view from kiltumper

Niall Williams' View from Kiltumper

2011-12-12T09:36:00.000-08:00

There is something about the stillness of December. There is something that is not quite of this world in the watery light between showers on a December afternoon in Kiltumper. The older I get the more I have felt it. Perhaps it is the dying of the light. Perhaps on days when the wind is not blowing and the rain not actually falling but held somewhere in the air between earth and sky so it seems the black sycamores stand in a grey sea it is easier to feel this sense of things being paused.

And that is something I have come to appreciate more each year, this pause, this moment when there is a sense of no momentum. In my experience it is rare enough. But this afternoon nothing comes or goes on the Kiltumper road. There has not been a single car or tractor or horse for three hours. There is not even the noising of a distant engine in some far field as there once was in the days when cattle were wintered out and silage ferried down the road in black swaying balls on a tractor spike. Now the cattle and the farmers are all in and the grey drowse of the afternoon is punctured only by the small sounds of birds.

I spend the afternoon in that greatest of luxuries, inside a book, and when I look up the window is blurry with rain. But no rain seems to be falling. If it falls at all, if it is not just a quality of the air of West Clare, a general wateriness, as if the sea has, in part reclamation, taken first the air, it falls with such quiet that it does not disturb the world of the book.

This is not always the case. The autumn gave us months of every kind of downpour, every kind of lashing, crashing, pelting, belting shower, (Is it a shower if it lasts all day?) Every kind of straight-down, slanting, sideways, in-your-face, at-your-ears, down-your-collar, into your shoes, rain. Odd-shaped silver ponds rose in the Kiltumper fields. Even the birds were astonished and, it seemed to me, fattened from less flying.

And perhaps that’s why the stillness of this afternoon when there is no wind at all and no rain falling seems so filled with this sense of pause that I close the book I’m reading and just sit with the grey light. The trees are spectral and dark and somehow noble in their standing. There’s a sense of another year’s ending and that they like us have endured what, literally, came at them.

Between the house and trees is the old haybarn. Now it houses only our turf pile, and each year it rusts a little more. I know I need to attend to it; two full panels of galvanised iron blew off it this year and so now in its roof are large rectangles of the western sky. Another panel is only partly hinged and sings a sawing ache when the wind comes from the north. A big storm could take it. But this afternoon, when no wind blows, the haybarn too stands still and endures in the dying light.

I watch the nothing happening until the night dark comes at half past four to take the trees and haybarn inside it. And I think again: yes, there is something about the stillness of December.

The National Academy of Writing Book One

2011-11-07T06:12:00.000-08:00

The launch of BOOK ONE from The National Academy of Writing, edited by Richard Beard and Rena Brannan is available from Amazon. (Here's the link to order.)

Excerpts from 12 writers are anthologized, and included among them are two chapters from my novel in progress: TITUS SPARROW PARK.

National Academy of Writing Anthology Book Launch

2011-10-20T03:42:00.000-07:00

Nine months, 150 pages, 35,000 words, 4 characters, 3 countries later....two chapters of my novel in progress, working title TITUS SPARROW PARK will feature along with 11 other writers in the NAW (National Academy of Writing) soon to be published Anthology on 9th November in Foyles in London.

In a sentence, here's the plot: A woman goes in search of her daughter's mother.

Titus Sparrow Park by C.B. Williams interweaves stories of three characters into a tapestry of love and loss that stretches from the west of Ireland and London to New York City and Boston. At its heart is the love of a widowed mother for her adopted daughter and the personal and physical journey she takes to insure that her daughter will never be alone.

Iris Bowen, widow, mother, gardener, and blogger, is prompted to search for her daughter’s mother when her health is jeopardized. Her daughter must not be alone in the world. All Iris has is a twenty-year-old envelope with an address in Boston.

In New York City, Rowan Blake, bachelor and landscape architect, is on his own journey. In danger of losing the company he founded with former lover and current business partner, Lilian, his life is unraveling. He’s arrived at a place where he feels no connection to the world, where the things he’s been working for mean nothing, and where the person who held the most influence over his life, Grandfather Burdoch, suddenly dies.

In London, Rose, gifted young violinist at the Royal Academy, is coming to terms with the loss of her father. She’s trying to lose herself in music, live between the staves, rise to the impossible demands of a brilliant but irascible teacher in England’s oldest conservatoire. But no matter how she practices it seems she is never good enough. Her teacher hates her, or is perhaps a little in love with her.

Over one long hot blue summer in Boston, New York, London, and the west of Ireland, these characters and their stories entwine with life-altering consequences. Titus Sparrow Park is a novel about hope, about what happens when your life comes to a full stop. It’s about carrying on, about the comfort of strangers and the surprising connections that unite us all. All journeys lead to Sparrow Titus Park as the characters discover they too are inextricably linked – like plants in a bed, lines in an architectural sketch, notations in a musical composition.

An accessible literary novel, Titus Sparrow Park is told through multiple narratives, explores the belief that love comes in many shades and hues, and along the spectrum it is the sacrifices we make for those we love which ultimately restore and sustain us.

To love selflessly is our gift.

2011-10-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

World's Best Dog... R.I.P.

Huckleberry, Kiltumper's Golden Retriever, passed away a few weeks ago. We're all sad. He was one week shy of his 15th birthday.

When I look at his photo, it makes me cry...When I round the corner of the boreen that passes in front of our house into our drive my reflexes prepare to be welcomed by him. But he's not there.

My Character Iris has Started a Blog

2011-08-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Candlelabra Primula...

Those are the violet ones in the foreground. Aren't they gorgeous? And blue Nepeta, which go on flowering for ever. In the background you can see a cerulean blue Delphinum and the ghost-like feather balls of Pulsatilla.

Meanwhile, this photo from Kiltumper is the new header for Iris Bowen's blog... a character in the novel I'm writing.

National Academy of Writing

2011-04-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

Angel from Kiltumper

Okay so it's not a spring photo. But I'm thinking about Angels lately. My sister sent me 3 from overseas. How they found their way to me is beyond knowing. (A cloud of unknowing sometimes does be enveloping me but that's another story.) So I accepted them with gratitude. You never know when someone has your back.

Meanwhile, over in London, I've been participating in the National Academy of Writing Masterclasses in -- writing. One of 12 writers selected, I'm working on a novel with a working title of Chelsea Morning. I had submitted 5000 words of Two Blue Moons -- a finished, yet unpublished work -- but have decided to keep that in a drawer. Once upon a time, a NY agent who shall remain nameless told me it was more like a second novel than a first novel. So logic dictates I should write the ubiquitous 'first novel' first.

So wish me luck...

Kiltumper, Kilmihil, West Clare, Ireland

2011-01-27T02:31:00.000-08:00


Christine's Garden by Doug Miller (dougmillerart.com)

Why didn't I think of this before?

Posting Doug's beautiful painting which he painted one fine week in the summer of '09....

I just want to tell anybody who lands here that if you want a Giclee copy of this, contact Doug at his website . I'm buying one!

For the record, this is how my garden looks -- well one aspect of it -- the old stone cabin window -- draped with an old fashioned rambling rose and astillbe and japanese anenome and filipendula. Don't mind the weeds...

View From Primrose Hill

2011-01-10T07:37:00.000-08:00

New Year's Eve 2011 Primrose Hill

Chinese Lanterns and Champagne

Spectacular Fireworks from the top of Primrose Hill. Chinese lanterns. Champagne. Clear night. And about 20,000 people welcomed in the new year, 2011.

Mt. Fuji Japanese Cherry

2010-11-25T13:38:00.000-08:00

The leaves of the Mt. Fuji Japanese Cherry burnished in the twilight of a Thanksgiving Day in November 2010.

Afternoon light from the west found us doing a bit of autumn gardening while the turkey roasted.

Something to be thankful for: A day with sunshine.

Things Fall Apart in Kiltumper

2010-11-01T06:05:00.000-07:00

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
- from The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats

Autumn in Kiltumper. Peaceful, right? Idyllic? Yes, certainly. Will it last? Ah... that is the big question facing us now. An Bord Plenala, Ireland's Planning Board, has rejected our appeal asking that it overturn Clare County Council's decision to allow a man from the village of Kilmihil to erect two giant wind turbines 500 metres from our bedroom. (The man does not live near the site of the planned wind farm. Nor does the developer.)

The turbines measure 280 feet tall with a wing span of 100 ft. The nearest turbine will be on top of the hill behind our house which is situated at the furthest corner of our smallholding in west Clare. The nearest corner of the field behind our house will likely be within 100 metres of the wind turbine. No longer will be walking in the back meadow of our home -- the birthplace of my grandfather and his before him.

Imagine our disappointment and disillusionment. Why the Irish government had decided to uphold the planning permission for 2 turbines so close to our home of 25 years seems careless and negligent. It indicates the government does not protect its citizens. The most recent findings by European and American authorities advocate that such giant wind turbines should be erected at least 1 km away from homes and households.

Here's a photo by Ian Mynard which illustrates just how close and large the Kiltumper Wind Farm will be from Kiltumper Cottage.

Recently, we received a phone call from Clare Tourism asking if we would participate in a forum to encourage tourism in County Clare. Yes, come see the wind farms that are popping up like poisonous mushrooms all over west Clare. Yes, by all means come listen to them at night when you can't fall asleep because of the blades swishing. It might lull you into a stupor of disbelief. It may even turn you into a cynic.

Homeopathy Treatment for Holistic Wellness

2010-10-11T01:25:00.000-07:00

Homeopathy has been the subject of much debate, especially in the UK where it is funded by the National Health Service. Although skeptics get very energetic in their criticism of it as a healing modality, the NHS has decided to continue to fund it saying, “We believe in patients being able to make informed choices about their treatments, and in a clinician being able to prescribe the treatment they feel most appropriate in particular circumstances,” said a spokesman. Read more about the positive aspects of homeopathy in helping people here at All Things Healing.

May Garden

2010-05-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

In the May garden, wet with rain. Japanese Cherry in the background. Clematis Montana climbing the stone cabin and over the roof. Berginia, Spanish Bluebells, and Anchusa about to come into bloom.

New Website

2010-03-26T09:16:00.000-07:00

Homeopathy at
All Things Healing

Just in time for Spring TwentyTen, a new website has been officially launched – allthingshealing – visit and see what you think. There are dozen of articles on subjects from dream medicine to sacred living, from herbal medicine to homeopathy and forums for discussions and even videos. My page is the homeopathy page and from time to time I'll post my own articles on homeopathy but the bulk of the material I hope will come from submissions from practitioners or from people who've had a positive experience with homeopathy.

Here's an article I wrote on Breast Cancer and Homeopathy

Snow in Kiltumper

2010-01-10T09:00:00.000-08:00

The Snow Falls
in Kiltumper

We're snowed in.
Iced in.
Nowhere to go.
Nothing to do but enjoy.
Reminds me of Robert Frost's

A Dust Of Snow
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Online Writing Workshops

2009-11-24T12:01:00.000-08:00

It's November '09 in the wet country. Parts of Galway, Clare, and Cork are submerged. The country's broke. The Irish soccer team isn't going to the World Cup in South Africa next June – they lost to France because an unfair goal was allowed by the referee who didn't see the 'hand ball' error made by the French captian, Henry. All public sector workers went on strike today, and another strike is planned for next week in protest of the proposed pay cuts in the next budget. Can it BE any worse?

Online Writing Workshops

Meanwhile Niall is busy writing writing and writing. We are setting up the website for online writing workshops. So check back soon. Or send an email if you're interested to Niall's website

2009-07-04T06:20:00.001-07:00

Turns out I'm not keeping up to date with my blog.... Ah well. Here's the news. It's July 4th.... in Kiltumper and to celebrate, I brought in some red white and blue sweet peas for the table. Not much for a Yank but after 24 years it feels like just another day. Meanwhile, the family and I have been to France for our holiday... a lovely village in the Maritime Alps called Valbonne, very near to Grasse and Mougin. It was a holiday to celebrate both our children's accomplishments, one in finishing the Leaving Cert and the other in graduating from the National College of Art and Design. (Check out her website: www.deirdremaywilliams.com ) We're just back, in fact. The garden is bustling with colour and scent, but weeding it has given me a back ache today. With the sun shining there's nothing to complain about. The swallows are doing their daily maneuvers between the rafters in the open cabin and the air above my garden as the babies have learned how to fly.

Next weekend sees the first of our Kiltumper Writing Workshops for this year and we are looking forward to another one on the Bank Holiday weekend in August.

If you're interested in a nice article on Co Clare.... the husband wrote a very good piece for the travel section of the Irish Times

January

2009-01-24T07:47:00.001-08:00

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

2008-10-27T11:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

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

2007-11-27T06:04:00.001-08:00

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

2007-11-02T11:39:00.000-07:00

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....

2007-06-11T03:55:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-06-01T04:23:00.000-07:00

Bealtiane

The cuckoo and the swallows arrived in Kiltumper in the last week of April. We had been waiting for them, those cheery harbingers of summer, with the kind of expectation that one holds for much-loved guests. For weeks we listened to the skies, asking our neighbours, ‘have you heard the cuckoo?’ While out in the garden we watched the skies for the swallows. The anticipation of their flight promising, surer than anything, that summer was on their wings. When the cuckoo did finally arrive, he circumnavigated the townland, calling down to Mary Breen’s and then across Downes’ farm. He flew above the fairy fort at Behan’s, then back across Hehir’s forest, past our cottage garden, and settled somewhere near Coughlan’s bog. Summer had justly arrived. The same day, the 26th of April, the barn swallows returned to our cabin and boldly resumed their flight patterns in a fashion that suggested a fundamental faith in the great, grand design. From the top of the rafters, where they are rebuilding their nests, diving down through the opening of the stone-framed passageway they flew out into the garden like travellers returned from a long journey. Their swooping flight would cheer an aching heart. Each time I walk into the cabin to find some garden tool they startle and leave their perches, thrilling me as they daringly dart past. I find myself wondering what our African counterpart looks like, what their winter home is like, and what they think of Kiltumper.

A red-orange poppy, bright as an African sora, has opened above a sea of green in the flower bed in front of the house, shocking everything else in sight like some electrifying force and clashing with the red tulips in a minor collision of colour. Like the first call of a cuckoo and the first sight of a swallow, the first pop of a poppy breathes new life into me because it means some summer-like weather is around the corner and, like the poppy shedding its shell, I can de-cloak. Meanwhile, the Japanese cherry is festooned with layers of blossoms much like the soft bustle gowns in the painting ‘Women in the Garden’ by Claude Monet, with petals billowing in the May wind. The colour blue zigzags its way across the border with the tiny belled flowers of Jacob’s ladder, forget-me-nots and aquilegia, pansies and bluebells. The swelling of greenness bursting into leaf is, thankfully, unrelenting this time of year making the boxwood hedge neon green with its new growth--rapidly in need of clipping before the month is out. Above the boxwood knot garden sits the small glasshouse. Planted with tomatoes and cucumbers, lettuces and carrots, and early strawberries, it becomes the favourite place for our cat, Neidin, who relaxes on the warm soil. She winks at me with lazy eyes as I pot on the delphiniums and dahlias that I’ve been protecting from the slugs. Do I dare to plant them out?

I love this time of year maybe more than any other. The energy in the garden is steady and determined and nearly every day there is some new marvel to notice. Likewise, I the gardener am steady and determined, but trying to keep pace with the tireless blitz of growth can be a challenge. I have to stop myself and sit down to enjoy it. I should be taking a note from Neidin’s diary--‘today I lounged inside in yer one’s warm glasshouse, closed my eyes and soil-bathed until dinnertime’--or whatever it is that cats think about when they’re not hunting. The garden tasks are as plentiful as the harvest they bestow, however, and although I have elected the Husband as Chief Groundsman I am largely responsible for the garden’s upkeep. To give him his due, the Husband graciously accepts the chores I assign him—hedging mowing, transplanting, barrowing—the kind of jobs where I know his mind is still half in the book he is writing.

In Kevin Danaher’s wonderful book, The Year in Ireland, he writes about Bealtaine and the many May-day and May-time beliefs and customs. I didn’t know this, but seemingly May is the time of year when women gathered the May dew, believing in its virtues as a medicine and beauty aid--“Bringing immunity from freckles, sunburn, chapping and wrinkles during the coming year.” It also cured, or prevented, headaches, skin ailments and sore eyes.” What you do is: in the early morning go to the meadow and knock the dew off the grass with your hands. Collect it in a jar or a plate. Let it rest in the sunbeams and once the dregs have settled pour off the good stuff until you have clear but whitish dew. Danaher says to walk barefoot in the dew will cure all sorts foot ailments. Better still, if you’re daring, roll naked into the morning meadow and be assured of good health and a fair complexion for the coming year.

Lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that working in the garden is being in the garden and being in the garden is enjoying the garden. Something akin to understanding that the journey is the destination, or as the American singer/songwriter Harry Chapin sang, ‘it’s the going, not the getting there, that’s good.’ So out I go. May in the Kiltumper garden will see us harvesting lettuces and scallions and rocket and spinach, and bringing in bouquets of blue flowers. And before the month is out, who knows, the swallows and the cuckoo that arrived from Africa just might see two naked humans out rolling and bathing in the morning dew of a Kiltumper meadow.

Volunteering in South Africa

2007-04-11T05:44:00.000-07:00

Volunteering in the New South Africa

So, we are back in Clare. But for a time, and maybe a long time, our hearts are still in Africa.
My son, a transition year student, participated with me in a month-long volunteer project with an organisation called help2read, a project based in a suburb of Cape Town called Muizenberg. At the moment it is a pilot programme but the director tells me she will soon will be operating in schools in the townships of Masiphumelele and Hout Bay (where the Mellon Foundation, known as ‘Irishtown’ in the Cape Peninsula, has built hundreds of houses). Every day for a month we worked with six primary schoolchildren. For half an hour each we read to them and encouraged them to read to us. We played cards sometimes and drew pictures of pirates and kings and butterflies. Our children, the students of Muizenberg Junior School, came from the local community and from places like Mitchell’s Plain, a coloured settlement from where it takes two hours to travel to school, and Grassy Park and even Khayelitsha—the township on the edge of the Indian Ocean, home to over a million. Some of our students like Esther, Rejoice, Joyful, and Fleming were refugees from Burundi and Rwanda and the Congo. Some of our students like Tyler were disadvantaged white South Africans. In the days before apartheid the school catered only for whites. Now it is 90 percent black and coloured, although the majority of teachers are white. While the infrastructure of the school is excellent, a legacy of pre-apartheid, the student body is bursting into every available space and the resources are stretched to breaking point. If the arrive at the door of the school, the school will take them in as long as they buy a blue uniform and white shirts and socks and black shoes. The school has tried to make a policy of not turning children away. These students were quite possibly among the luckiest of students and the school itself one of the most racially integrated in the country. It is the face of the new South Africa. It is putting its best foot forward. It is the model of education, and the contribution of volunteers like ourselves only make it better.

So what was it like, people ask when you come back. Well, really the experience is so profound, so different to your usual life that you could speak about it for days on end and still not quite capture it. Picture arriving after a 12-hour flight in Africa. It’s 6 in the morning, the January sun is dazzlingly hot, and you are there waiting four hours for your pick-up from the volunteer organisation with no idea of what lies ahead. At even that first moment we had stepped out of Western, Northern Hemisphere lives and into a slower pace. When a South African says ‘now now’ to you don’t expect it mean now as in double time. (Expect it to mean today, tomorrow or sometime next week.) Driving directly from the airport you see the township of Langa—one the biggest townships in the country. What strikes you is the rolling sea of tin roofs, thousands of tiny shacks, painted different colours. Some are collapsing. But most, amazingly so, are sustainable homes. Not long gone from the days of the ‘one family/one bed’ rule, the townships are slowly transforming into more acceptable housing. When you talk to people about township living you begin to understand that it is their ‘home’. Ask a person from a township to move into a wealthier neighbourhood and they will most likely refuse. A few weeks after our arrival we met a white South African couple, living in a wealthy suburb on the coast of the Indian Ocean who explained to us that their maid travelled two hours a day, each way, to work at their home. She was invited to stay for month while the couple went on holiday but she refused point blank. Didn’t even consider it. Why? Because where the whites lived was isolated. No community. No camaraderie. No neighbours living a shared experience. Not ‘now now’, she very likely said, ‘not ever’. Her employers take care of her expenses and have bought her second shack-cum-house in her township. If everyone did this, if the haves continue to give to the have-nots, then the new South Africa may be able to lead Africa itself, eventually, out of poverty.

Our own accommodation was on the edge of the Indian Ocean in a hostel where we shared living and cooking arrangements with other volunteers, surfing fans, and long-term residents, most of them from the Congo or in transit from the townships. With only five working hot plates being shared among 30 plus residents, dinnertime was chaotic. If you suffered from insomnia, then the beach hostel was not the place to lay your head at night. There was Willie, the oddest of characters, who wiped his face and arms and counters with the same dish-rag, keeping the place tidy albeit not germ free it must be said. There was Kweze and Ryan the young black surfing stars and Patrick the sharkspotter. There was Alex whose children and their mother lived in a township and he elsewhere because he was unable to marry her until he had given a dowry to the father, part of the Xhosa culture. Occasionally his beautiful children visited him at the hostel. There was Dom, a barefoot blond dreadlocked 19 yr old from Manchester with spider tattoos and wearing his board shorts down around his ankles looking for his passport and wallet that had been taken after another binge of heavy drinking. There was red-headed Una from Scotland on her way to India, after two months assisting in an orphanage in a suburb called Athlone, to work in another orphanage. And there was Aine, a 40 year old teacher from Limerick, taking a gap year and volunteering in the same reading project as ourselves. She was a teacher of Irish and French and my son practiced his French with her and occasionally his Irish, laughing together sometimes when no one else understood what they were saying.

We were looking for an opportunity to give something back and we found it through volunteering in South Africa. That we got to also experience a different place in the world at the same time was a bonus. The idea of ‘Meaningful Travel’ sums it up quite well: Volunteering and travelling. Within an hour from the township outside Port Elizabeth, where Sr Normoyle intends to urge volunteers to build a hospice for the Missionvale Centre, the elephants and giraffes and lions and cheetahs roam free inside private game reserves. But outside, in the streets, the new South Africa is breathing new life into itself. My son and I were part of that breathing life, a life full of contrasts, of tremendous beauty and poverty. The memories of the springbok on the grassy plains and the girl in the blue dress, Rachel Kunda from the Congo, on the sidewalk in Muizenberg are etched in hearts and minds forever.