my existence and the rich, ever-yielding mythology that informs me. I adore the trappings of Catholicism and think of it as a dramatically rich religion in that it creates profound conflicts within the soul and encourages suffering. The great "stuff" of literature. One is always treading on the brink of hell.
Randy Lee Eickhoff: One cannot separate the two, mysticism and Catholicism. Thomas Fleming put it best when he said that the Tain depicts Ireland as it was before the priests got to them and spoiled it all. I'm paraphrasing terribly here, but Fleming is absolutely right about that. The Brehon Laws actually gave the individual Irishman (and woman, especially) a lot more freedom than the stringent force of Catholicism which did its best to stamp out the mythological history of the people. Peter Tremayne (Peter Beresford Ellis) illustrates this with his delightful and intriguing books about Sister Fidelma as well as with some of his other writings. Frankly, I would like to discuss some of his observations sometime with him and do not always agree with his historical comments, but he is, for the most part, generally right on target. The introduction he provides at the beginning of his current Sister Fidelma books is excellent, I think, as is his unique combining of the pagan past with the coming Christianity in 666 A.D.
Catholicism does figure greatly in my work. It has to. The early transcribers, the interpolators such as Interpolator C in The Ulster Cycle, intruded heavily upon the pagan stories as did the early Anglo-Saxon transcriber of Beowulf. One has to try and separate the Christian inserts in order to emerge with a clear view of the pagan past. This is a most difficult thing to do because anyway one attempts this, one must intrude somehow upon the text. But that is the nature of a translator: constant intrusion. It cannot be helped. We are limited by two languages: the ancient and the modern and, quite often, the two do not correspond. In my work, I generally see the priest and Catholicism as a conspiracy to rob the individual of his cultural heritage. But we must remember that religion needs man as much as man needs religion. It is not really Catholicism that is the villain, here, as it is the harsh dictatorial demands of the priests of the past. In a way, that can be understood, for Catholicism after the seventh century changed dramatically, seeing man as a completely sinful creature instead of man being as one with the cosmos or universe. I'm not certain the old ways were not the best.
Liam Clancy: As a youth I was profoundly affected by the "Celtic Twilight" of Yeats poetry. Religion and spirituality are poles apart. Religion, with its rules and hierarchies and rigidity becomes like a club that tries to prescribe one theory of the mysteries of creation in frozen states. Spirituality is fluid, ever changing, ever opening to new translations. Catholicism played a major role in my life --- mainly in my attempt to escape it.
Marita Conlon-McKenna: Yes, fortunately mysticism surrounds us here, it is part of the lifeblood of the place, you can't help be touched by it, open to it. Like the air we breathe or the ground under foot, it surrounds us. I know it seems to trace itself through my writing. From Mary Kate, the wise woman in Under the Hawthorn Tree, even the tree itself is mystical, to Michael learning to become a horse whisperer, to my latest character Martha discovering she has the power to heal people, like some of her female ancestors. It is an element I enjoy using.
I am a practicing Catholic and comfortable with my God but it would be hard to write about Ireland and Catholicism not to somehow figure. The Magdalen, which is set in a Magdalen home for unmarried mothers and abandoned women, is a harsh look at just how holy catholic Ireland responded to these young girls and women. Rejection by society left them exposed to the over harsh treatment meted out to them by those who were meant to be their protectors. In the writing of Esther's story I tried to be fair to all concerned but to reflect accurately those times and what happened within those sacred walls. I came in for some criticism at first when my children's famine book came out because Eily, the main character, looked at the world around her, the neighbours dying of hunger, her baby sister dead, strangers roaming the countryside and gazed up to the night sky and asked if there was a God! I felt it was the right question for an intelligent child to ask, but I sure got some flak over it. Now the book is a recommended read and on the curriculum in schools all over Ireland north and south.
I am a practicing Catholic and comfortable with my God. It would be hard to write about Ireland and Catholicism not to somehow figure. I came in for some criticism at first when my famine book came out because Eily, looked at the world around her, the neighbours dying of hunger, her baby sister dead, strangers roaming the countryside and gazed up to the night sky and asked if there was a God! I felt it was the right question for an intelligent child to ask, and got some flak over it. In The Magdalen obviously the role of the nuns who ran the Magdalen Home, and the priests who officiated there are a part of the story. As a writer I have tried to be fair to all concerned but the central theme of the story is how these women, abandoned by society and their families survived such loss.
Mary E. Lyons: When I first saw the townland where my great-grandfather was born in 1835 and where my grandfather was born in 1869, I felt I was standing on the tip of the planet. The violent sea, the headland, the 4,000-year-old court tombs only yards from where my ancestors grew up, the utter remoteness of the place --- I brought that wild beauty home with me. When I have trouble falling asleep, I conjure the scene in my mind. It hasn't just touched me. It's part of me.
The short answer [re: Catholicism]: The priest in Knockabeg: A Famine Tale is a composite of priests I knew as a practicing Catholic. The long answer: I grew up Catholic in the deep south, and this is one reason why I felt like an outsider --- I'll never forget the 4th grade teacher in SC who asked me if I worshipped fire. I suppose childhood emotions of feeling different and isolated are woven into my books, though I'm not consciously aware of them as I write.
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