Seanchaí

The fog has cleared, and so has the head

Clear View From The Hills

Ahh! The presentation is over, and I've gotten good responses. The fog has lifted and my head is clear. (Yes, the photo at right is the same landscape pictured yesterday, but during different weather.)

A little lecture, a little music and a little digital poking around all contributed toward what I hope was an informative presentation this morning.

I even tried my hand against a few academics during the question-and-answer. Imagine!

Well, I feel great, and ready to get to work on my thesis. By May I should have two more letters after my last name. (I hope to accumulate 10 before I start my real life.)

Thanks so much to everyone who supported me today.

Days before my talk: 1 -- Ideas in my head: 6 million

View from the Hills

I don't mind telling you I'm on pins and needles. It's the last day before my talk, and thoughts of Ireland and storytelling and culture and communication are creeping in to every corner of my head.

The show starts at 11 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday, Nov. 6) in Letterman 267 at Ball State. Hopefully by about 11:30 the fog will have lifted for my audience, and they'll walk away knowing something new.

The least I can hope for is that each person will have some interesting water-cooler conversation for the next day.

The most I can hope for is that a few people will be inspired to have a look at Irish storytelling on their own, and come up with some new thoughts.

See you there. And if I don't, wish me luck.

My modern Irish storytelling Big Bang Theory

Éamon Kelly

I have written twice in this blog about Éamon Kelly, pictured left. The first time I considered the man. The second time I considered his work.

In the course of researching over the past several months, I have become intimately more familiar with the tales of Ireland's Master Storyteller.

My conclusion about Mr. Kelly, more accurately an actor playing the role of a seanchaí, is that he is the founder of modern Irish storytelling.

If Peig Sayers represented what the art form was, Mr. Kelly represented everything it could become.

By taking storytelling from the fireside to the radio and the stage, he affected audiences of thousands with his stories. This is the difference between the old school and the new.

Before  Éamon Kelly, few if any people considered the power Irish storytelling could have on a global stage. Now the art travels freely across Ireland and beyond, thanks to a new group of stewards who want to share their gifts with everyone.

A hardscrabble life off the west coast of Ireland

Peig Sayers

What a tough-looking woman, you might say to yourself, and you'd be right.

Peig Sayers lived on Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Ireland for most of her life. Poverty, sickness and death were inordinately common in her life from 1873 to 1958.

She is remembered today as a great storyteller. Her oral autobiography has been transcribed into book form and distributed internationally.

I wanted to Mention Peig as an example of Ireland's storytelling past. She was the product of a certain time in Irish history. In her lifetime the country struggled to find its political identity, and times were hard for peasant farmers.

If this type of storyteller still exists in Ireland, I found no trace of it on my trip. Instead I found a number of modern, professional storytellers who honored Peig as a beacon of what Pat Speight describes as "a time that is gone."

It's also interesting to note Peig's book was required reading for young Irish students for decades. Many have viciously, sometimes hilariously, cast aspersions at the woman and her story.

The flight home, then two months of jet lag

The reading list

I'm compelled to remember returning from Ireland in June, and hesitating to start this project because of the huge amount of information I would have to process.

It took more than two months to begin working in earnest. In fact I didn't do much of anything during the long, hot summer in Muncie. I'll blame it on jet lag for now.

But the lag was helpful. When I sat down to begin transcribing interviews in September, so much of the material seemed fresh, and I was able to dig in with more zeal.

It helped also to be starting a class on Celtic History at that time. It turns out Irish storytelling has been one of the constants in that culture, as far back as the beginning of recorded history.

That means the questions for me are as follows: How does storytelling function in the digital age? Why has it survived in spite of significant cultural upheaval? And in broader terms, what does it mean to be "Irish," anyway?

Well, I have my pet theories. I'll put a leash on them till next Tuesday, however. Hope to see you at the talk.

God, the Academy, the producers, Mom & Dad

Thank-you notes are traditionally the least interesting part of a major project -- film, song or otherwise. But this being my first "major project," I now understand why they always show up.

Without constant nurturing from familiars and strangers in the past month, I'm sure this trip would have faltered or even failed; would have been, at best, a perilous cliff walk.

Cliff Walk

First kudos go to Mom and Dad, and to Grandma, who sounded wonderful on the other end of my cell phone, and who kept me alive as long as I did on the bloody miserable face of Croagh Patrick. Better family I couldn't ask for. Love ya.

Next gratitude goes to anyone who posted or read this blog. It's a daunting thing to run a Web site you're not sure anyone is looking at. So many thanks for the signs of life from everyone, especially the repeat business.

The unflinching support of my hosts, Denis and Mary, kept me sane. Even after I broke the spare key in their front door they did not hesitate in hospitality. What rare and wonderful friends. And another wink for my London hosts, Natali and Luis.

Thanks also to my professors, who trained my mind this past year to stay on target, stay on target, stay on target.

And finally to the storytellers themselves. These I will point out by name, because not one of them had to go out of their way to talk to me, yet all did.

Best to Kate Corkery, Lillis O Laoire, Richard Marsh, Coilín Oh-Aissieux, Ciaran McMahon, Gerry MacGregor, Sean O'Donoghue, Denis O'Day, Eddie Lenihan, Peter Curtin, Pat Speight, Kieran Shiels and the irrepressible Clare Murphy.

Thank you also to Caroline Oates, Geraldine Kilcoyne, Noreen Pattwell, Andrew Byrne, Patrick Wolohan and the guy at Dunnes Stores in Maynooth, who let me park the car in the employee lot overnight.

Now, the traveling is over and the work begins. Main presentation to follow in autumn.

Which means ... keep checking the blog, from time to time.

I won't say good-bye. Just so long.

 

This post is dedicated to Roger & Carol Tackett

Four planes, four trains, a bus and two cars

It's the very last day of my cultural immersion. When I go to bed tonight it will be in my beloved Ohio. So much of this trip has been taken in a dream state. I still can't quite fathom that I spent a month asking near-strangers for their time, consideration and answers, and that they so willingly obliged.

Yet in the end this has only been a cursory inspection of Irish storytelling. If I had more time or a million dollars -- well, I wouldn't be in grad school probably -- but for the purposes of this study I would have dug deeper and cut a wider swath.

I would have stuck around all my storytellers a little longer, to see them perform not just for me, but for a public audience. I would have holed myself up in University College Dublin for a week with a thermos of coffee and a card for unlimited photocopies.

Traveling Kit

I would have driven to Northern Ireland and back again for storyteller Liz Weir, and once more to the capital for storyteller Jack Lynch.

And there is a scary likelihood I would have tried to become a protégé to Eddie Lenihan, assisting him in his fascinating research in whatever way possible.

On the first entry to this blog I said I would end up feeling two things at the end of the trip: travel-weary and satisfied. Both are true.

This post is dedicated to Christine Bavender & Tim Underhill

Looks like Hickey got to it first

Irish Days

I'd like to talk again about good karma. I ran into a little more yesterday ambling down King Street here in Hammersmith, London.

And what should I see in the bookshop window but a volume called "Irish Days: Oral Histories of the Twentieth Century," by one Margaret Hickey. What's more, it was marked down to £3.99, a good price even in dollars.

So, book in fist, I returned home.

What Ms. Hickey has done is interview a group of about a dozen Irish people, the youngest born in 1926. She treats the storytelling tradition as a cultural activity of the past, and ties it much more strongly to poverty than I have. But then she's more pointedly studying history, not just storytelling.

For her purposes, she makes a good case here and there.

From the introduction, as she describes the rural, impoverished Ireland of the past: The most universal and most magical way of recreating the soul was the spoken word. The chance to sit around a fire in the evening, take a pull on a pipe and converse was a treat keenly relished, and those who could tell a story were welcome across any threshold.

Note the strong language. In Hickey's reasoning, oral communication is not only a way to combat poverty; it's a way to reclaim one's own spiritual being.

I have yet to meet a person who has studied Irish storytelling and does not recognize a major cultural weight behind it.

This post is dedicated to Justin & Breanne Gladis

Orality, literacy, telecommunications, digital

Digital

A weighty question got put to me yesterday: is the world divided into four spheres, being orality, literacy, telecommunications and digital?

Whew.

In the end I do agree with the notion that each is a different system requiring different types of thinking. But I would be sure to add the point that all four systems can work in tandem.

We're seeing the four systems work together today. Most of the Irish storytellers I met on this trip, I found first online. There's the digital. When in Ireland, I contacted them by phone. There's the telecommunications. They referenced and recommended many books for me to read. There's the literacy. And of course they told stories. There's the orality.

Now let me take it a step further. I'd suggest this is the only time in history you'd have such a conflagration of media. In the ancient world, storytellers were most likely illiterate, except on the rare chance they were employed by nobility.

With the rise of literacy, the oral tradition shrank as more folks learned to read. In a roundabout way Eddie Lenihan suggested this to me by saying the UK's oral tradition has all but vanished.

Storytelling

And as traditional telecommunications, such as phone lines and TV sets, proliferated in the homes of the Western world, perhaps leisure reading began to fade.

Today, we're watching as the masses switch to the Internet to make their phone calls or watch programs that used to be shown only on TV.

Yet it's not as if the Internet is squashing all other forms. It is simply a new channel, a new medium, which can more quickly and thoroughly deliver new information, as well as massive stores of information from the past.

The way I see it, storytelling, books and telecommunications are staying alive online.

This is an argument in broad strokes. If I had 633 pages I would share more, but for now please be satisfied with this humble note. My brain is tired.

This post is dedicated to Kyle & Christi Blythin

They had to make their own entertainment

If I have built up any good karma in my life, a good portion of it got cashed in on this trip. I did as much planning as I could beforehand, but many pieces were still not in place when I left America on May 7.

Then, one after the next, each piece fell into place, making my journey fruitful and intriguing. I visited many corners of Ireland, and I'm so satisfied with the breadth of personalities I encountered.

There's Richard Marsh, the devoted historian; Clare Murphy, the energetic performer; and so many more.

Yet in this group, all shared a common wisdom: in some way, each of them told me that storytelling was a way for Ireland to make its own entertainment in the past, meaning, at a time when the country was materialistically poor.

The reminder of the "bad old days" is fresher in Ireland's collective consciousness. In America, what most people understand of poverty has come from the Great Depression generation, and even in that case there were considerable portions of the country that were unaffected.

Derelict Cottage, Co. Clare

I've had a pet theory for the past year: that narrative, and storytelling in particular, is a way to make sense of reality. In our own heads, we select certain events from our days and re-arrange them in a way that seems logical to us. And the harsher the outward reality, the more colorful and valuable the stories become.

So that's where I suppose Irish storytelling came from, at least in recent history. Where it stands now -- and where it's going tomorrow -- I have yet to figure out.

But do keep reading, dear friends.

 

This post is dedicated to Coach John Behrle