This week wasn’t supposed to go this way.
This is exactly how I expected this week to go.
I’m writing this from the couch in the company of the tissue box I have claimed as my own. I feel my husband has done me a slight injustice by grabbing the superior facial tissues because both our raw noses could use the “with lotion” variety. He’s not the bad guy here though. He'd be more than willing to share, if only I could detangle myself from the afghan and shuffle over to where he’s sniffling at his desk.
NOTE: Despite the title, and despite my imperfections, I am not the heroine named above and, though our love affair is far from flawless, we’re not breaking up over household paper goods.
The Crash After the Crest
After weeks of anticipation and procrastination, deep dive research and “speaking Brigid” nearly everywhere, I find myself on the other side of Imbolc (the pre-Christian festival associated with the Irish goddess).
Brigid’s Day was a phenomenon in Ireland this year because they celebrated a national holiday in the name of both the goddess and the saint for the first time.
Brigid’s Day was a phenomenon in my life because I led two live events and had the opportunity to hold space for Herstory Ireland’s poet-in-residence, Laura Murphy, and her groundbreaking story in S3 Ep1 of KnotWork Storytelling, Brigid: Rebirth of the Mother.
I’ll be feeling the reverberations of these connections and this imbas forosnai (the nearly forgotten Irish phrase that meaning “inspiration that illuminates) for a long, long time.
And, I will be wading through the dregs of this inevitable head cold, which hit the moment I could rest and let my defenses down, for several more days at least.
But now that we’re back to releasing weekly episodes on KnotWork Storytelling, it’s time to add more stories to the cauldron and invoke new names and narratives.
Meet our imperfect heroine, Líadain.
Let me tell you about her deeply flawed love affair, which, of course, ends in tragedy.
I wasn’t even thinking of Valentine’s Day when I scheduled this episode, but we are creatures of our culture, and Hallmark has a way of breaching our defenses, much like the virus that causes the common cold.
And, as much as our culture likes to sell us the happy ending, it is the saddest love stories that tend to endure. And Líadan and Cuirithir have one of the saddest of them all.
Not really a Julie and Romeo story, the couple in our story are sometimes compared to the real-life couple, Heloise and Abelard. Those eleventh century French lovers also had a deeply complicated relationship, and they too ended up taking religious vows, but I am glad to say that my story doesn’t involve a brutal castration.
What my story does involve is a reimagining of a tale of two bards, most likely from the seventh century, that was preserved in two fifteenth/sixteenth Old Irish manuscripts.
Find the translation from UCC here.
This commentary from University of Notre Dame was especially helpful, too.
Who Came First, the Rock Star or the Bard?
Ok, so that’s kind of a trick question. Kinda.
The Irish bardic had its roots in the time of the druids. Amongst the poetic class or filid, some were ranked beside kings (and that meant a lot in Gaelic Ireland’s hierarchical society. The last of the Irish bards, Turlough O'Carolan (who you hear about in S1 Ep13, How to Heal the Heart of a Poet, Or the Invention of the Irish Harp), died in the 1730s.
But of course, the bardic tradition has continued onward in Ireland’s poets, storytellers, and musicians.
Including–especially–Sinead O’Connor.
I was in middle school when I got I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got on cassette tape. It was a revelation.
I was well on my way to the sacrament of confirmation when she tore up the photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, but I wasn’t particularly bothered.
There’s a part of me that always trusted the wild quest for naked truth that seemed to come through Sinéad’s music and her “newsworthy” choices (which led to moralizing, pearl clutching think pieces). Maybe it’s a shared sisterhood from another life seeing as her way of living, being, and expressing seems so different from my own.
I wish I could find the original source, but Ireland’s edition of The Sun republished bits of an interview in which Sinéad spoke about her choice to shave her head:
“They wanted me to grow my hair long, wear short skirts and high heels and make-up and write songs that wouldn’t challenge anything.
“But I come from a country where there used to be riots in the streets over plays. That’s what art is for.
“There’s a tradition among Irish artists of being agitators and activists — whether they’re playwrights or poets.”
That public persona is what initially inspired my Líadan, but then I picked up Sinéad’s memoir, Rememberings, a sort of stream of consciousness prose poem about art, abuse, survival, and the sacred sovereign right to change your mind. In this book, in which Sinéad offers glimpses of how she’s made sense of her life story, I found a whole new window into an ancient character with mysterious motivations.
Why did Líadan tell Cuirithir to come to her so they could finally be together, and then take up the veil and become a nun before he arrived?
Because… reasons. A whole life of trauma and broken promises. An attempt to keep a vow to herself. Fear. An identity not yet formed. Longing. A life that would need a whole lot more time to finish becoming. Because the quest to belong is full of mistakes and miscalculations.
This week’s conversation
I invited my friend Bethany Hegedus to join me to talk about this story because Bethany gets the creative drive and the circuitous nature of the creative journey.
She is the author of many award winning children’s books including Grandfather Gandhi and Be the Change: A Grandfather Gandhi Story, both co-written with Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), as well Alabama Spitfire: The Story of Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird, Rise!: From Caged Bird to Poet of the People: Dr. Maya Angelou, and Hard Work But It’s Worth It: The Life of Jimmy Carter.
Bethany holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults and is is the Founder and Creative Director of The Writing Barn, a writing retreat and workshop space in Austin, Texas. She is also the host of the popular Courage to Create podcast. Find out more about her Courage to Create Community, a fabulous online community for writers (with whom I have been lucky enough to share my Heroine at the Crossroads workshop!).
We really got into what it means to be a woman in the creative arts and how that need to balance career, love, and calling is as much an issue now as it was in Líadan’s time.
The lack of space on the stage for women is not just a medieval problem, it’s still very much part of the artist’s path.
The struggle to be out in the world with our art and also the call to home and quiet.
So many great love stories refuse to deliver us happy ending - including past KnotWork Stories about Deirdre and Macha
The question of composing for an audience and the marketplace vs. “I just write for myself”
Bethany’s advice to writers: lean into your own personal story
Insights into the experience of childhood through the eyes of a children’s author.
Healing early creative wounds, from mean English teachers to romantic relationships that caused us to leave our art behind