I started out this week feeling pretty overwhelmed. Luckily, the students are getting along better with one another and appear to have learned how to practice passive avoidance of the people they don’t want to be around. However, I am having serious problems with people choosing not to come to class. I also had to run herd over the foolish rumors that they’re being overcharged for their housing. Twelve euros a night is a bargain and they think it’s expensive? Including heat and electricity and cleaning and water? One student spread serious rumors about it, and it’s almost impossible to stop a rumor once it starts. It’s always this hard, but I forget in the intervening three years what a whole series of individual challenges each group presents. It takes up an amazing amount of brain space. I know I can’t weed out people who genuinely don’t want to be here or to participate, but I wish I could give them as realistic a sense of this as possible. Next time the group will be much smaller. This is a promise I am making to myself.

On Monday morning I drove down the bog roads at high speeds to collect Judith Hoad, an outstanding herbologist who lives near Killybegs. She is probably best known for her work on wool, weaving, and tweed in Donegal; she wrote a well-respected book called This is Donegal Tweed that I like very much. We had a lively conversation about a variety of topics on the way back – politics, global warming, men and women, childrearing, health – and I felt very comfortable with her (just as I did three years ago). She took my students out on a walk down the road, located several dozen “weeds” growing here and there, and identified them as highly useful for medicinal purposes. Each student was given a piece of paper to write out the Latin name and part of the plant, how to prepare it, and what it was used for. There was a bad storm brewing out in the sea (black clouds and all), but it mostly held off until we were finished. Guy, Antonio, Judith and I went to the teahouse at the Folk Village and enjoyed sandwiches, tea, desserts, and good conversation.

In the afternoon Judith gave a lecture about making tinctures and various preparations, then the whole group walked uphill to the student dorm to make rose lotion. I saw the horrified faces of the dorm students as they heard her say “later we’ll go up to the dorm,” so I snuck out during her lecture and cautiously went into the kitchen. Just as I suspected, it was filthy; I washed dishes and put them away, scrubbed the stove and counters, and swept the floor just in time for them to come up as a group and use the kitchen. Whew. As has been the case with all the “one time” lecturers, this one held great fascination and was a wealth of information for a segment of the students, and was meaningless and boring to others. Of course, to me these are all dazzling and fascinating!

Kate Newmann, the poetry teacher, invited all of the students (and Guy and Antonio as well) to her home in Kilcar on Monday night. Somehow we all fit inside; it was warm and intimate, friendly and delightful. Kate had a large salmon, two whole chickens, pizzas, organic grilled vegetables, fresh fruit, fine cheeses, and about twenty bottles of wine. No one could believe it. She lives there with her mother Joan (also a very fine poet who just launched her latest poetry collection in Belfast on Friday). The two of them are some of the finest people you could ever hope to know. They welcomed my students with open arms and tons of delicious healthy food. Within an hour the wine had started to work and the students were having a great time (we were too!).

The poetry started at about 9 pm – I read one of my own from several years ago, Guy read one called “Leavetaking” by Greg Delanty, and Antonio read the poem from their wedding, followed by one of his own that he wrote that afternoon!! A couple of the students did songs, others recited poems that they had learned by heart in winter quarter, and many did original poems. It was so congenial, so bonding, and absolutely beautiful. And the students ended up finishing every bottle of wine in the house (ouch). Kate and Joan live in a home overlooking Teelin Bay, so we saw the storm roll in and pelt the windows with rain as we were snug inside. Late that night, a neighbor (and relation to Dermot Byrne, the button accordion player for Altan) named Pat Byrne came in with his fiddle. He played a couple of tunes, then handed the fiddle to me. It was like cutting butter with a warm knife; such warm tone! It was unlike any other fiddle I’ve ever played. Luckily I had played for Guy and Antonio the day before and was a little bit prepared. The whole evening was a revelation – and again, very real, immediate, and intense in its engagement of all the senses.

On Tuesday morning Guy and Antonio and I were up at 5:15 to go to the airport. I’ve cut my time down; it took only an hour and 15 minutes of bouncing over the bog roads, and we were able to have tea and a scone at the airport. I hugged and kissed them goodbye and was walking out when a car came screeching to a halt outside and the pilots leaped out, buttoning their uniforms and grabbing their stuff. They said hello to me, and in response to my comment, “Guess the plane can’t take off without you,” one of them answered “ach, you never know.” It was an easy drive back; I was consumed with thoughts of a poem that I need to write about the fiddler from the night before, Pat Byrne. He’s been a fisherman and fish processor for years, working in water and ice with big knives, and has cut his hands so badly that he hardly plays anymore. Hmmm.

On Tuesday afternoon Martin the chef from An Chistin (the small café attached to Oideas Gael) offered my students a cooking class! We had great fun watching him put together four dishes: seafood chowder, Irish lamb stew, brown bread, and carraigín Bailey’s mousse. The seafood chowder included mussels, whelks, calamari, crab, salmon, mackerel, and monkfish along with vegetables and cream. The Irish lamb stew was fairly standard lamb-and-vegetables, cooked for three hours. The brown bread included ingredients that I don’t use (egg, milk, some white flour) and left out the oats; it tastes delicious, of course, but so does my brown bread with the oats and buttermilk. The mousse uses carraigín (spelled in English as carrageen), a type of nutritious seaweed that serves both as a thickening agent and has long been reputed to help people with respiratory ailments. You cook it with milk for about a half hour, strain and sweeten it, then serve it with whipped cream and fresh fruit. Yum! I wrote the recipes down in minute detail and peppered Martin with questions, and he ended the class by giving us all a bowl each of delicious chowder or sú mara (sea soup). I’m going to put all these recipes up on the class website.

We had a short seminar this week; the director of the play we saw (“Many Young Men of Twenty”), Seán Hanrahan, came to meet the students and spoke with them for about 45 minutes about the playwright (John B. Keane), the play, staging, etc. It was fascinating, and he had good answers to all kinds of questions. It was so nice of him to offer to come and talk to them, and I’m sure it helped everyone to understand what they saw much more effectively.

Liam Cunningham gave the Tuesday night lecture on national and local politics; it was very interesting! He showed a short film of the Gleann in the early 60s: an unpaved road leading into town, broken-down thatched cottages, no new-looking homes, almost no cars except the ubiquitous VW bug of Father James McDyer, the radical priest who saved the Gleann from abandonment from emigration. He described himself on the Late Late Show (with Gay Byrne) as a “Christian Communist.” And, in fact, he was successful: since he died in 1987, the Gleann has thrived (especially spring through fall), people have employment, it’s got several paved roads, there’s some new construction but not enough to ruin the place, and it’s got its own stunning location in a glaciated valley with several dozen archaeological treasures, a gorgeous beach, and views out to there. In the upcoming national election the two main political parties (Fine Gael – “Celtic Tribe” and Fianna Fáil – “Deer of Ireland”) are both moderate-to-right-wing, conservative, and favor corporate tax breaks and unimpeded property speculation. Sinn Féin has gained in popularity since the talks in the North have been so successful, so they’re likely to gain some seats in the Dáil, the Irish parliament. Liam said that health care is an overwhelmingly important issue here (for example, women in Donegal with breast cancer have to travel all the way to Dublin twice a week for treatments). The elections are a week from this Thursday, on May 24 (the night before the students’ final exam).

Wednesday was one of those days where the weather dominated everything – heavy drizzle mixed with pelting rain. I ferried students back and forth to the sweater factory (about four miles away – too far for them to walk), where I’ve come to know the family fairly well; I go there all the time. They’ve given me a couple of very nice sweaters because I’ve brought them so much business. At first I was telling the students that I received no commission from the sweater place, but now that I have, I’ve been up front with the students. One of the sweaters is the color of dark seaweed with vertical bars spaced about two inches apart; the other is a sort of heathery dark orange with no pattern, that matches my hair. I didn’t want to be greedy and pick an expensive sweater in either case, so I chose two reasonably priced ones that I fell in love with. The woman who runs the place is 82 and knits continually; she never duplicates a sweater and never uses a pattern. All her sweaters are marvelous combinations of seaweed patterns, honeycombs, diamonds, cables, stars… you name it. She is intensely creative and active in her work and it will be a huge loss to the knitting world when she retires.

A Swiss man (Stefan Hofmann) who lives in town gave an afternoon lecture on the Book of Kells, including some of the humorous aspects of the accompanying drawings: a tiny cat throwing up after the end of a particularly dull passage of text, another cat screeching to a full stop just before a sentence begins, Jesus dancing, and a mouse running away with a communion wafer in its mouth. It was delightful! You’d never see anything about that in the usual explanatory texts. We offered a pennywhistle class, but so many people were turned off by the first one (taught by the man who showed up an hour late with no pennywhistle) that they stayed away in droves (and, given the weather, who could blame them?). It was an optional class anyway. I spent many hours this week developing grammar worksheets, because the language teacher isn’t having them do any homework and they’re not sure what to study for in terms of the final exam. The bodhrán class was a roaring success, as always. It is such a pleasure to watch such a fine teacher (Paddy O’Donoghue, whom everyone refers to as Paddy Mór – big Paddy) in action. I told Guy and Antonio that the names Paddy and Seán are the two commonest names here. Oh, and Liam Cunningham (director of Oideas Gael) told me that people here refer to me as Sian (pronounced like Seán but with a much more open “a” sound – not an “aw” sound). It’s the Welsh spelling and pronunciation, and it’s appropriate for women.

Our friends Rick and Joan Lorenz (the ones we were with during the Semester at Sea, who we ran into at Connemara) are staying in Donegal for a few days and rang me up. They’re at the home of a colleague in Galway (in Maas, right on one of the northern sandy bays and not far from Glenties). They invited me to spend the afternoon with them, so on Thursday I asked my colleague Dunstan to be present to start the afternoon art class and I drove up to meet them at the Kilclooney dolmen (about five miles from where they’re staying). Yes, that’s the same very large dolmen I mentioned last week (where I went with Guy and Antonio). I was happy to see it again, and I knew where to look for it this time! The weather was misty and windy, which made it much more dramatic. I was wondering in advance if the heavily pregnant mare would have had her foal by now. Well! When I got there I couldn’t see her, so we walked out to the dolmen in the mist; it was very pretty. On the way back, there she was…with a tiny pinto foal! It was very wobbly and staggered during the windier gusts. I must have taken dozens of photos. The mare was protective of him and kept him about 30 feet away from us; when a lady walked past I mentioned that we were admiring the foal, and she said it had been born that very morning! She had been the first one to see it, and told the owner to remember her “come christening time.” We had a good laugh over it.

We drove out to Narin, where there is a very large flat beach, and just missed being able to walk out to Inishkeel, a small island accessible in low tide. I was glad to miss it, though, as the tide came roaring back from either side of the island, clashing in the middle right where we would have walked (or run, as the case might have been). We had a very nice walk along the beach, watching the tide warily, then climbed up onto the tufted dunes and sat there watching half a dozen dolphins playing in the waves, quite close to the shore. There must have been good fish there for them, or perhaps they just liked the waves. We had a nice meal at a pub and then I came back here to attend the dance class in the evening. And by the way, when the radio announcers give the traffic report during rush hour in Ireland, it’s for the entire nation. It’s hard to believe sometimes that Washington State is twice the size of Ireland, especially given how long it takes to drive from one part of the country to the other.

Friday involved having to exchange my rental car. Insurance rules here prohibit renting a car for longer than a month, so after many phone calls and negotiating, I was told to go to the Sligo airport yesterday. I left at 7:30 in the morning and got there by 10, and there wasn’t anyone there from the rental car company! The only person in car rentals there was a very nice man from Avis, but he was unable to help me, so I rang Europcar and – incredibly – spoke to the same woman who had arranged the deal for me. She suggested that I go to Knock airport, all the way in Mayo (and a very long way from Donegal indeed, though not nearly so far as Dublin). I did, feeling like this was a very bad day and despairing about whatever there was to despair about (the students, mainly). My Ford Mondeo was exchanged for a much smaller Fiat Punto (at about half the cost, hooray!) and I was given a thousand dollar refund. (All that really means is that I was paying too much for the Ford in the first place.) I sped home and got there just in time for the bus to return with the students from Killybegs, where they had gone to find ATMs and banks and food (and pints). The weather was unbelievable!! The wind was pushing cars left and right on the road and whipping up huge waves on the ocean. It was glorious! There were entire sheets of rain marching across the road. As soon as I got home, I pretty much had to turn around and drive out to Gortahork to pick up Cathal Ó Searcaigh for his presentation on Saturday.

Cathal Ó Searcaigh is Ireland’s best-known Irish-language poet. He is considered a national treasure, and he lives in his home in the tiny township of Mín a’ Leá, close to his neighbors yet isolated from the outside world. Yet he spends a portion of each year in Nepal with a family there, and his Irish home is decorated with Tibetan prayer flags on the outside and lots of Nepalese and Irish art on the inside. He’s a fascinating man; he is openly gay in a nation that has yet to come to grips with its gay and lesbian population. I like him very much, and as soon as I walked in he gave me a big kiss and a hug. We walked out to the local sacred well for water for tea, and the water was some of the most wonderful, pure, refreshing water I’ve ever tasted in my life. It was stunningly good; probably the best I’ve ever had. It wasn’t pale brown like regular bog water (the kind that comes out of the tap); it was like the “pure crystal fountain” water that so many songs refer to. And the tea he made from it was a revelation. I just couldn’t believe it. It was very refreshing after my long day. After a search for his glasses (which I found when I retraced our steps to the well – they were lodged between two rocks right next to the water in the well) we piled into the car and bounced along the bog road in the night, two and a half hours back to the Gleann. With his lively talk it perked me right up, and after we checked him into his B&B we hung out at the pub for an hour or so.

The next day (yesterday) Cathal gave a workshop on writing poetry with my students; he is yet another master teacher and it was great to watch him in action. He likes to play with “power words” (including, for example, expletives) and get the students to cut through all their self-censorship in an effort to be more effective writers. It was surprising what he was able to elicit from them! He is so joyously celebratory about the body and about sexuality in ways that startle even me. Here’s an example: we were having tea in the late afternoon yesterday, before his early evening reading. One of my students dropped by, and when I opened the door and invited him in, Cathal shouted, “We’re having sex!” I automatically said “No, we’re not!” and then felt like an idiot. Duh! Of course we weren’t, we were having tea in the kitchen, and he’s gay, and I’m married, and, and, and…! My student saved the day by saying “Ooh! Can I join you?” and we both said “Sure!” My whole day with him was like that – one comment after another, including at a hilarious lunch with a couple of students – and he stayed at my cottage last night (with various insinuating and extremely funny comments to my students as we headed out of the pub).

Cathal’s poetry reading last night was beautiful and powerful: he reads translations of his poems in English, then reads them in the original Irish. He’s masterful with images, certainly, but he also plays with the sounds and rhythms of the language in ways that no one else does. It was a great experience to hear him read. Kate Newmann, the students’ regular poetry teacher, showed up for the reading. We decided to have him stay with me so that we could then come over to Kate and her mother Joan’s home for lunch today. He slept until 11:30! What a marvelous luxury; I wonder if I could do that? I invited students to come over for late morning tea today to collect yarn; the very nice 82-year-old lady at the sweater shop had given me a bunch of beautiful heathery yarns for the students, so I figured that this would be a good way to distribute it. It was so pleasant to have people in the kitchen, knitting, winding yarn and chatting companionably, and Cathal appeared enchanted with the whole thing. Evidently people under 50 don’t ever knit here, which surprises me because it’s so big in the States. I always have students knitting in class, and I see them around campus as well.

Anyway, lunch with Kate and Joan was great – the weather was fine and you could see people boating out in Teelin Bay – they had organic lamb, steamed vegetables, a watercress and tomato salad, fresh fruit, and red wine. It was delightful and took my mind off all the student crises. On the way back to his place in Gortahork, Cathal regaled me with various wild tales and opinions and questions, and I never noticed the miles passing. He gave me some of the sacred well water to take back with me. It was a longer trip back to the Gleann without him. When I got home the students needed the building at Oideas Gael to be opened, which I did, and then Liam and I had one of our long planning meetings – this time about the students’ departure this coming Saturday. We’ll be checking each house early Saturday morning before the students get on the bus, so that we don’t have a repeat of last time’s disastrous trashing of one of the houses. By the time we were done with our meeting, Gearóidín Breathnach (the brilliant sean-nós singer from northwest Donegal) was here and ready to teach my students. Fully a third of them skipped class, which pained me and seemed incredibly rude, but it is unfortunately always like this as the final week approaches. But Gearóidín told lively stories and taught us two songs, and as we left class the evening was beautiful and the moon was a tiny sliver in the sky.

Only a week left before we go home. I can’t believe how both long and short it’s been, and I miss having the Morgan Report follow my gazettes! The next gazette will be my final one, as I’ll be sending it from home.