Well! We’re at the halfway point now, which amazes me. It feels like we’ve just truly arrived, for a number of reasons. First, we’ve done some major traveling with the students, and second, we’re just getting used to the place. We’re actually not quite done traveling yet, because as I wrote the following we were newly arrived in Derry from spending time in Connemara.

We started off the week with a bang: Bealtaine (“ByALL-tinna”) is the Celtic festival of the beginning of summer, and it started on May Eve (April 30). They don’t do maypoles and such here (maypoles are English, not Celtic – besides, there aren’t many trees and you wouldn’t want to waste the wood on a maypole). Instead, they do bonfires with gorse (highly flammable and a terribly nuisance plant anyway – like Scotch broom with nasty thorns) and coal or peat. This festival is the counterpart to Samhain (“SAW-inn”), the Nov. 1 festival that we celebrate as Halloween. All festivals (and days, in fact) begin the evening before, when the sun goes down. So after the sun went down on Monday at about 9 pm, we came out of poetry class to find a huge bonfire burning on the hill above us. There were a couple of smaller ones happening across the valley, too. It was very exciting! I had never seen actual Bealtaine bonfires lit by local people! The fire is said to be purifying, and people used to drive their cattle between two fires on May Eve (and/or jump over the bonfire themselves).

I told the students to go find a place on the beach and build a bonfire with peat and coal; Morgan was eager to go too, so we put some firewood (very rare in Donegal!!!) that we found in our shed in the back of the car and went down there. We found our way down to the beach in the dark (with tiny flashlights) and some students had already started a bonfire. The weather was stunning: no wind, clear sky, stars coming out, and the almost-full moon rising. I couldn’t believe it! I’ve been at Bealtaine bonfires where the mist was so heavy that it felt like rain, or at ones where it was raining, or when the weather was so severe that there was no possibility of a bonfire. This was different: clear, congenial, perfect. Its like will not be seen again! We hung out for about a forty-five minutes, and left before anything crazy happened (just the usual guitar playing and singing, jokes, announcements, etc.). It was funny and enjoyable. The last students to leave (at whatever time, I’m not sure) were careful to put the fire out.

In the afternoon we had invited a scholar and writer from Cavan named Dolores Whelan (she writes extensively on Celtic spirituality) to discuss the Celtic calendar. It was fascinating; she used a circular diagram of the year and discussed the positions and characteristics and customs of Samhain/All Soul’s Day (Nov. 1), Imbolc/Candlemas (Feb. 1), Bealtaine/Festival of St. John (May 1), and Lúghnasa/Lammas (Aug. 1), with the solstices and equinoxes in between. The lecture went for three hours, so I can’t summarize it (even with my notes), but one of the most striking things about it was how closely the agricultural and academic calendars correspond. These students began their studies heading into the new year (Samhain), and spent six months being receptive and relatively passive in their learning (all theory, basically). Now that we’re at Bealtaine, the students’ efforts are coming into fruition: they’re active, expressive, productive (all practice). It works! And at the end of the term they’ll be producing large integrative essays that combine their passive learning (the theory) with their activities in Ireland (the practice). It’s fantastic.

The poetry class was just as confounding (for some) this time as last week. We all brought our poems to read out loud, and Kate (the teacher) finished the discussion of sight from last week. Then we launched into noses and the sense of smell. She had people complete the proverb fragments: keep your nose to the -------, a good nose for a -------, I smell a --------, he came up smelling like ---------, and following your -------. It was very interesting and funny to see what answers people came up with! She also had us all write down (and share) our earliest memories of smell (mine were Tollhouse cookies baking, the horse I rode on my very first ride at the age of 5, fresh sheets drying on the line, and my mom’s cigarettes when she first lit up). I’m quite sure these are different memories from the ones I listed the last time I was here with students! Then she asked us to write down and talk about moments of sixth sense, which was fun to hear people’s stories. And in our responses to the quote (by Rousseau) of “smell is the sense of memory and desire,” some of the students were heart-breakingly honest and drew tears. It was a powerful, vulnerable moment in the life of the group. [My response was just about how the smell of ditto paper when I was a kid came to mean publication after one of my short stories was copied onto ditto paper and passed out among my classmates. I came to associate publication with smell, so I always smell my new publications.] As you can imagine, I was humbled by my students’ work.

On Tuesday we had seminar after the morning Irish classes; I taught them to sing a new song in Irish (Bean Pháidín, a funny song about a woman who wishes that she were Paddy’s wife and that the wife he has could be dead). We had a seminar, then, about the reading that they had to do for the trip to Ireland: about Father McDyer, the iconoclastic priest who essentially rescued the village of Gleann Cholm Cille from desertion and obscurity by developing local craft industries; about the role of the drunken or fallen priest in traditional Catholic society in Ireland, and about the layers of spirituality in the valley itself. There are thousands-of-years-old dolmens right next to Catholic pilgrimage sites here. It was an interesting discussion. The evening’s activity was a lecture on the Donegal Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region) with Donncha Ó Baoill (Donald O’Boyle); he took all the students’ family names and traced their origins. He did this same thing last time and it was wonderful for the students to imagine themselves differently. With Williams, it’s pretty clear: “ah, you’re Welsh, is it?”

Cary and Morgan took the afternoon off – they don’t come to seminar anyway – and went adventuring! They went to the John Molloy shop in Ardara for sweaters (they got some), then went to Glenties for lunch. After lunch they shopped at Kennedy’s in Ardara for more sweaters (and a gorgeous green wrap for me and Morgan to share), then went out to the “Eco-Dolmen Centre” in Ardara where they looked around for a few minutes and got directions to the Dúnfort and the Kilclooney dolmen. They walked across the road, past some houses where there was a friendly little horse, and went up a little ways to find the dolmen. It’s really neat looking from all angles, and when Cary went inside it he could see Mt. Errigal in the distance. He got some great pictures. Morgan had a foot cramp so she didn’t climb up to see it. After that she played on a play structure for a couple of minutes, and then they went to find Dúnfort: a two-thousand-year-old Celtic stone fort that takes up most of an island on Loch Dún, about five miles from Ardara. They couldn’t get out there by boat (the man they spoke to said “both boats are in bad shape”), but they could see it from the shore. They backed out of the boat guy’s place and went to where they could see it from the road; then they parked and walked across to get closer through cow pasture and bog. Cary got one surprising wet foot (a common occurrence when you walk across a bog!). The stone walls were totally covered by the bog in many places.

The weather continues to amaze us all. We’re turning down the heat in our cottage because it is less and less and necessary. Usually Ireland warms up by May 1st, but this is remarkable. I still can’t believe how perfect the weather was for the Bealtaine bonfire. I keep hearing that Seattle has had continuous pouring rain. Heh heh heh… I told my students on Thursday that we’d actually taken them to Italy instead of Ireland, and that they’ve been learning Italian instead of Irish. People are saying that the elderly are marveling over the weather, not having seen it go for six weeks (almost) continuously without rain or even clouds in their entire lives. Leonard, the man who owns the main food shop in town, said you might see a fine week in August, but never six weeks and never in the spring. Other parts of Ireland are apparently in near-drought conditions.

On Wednesday the thunderous sound of the bodhráns echoed through Oideas Gael again, with considerable improvement over last week. Morgan participated again. There weren’t quite enough bodhráns to go around, so I sat outside and enjoyed the sun and chatted with Siobhán and Gearóidín, the people who work with Liam at Oideas Gael. In the evening I led the students down the road to the Folk Village again to finish up their weaving projects, and spent another pleasant evening chatting and watching people weave. I went across the road to the overlook of the beach and was shocked to see people on wave runners in the bay! It was incredibly noisy, but the water was quite still and the evening was otherwise lovely. As the sun went down the wave runner people went away. Margaret, the leader of the weaving class, said that she moved out of Gleann because the young men in town have nothing to do but make noise.

The day before we left on our trip to Galway and Derry a bunch of us went up to Port, the next bay to the north, for drawing. But instead of drawing, Cary and I hiked up to the top of the cliffs overlooking the water, and watched the sunlight sparkling endlessly. There were gulls hovering at the cliffs’ edge, and sea stacks that formed their own fog! You could actually see fog rising off the backs of the sea stacks! It was extraordinary; I’ve never seen anything like it. Port was deserted entirely about fifty years ago (like many small towns here) and now it just has the ruins of stone cottages and tall stone walls that serve as windbreaks. It’s still beautiful, though, and we enjoyed our walk immensely. On the way home I stopped and bought a couple of sweaters at the nearby Glencolumbkille Woollen Mills (one that’s a sort of raspberry heather, and another the color of seaweed). The evening class was Donegal dancing with Edie Bradley, the same teacher they had last week. She is hilarious! She kept teasing the boys in the class. After doing Shoe the Donkey, the Long Journey, Breakdown Blues (!), the Siege of Ennis, and the Walls of Limerick, she ended with a country line dance that was reminiscent of the Electric Slide. The last time I was line dancing was in Iceland in 2005, dancing to Icelandic country music (sung in Icelandic!). It was odd, but of course fun too.

The trip to Galway was a huge challenge. I had a number of students drinking heavily, and another bunch of them with bad colds, and some of them were both sick and drinking a lot. So naturally they weren’t feeling great about taking a long bus ride to Connemara. Most of the students, fortunately, came to the annual Joe Heaney Festival (our whole purpose for coming to Galway) and participated. They were very surprised to discover that we were in the heart of the Gaeltacht, where people don’t speak English if they don’t have to. A number of them felt unwelcome and resented even being there, but (as Cary correctly pointed out) this was the one and only event on their whole trip to Ireland that was not put on exclusively for their benefit as tourists/students. So that was hard and got somewhat harder the next day. The problem is, every time I do this trip the students start to get on each other’s nerves by the end of the second week, so this time away is to help break things up. No matter what happens, it’s hard.

We stayed in Leenane, a tiny village at the end of a long fjord in Northern Connemara (and the setting of the film “The Field,” a must-see for anyone interested in Ireland). It was 45 minutes away from the festival in Carna (southern Connemara), but Cary kindly drove the entire time. We had dinner with Rick and Joan Lorenz, colleagues from our voyage on the Semester at Sea in 2005, along with our friend (and my co-writer for the Joe Heaney book) Lillis Ó Laoire. He teaches at the National University of Ireland in Galway, and he brought an American colleague, Sarah McKibben, who normally teaches Irish at Notre Dame but was at Galway for the semester. It was quite the congenial dinner with excellent food!

I let the students off the hook for Friday, so they could shop in Galway and attend music sessions if they wanted. At the festival that night, there were some speeches (in Irish), but also some terrific singing. We bought a CD by Róisín Elsafty (whose father is Egyptian but who is a native Irish speaker herself and a fine singer), as it was her CD release party too. It was great to see some of the people that we recognized from times before; some of them recognized us, too! We saw Liam Mac Con Iomaire, who lives in both Dublin and Connemara, who has just finished a wonderful biographical book (in Irish) on Joe Heaney. I will be forever grateful to him for writing in the kind of Irish that I can understand: clear, expressive, and straightforward Connemara Irish. Plus, the fact that he has this book coming out shortly means that the book I’m writing with Lillis can function kind of as a complementary book: it will duplicate very little of the same material, and the two together will give a much more complete picture of who Joe was.

On Saturday we came down to Carna again for the all-day part of the festival, and I met the students outside and tried to divide them into those interested in either sean-nós (old style) singing or sean-nós dancing. Most went for the singing, and the hard part was that there weren’t enough photocopies of song lyrics to go around. I offered to get more copies made, but in fact it was Mícheál Ó Cuaig who went to great lengths to get some done; he works nonstop every year to continue the festival and to foster local interest in sean-nós singing, and I admire his work greatly. He was working so hard this year, in fact, that he lost his voice and couldn’t do his emcee duties later that evening. My heart went out to him; the first time I met him, I too had lost my voice and croaked through a whole three days of being desperate to share my love of the songs – but couldn’t.

Anyway, after the workshop Morgan and I had lunch with our friend Rick Lorenz and a folksinger named Jack Hardy who was in Ireland just for the festival weekend. Cary unfortunately had driven the 45 minutes to Oughterard to check in to our hostel and leave our bags, and didn’t even have the chance to enjoy any of the morning because it was all driving. After a lunch that involved mostly discussion of youthful binge drinking in Galway, we went to Tí Leavy, a small pub that – incredibly – fit over a hundred people into it for the big session of sean-nós singing. Mícheál was the emcee for that event (which is possibly what cost him his voice), and there were terrific singers – Bríd Mulkerrins (Joe Heaney’s great niece) among them. I loved it. When it was my turn to sing, I didn’t mess up, for which I was grateful (Lillis had asked me to sing “The Nobleman’s Wedding,” an English-language one that Joe Heaney probably got from his father). My students and I sang “Crúiscín Lán,” which has an Irish-language chorus, and that was fun.

The “big evening” involved a large array of musicians, sean-nós singers, and dancers, each of whom had been allotted about five minutes. The first set was a group of fine young players (I’m guessing 10 to 17 years in age) – they were so very good, and so fun to watch! And as each group went onstage, the sets got longer and longer. By 11:00 pm the schedule was over two hours behind, and we had to go. Meanwhile, there was a student rebellion on the bus (some people had never even come in the entire day) and the whole scene was divided between those who really enjoyed the event and those who did not. I really, really enjoyed it! It was a long drive back to the hostel in Oughterard (thanks Cary!), and an early drive over to Galway to get to the Burren on Sunday morning. by the way, the weather changed on Friday evening and became much more Irish after several weeks of feeling like we were in Italy: rain and heavy wind, bright sunshine, more rain.

What a marvelous place the Burren is! Limestone rocks are everywhere, along with dramatic cliffs, fertile fields, megalithic tombs, forts, standing stones, and other sacred sites. We met the students at Corcomroe Abbey (except those who stayed behind in Galway because they were ill or hungover) in County Clare; it was built in the late 12th century and even a quick glance reveals exceptional architectural technology. It was also the burial site of the Tierney family, so my student Angus Tierney got his picture taken with “his people”! Perhaps most exciting and fun was hearing the sound of the cuckoo, which is beautiful and sounds just like a clock. We then went to the Poulnabrone dolmen, Ireland’s most famous one; it is so dramatic that no matter how many times I see it I’m still impressed. There were a lot of wildflowers there too, including ones I’d never seen before. The Burren has so many unique birds, plants, and animals that are found nowhere else on earth – it was a pleasure to be there even in “changeable” weather.

We went to Kilfenora for lunch at the Burren Centre and had the chance to hear my colleague Dunstan’s father, Knute Skinner (a well-known poet who lives in Clare) give a reading to the students. His wife Edna (Dunstan’s step-mother) not only read some of her prose (very lively stories about friends and neighbors in Clare) but also gave Dunstan a bunch of homemade cookies to give to the students (and us!). It was so dear, and a great chance to hear powerful poetry. We swung by Brigid’s Well, a holy site near the Cliffs of Moher. You walk into a ten-foot-long tunnel filled with photographs, prayers, and statuettes of Brigid (who was both a goddess and a saint – Britain is named after her), and come to the sacred spring to pray. There are so many notes of thanksgiving too, and little tokens of thanks for curing various illnesses (crutches, for example). I offered a heartfelt prayer for one of my friends and colleagues at work who has lung cancer, and walked out of there in tears. When we got to the Cliffs of Moher, I stood up in the front of the bus and told the students that, “for the next half hour, I am your mother. Your mother says you will not go beyond the railing. Your mother says that you will not dance on the edge of the cliffs or even sneak up to the edge. You will come back at the appointed time, at which point I will cease to be your mother.” They went out, as did I, and enjoyed the clouds whipping across the sea and the changing play of light on the cliffs and water. It was great. And then, when they got back on the bus, I made the speech about no longer being their mother.

We decided to go to Gregan’s Castle Hotel for a special dinner with the financial assistance of my parents (thanks Mom and Dad!!), and had a lovely red wine with lamb (Cary), salmon (me), and pasta (Morgan – who had sparkling water). We had salads with special items in them, like guinea fowl and roasted fig for Cary and goat cheese and walnuts for Morgan and myself. It was warm inside, and very fancy, and although we were very windblown from the day and not as dressed up as we probably should have been, it was immensely satisfying. The desserts were way over the top: a chocolate plate with various layers and mousses and creams and fun items, petits fours with our tea (lemon tarts, chocolate bonbons and tarte de Santiago-type almond cake), and an ice cream and sorbet plate. On a large sesame cracker in the shape of a painter’s palate, there were arrayed lots of small scoops of ice creams and sorbets (melon, meyer lemon, blackberry cinnamon, raspberry, strawberry, etc. etc.). Oh my. We split everything and even though the drive home was long, it was extremely pleasant! Every aspect of the meal was perfect, the service was helpful but unobtrusive, and the atmosphere in general was congenial and elegant. Thanks again, Mom and Dad!

The Morgan Report:

Hi everybody! So much has gone on this last week. It started out with the celebration of May Day or Bealtaine, as they call it here. Poetry class ended at 9:30 pm, and we headed on down to the beach (that would be the students, and my mom and me and my dad, and the other teacher). The first students to get there started a bonfire and half of them started singing. Half a dozen people said they wished they had brought a coke or something for me, because they had all brought beer. The other half of the students swam in the ocean, and gossipped, and splashed each other. I left before things got too rowdy.

On Tuesday me and my dad had an adventure (we visited a dolmen, met a nice horse, saw a Celtic fort and we went sweater shopping). And on Wednesday again we had bodhrán class (drumming) and weaving. I finished my first weaving and completed a second as well. On Thursday we went to a seaside town called Port that was deserted, and we all sat on rocks and drew the ocean and other rocks and sea life. Later on we had dancing, and learned some new dances.

Friday we went to Leenane where we were staying. We dropped off our bags and went to the Connemara Joe Heaney Festival, where people were making introductory speeches. I breathed in a bug, sneezed, and got a cold from it. I am positive that’s how I got my cold. I also met a friend named Niamh (“neev”). On Saturday we came again to the Joe Heaney Festival, and more fun things than speeches were happening: the students came too! Most of the students went to the singing workshop room, and only a few of us went to the dancing, me among them. I learned some dance steps, and it turns out that almost all of the Irish kids who were dancing knew how to dance, and I was the only one who didn’t, along with having a strange accent.

Later that same day we joined Rick and Jack: one of them an old friend from the ship, another one an American folk singer. They talked about very grown-up stuff, and I was quite bored. Then all 40 of us went to a session in a very small pub. We crowded in there, and found it just fine until everybody else started arriving. It was worse than standing on a Japanese subway train on the way to a place an hour away, but the music was good, and I liked drawing cartoon pictures of the students that were sitting nearest to me. After that we returned to the Carna Bay Hotel for dinner, after which we went back to the Joe Heaney Festival place. There was much singing and a bit of dancing, and music playing. I went to bed at around 12:40 am, as I would the next night and the night before.

On Sunday we toured the Burren; at one point I got down inside of one the cracks between the rocks and pretended I was falling in; my mom got some pictures. On Sunday one of the students found a kitten underneath a car that was meowing and crying. I held it for awhile and fed it some of the cheese that the students had provided, and then it was given to the lady behind the counter in the shop, who took care of it until the animal shelter could pick it up. Another funny thing happened while we were at the same shop: the lady behind the counter (one of the two) picked up her purse, looked in, and started shaking all over. She stood there for about 10 seconds, while the other lady was bellowing her name and saying “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” The first lady walked to the door and, still shaking, threw whatever was in her purse outside. I thought “Okay, that’s strange.” Later when I went outside, the students were all crowded around the largest snail I had ever seen! It was about the size of a small plum, and quite gooey. Life for a snail is pretty bleak, especially among cosmetics in ladies’ purses.

Later that evening, we went to dinner at the Gregan’s Castle Hotel. I ate goat cheese salad and pasta, with olive oil and lots of cheese. That was quite good, but it was nothing compared to dessert. For dessert we had the chocolate plate, and the ice cream plate. The ice cream plate contained chocolate, vanilla, dolce de leche, and coffee ice creams, along with at least twelve types of fruit sorbets. The chocolate plate contained kind of a chocolate tart with hazelnut cream on top, chocolate mousse, and layers of layers of whipped cream between sheets of dark chocolate. I was rather hyper afterwards. I went outside later and got my ya-yas out in the form of doing whatever I remembered of the Irish dancing lesson. I went to bed again at 12:40, or somewhere in that region, and I’m hoping to go to bed a lot earlier tonight, but not too early. Both Mom and I have caught the national cold now. From Morgan.