The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon
DUBLIN DIARY
Credit to worldfromaboveHD for this warmup video.
Welcome to Issue 25 of The Grapevine and our salon chamber dedicated to the experience Barbara and Jonathan Knott had with many others in December 2015 at the Abroad Writers Conference held in Dublin. Our thanks go out to Leah Maines of Finishing Line Press for inviting Barbara to read and to bring Jonathan along to explore the native land of their ancestors.
Introduction by Barbara Knott
A few years back, nearing winter solstice, I found myself coming home to a place I left at least a century and a half ago, traveling in the genes of great-great grandparents from Ireland across the Atlantic. They entered the United States to the north and worked their way south, where they settled in to live as I knew their descendents, including my father and mother: as farmers and cotton mill workers, whiskey makers and sellers, who seemed to have no consciousness of having come so far, no Irish brogue, no tales from home, but whose love for storytelling was alive and well in the new world. Those genes finally made their way into education and art in my generation, genes that I passed along to my son Jonathan.
Now we were coming home together in this great aircraft, a mode of travel that didn't exist when our ancestors left Ireland in ships. Some were called coffin ships because so many of their passengers perished. The great flying machine was bringing us in through a cloudy sky until we got our first glimpses of Ireland's green fields, a green so deeply rooted that I know it in the color of my eyes.
Maybe you have heard or said some casual thing and then remarked: I can feel it in my bones, and perhaps you meant, as I might have, that you recognize a deep affinity with what has been said. Here, I am talking about that bonedeep affinity that expresses itself in some memories. I felt it entering Dublin and going by taxi to Butler's Town House to check into the Abroad Writers Conference, and walking next door to Ariel House, climbing the stairs to unpack my American self and get her ready to clasp hands with her Irish self and have one of the great times of their life. Most especially, I am so happy to have had my son Jonathan, also a writer, to make this trip with me. Thanks again to Leah Maines for inviting us and to Nancy Gerbault, organizer of the conference, for making it so thoroughly enjoyable. Now, I'd like to invite everyone to enjoy the photographic excursion back through the experience, courtesy of Linda Ibbotson.
Reminiscing with poet and photographer LINDA IBBOTSON at the ABROAD WRITERS CONFERENCE December 2015
Sitting at the edge of Dublin City and named after the Ball Family that traded in the l6th and l7th centuries, Ballsbridge emerged from the marsh and mud flats of the Dodder Valley and had a working cotton printer, paper mill and gun powder factory by the l700s.
The leafy suburbs, the soft winter light and red brick Victorian properties, invite you to wander as a flaneur in the haunts of Dublin's literary greats such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Brendon Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce.
Butlers Town House, therefore, became the perfect setting for the Salon syle Abroad Writers Conference with Award Winning international writers, particularly from Ireland, USA and the UK.
The intimate, week-long conference consisted of full day workshops, early evening readings, discussions and one-to-one sessions including poetry, literature, travel and food writing, memoir and intensive manuscript sessions. A literary menu to suit all tastes!
There was a seasonal glow of warmth and camaraderie, particularly as the week unfolded and the wine flowed, accompanying the mouthwatering gourmet meals, held in the conservatory/dining area, cooked by Nancy Gerbault and Michael Ruhlman.
It was wonderful to hear Finishing Line Press Editor Leah Maines along with published poets from the USA. New York Literary Agent Jeff Kleinman joined the conference and served the wine!
Here are some photographs of the events I attended, including Noel Duffy's wonderful poetry workshop Gravity's Angel where I learned to weave a thematic thread through a poem. The two sessions covered "Stillness, Movement" and "Image and Idea."Noel Duffy was born in Dublin. He co-edited (with Theo Dorgan) Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry ((Poetry Ireland, 1999) and was the winner in 2003 of the START Chapbook Prize for his collection, The Silence After. His poetry has appeared widely in Ireland and the beyond (including Poetry Ireland Review, The Financial Times and The Irish Times) and has been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4.
Jacquelyn Mitchard. Open only to six students, New York Times bestselling author Jacquelyn Mitchard hosted a full manuscript intensive critique. A multi-award winner and journalist, she is the author of he best-selling novel The Deep End of the Ocean, which was the first selection for Oprah's Book Club on September 17, 1996.
Delta Willis. A member of The Explorers Club who has written for Adventure Travel, Audubon, Diversion, Outside, People and The New York Times. A former publicist for the National Audubon Society and Earthwatch, she tracked lions in Kenya. She is currently writing My Boat in the City, about living on board her houseboat at New York's 79th Street Boat Basin, base camp for journeys to Africa, Australia, China, New Zealand, and Papua, New Guinea.
Delicious food and travel writing workshops hosted by Delta Willis.
In the footsteps of James Joyce, we'll become flaneurs, discovering the streets and tastes that inspired him.
Michael Ruhlman is a TV chef, journalist and writer of over 20 books. He is published in The New York Times, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Gourmet Magazine.
Ruth Padel is a multi-award winning Professor of Poetry at King's College London, and Fellow of both the Zoological Society of London and the Royal Society of Literature. Ruth conducted workshops throughout the week. A delight to meet her and hear her poetry.
Kevin Barry. A hilarious finale as Kevin read from Beatlebone, an imaginary Irish adventure. "It is 1978, and John Lennon has escaped New York City to try to find the island off the west coast of Ireland he bought eleven years prior." Award-winning Kevin is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award.
John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. I loved his dry sense of humour and explanation of his writing process. I had just read The Sea, a novel that won the 2005 Booker Prize, also adapted for film.
Deborah Henry. Wonderful to meet and hear Deborah read. She recently wrote a screenplay based on her critically acclaimed novel The Whipping Club which received a Kirkus starred review, appeared on Kirkus Review's Best of 2012 list, was praised by Publisher's Weekly and selected for Oprah's Summer Reading List. I met Deborah at the Abroad Writers Conference held at Lismore Castle, Ireland.
John Boyne has written 13 novels for younger readers and a short story collection, including The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, a New York Times No. 1 bestseller adapted for a feature film, a play, a ballet and an opera, and selling about ll million copies worldwide.
Ethel Rohan. It was lovely to meet Ethel again. I participated in her wonderful Master Workshop "Brilliance of Brevity" at Lismore Castle, Ireland. She is the multi-award winning author of the Event of Contact, winner of the Dzanc Short Story Collection Prize (2021). Her debut novel The Weight of Him (St. Martin's Press and Atlantic Books, 2017) was an Amazon, Bustle, KOBO, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book. It was shortlisted for the Reading Women Award.
Josip Novakovic was born in Croatia and moved to USA. He is a multi-award winning author, including a recipient of the Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was also a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013.
Socializing, with Barbara Knott holding out two wine glasses for Michael to fill, and Barbara Mossberg on the couch leaning into conversation with Douglas Cole and Jennifer Merrit.
It was also wonderful that Paula Meehan (Ireland Chair of Poetry, at the time) and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain attended some of the readings one evening.
Was the conference enjoyable? Look at this!
There is a unifying spirit in language and the written word and a sharing of that language and feeling.
It was wonderful to re-focus on this conference as I live Life Through the Lense and appreciate the opportunity to be present and to take photographs.
Thank you Nancy Gerbault, organizer of the Abroad Writers Conferences, and to Barbara Knott who invited me to share these photographs of my experiences.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. W. H. Auden
Returning now to Barbara Knott's earlier thoughts about Ireland and Dublin and ancestry:
While working intermittently on my book manuscript over the past twenty years, the one I brought with me to Dublin for the AWC workshop in December 2015, an image once emerged from the cemetery in front of the church I was writing about, an image of laughter coming from the graves of people long dead and gone. I thought of giving the book, a work of autobiographical fiction, this title: Can These Bones Laugh? The title drifted into my file of possibilities, but the image of memory locked into bones, the longest-lasting pieces of our incarnation, stayed with me.
That notion of bone memory was with me as I began working on the introduction to our Dublin Diary feature for this issue of The Grapevine. I wanted to begin with what it feels like to be a member of the Irish diaspora coming home, of the sense of belongingness that haunted our time in Dublin and in the Irish countryside. Jonathan felt it as well, as you will see in the pieces we include here at this gathering place we have created for those who spent time together in Dublin, UNESCo's City of Literature that holds so many memories of Nobel Prize winners William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney, as well as James Joyce, perhaps Ireland's most famous and esteemed writer who is not among the Nobel winners (though his Ulysses often tops lists of most important novels in the world), and the inimitable Oscar Wilde, whose home and statue are on view.
There must be a special place in literary paradise for people who make a career of creating opportunities for others to live creatively, to fulfill potential, to express passion and insight, to contribute cultural wealth to the world we all live in and love. That would link Nancy Gerbault, conference organizer, and Leah Maines of Finishing Line Press, in an eternal cycle of individuating artists creating, recreating, and sharing what they make. A special thanks to Leah for offering me the opportunity to read in Dublin and to Nancy, who appears in a couple of the pictures above, for making our stay in Dublin so lovely in so many ways.
Below are links to presentations we have put here.
SALON SAMPLINGS
Barbara Knott: Looking into Small Worlds with Theodora Ziolkowski
Jonathan Knott: River Watching the Mighty Boinne
Barbara Knott: Review of Noel Duffy's Summer Rain
BarbaraKnott: Riffing on Molly Malone
Josip Novakovich and Delta Willis Photos with Quotation from John O'Donohue on Animals
Copyright 2021 Barbara Knott. All Rights Reserved.