Ireland & Greece Do It Yourself Storytelling
You Are The Author, You Are The Character, Location Is The
Magic
I like you love to travel. And I just like you have struggled this year as COVID19 has clipped our wings. Travel shutdowns, border closures and quarantine regulations- all of these have made travel of days past impossible at present, and for a while into the future. But that does not mean our minds must stay grounded. When I think of why I love to travel, and my favorite journeys, I can feel my heart lift and my CREATIVITY. Especially when I think about my two favorite destinations connected by a couple of my roles, the writer and the student in Ireland and Greece. Let me take you there.
Connemara Ireland
As I said, I love Greece and Ireland. The Aegean and the green, the hot and the sultry with the mystic and the moody equal a kaleidoscope of contrasts galore. Both countries are so rich in wisdom and sensations. I also love to write and the idea of merging my wanderlust with smart and engaging professional writers and teachers holding court in my idyllic destinations was too enticing to pass up. So I went on a writing retreat and a salon which landed me in my own story with these places with the help of the leaders. They were plugged into local characters and literary icons, regional mythology, poetry and their teachable craft mixed with my own blend of expression. Wow, that's a lot but I really did dive into plot, place and creativity in Ireland and Greece with a couple of curated journeys that had the right alchemy of wandering, earning and writing to make me say.... yes!
So grateful this was just before COVID daze, literally the year before. My takeaway? Read up on countries you want to visit because we have the time. Find writers and leaders to be your sherpa once the traveling gets in motion and we find a new rhythm in travel through inventive communities and trips. It's a great way to forge new friendships, live a country's tales if you love to write, learn, create and yes travel through a different portal.
With Help From The Gods, Poets, Fairies & Literary Icons
Following the footsteps of Yeats, Bono, Henry Miller, Socrates, Aphrodite and my curiosity, Greece and Ireland were the main characters in my literary pilgrimages in 2018 & 2019. It was almost a year ago when I went back to Ireland. I went to Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains, the year before and fell in love with the country. I met singers and fiddlers in small pubs, in Dublin and up at Jonny Fox's in the mountains where walls of Irish jokes, soulful musicians played on stages both in small booths and intimate performances. I knew I had to go back and dig deeper into the country. So I jumped at the chance to go to the West Coast for a full on storytelling retreat submerged in Ireland's more unusual & traditional storytelling locations, Connemara.
Pub Owner in Howth Ireland
With my sherpa, Phil Cousineau a writer, journalist and mythology guru leading the way, I knew I would get granular about the lore and the muse. I met Phil at a couple of California writing workshops and he introduced me to the trips he leads. After my original Dublin adventure, I met his Ireland and the local characters, poets, actors, leaders and musicians from his connections over the years.
I became acquainted with the stories and was urged to make my own while I slid around the mud and danced to trad music in a pub, well several pubs, was almost blown over in a pre hurricane gale near Kylemore Abbey. It was quite dramatic! I even swam in the Atlantic on my birthday in October just last year. I heard the ocean crackle on the stones and watched actors perform small theater and made new connections out of the blue.
Dinner at Renvyle House
I'm really missing that part of the world. Since some world travel is on the pause button for Americans for the obvious, my lessons from these romantic and powerful countries are still effecting how I feel about the world and its amazing influence on place as character. I'm taking the slow life seriously and savoring Ireland and Greece's imprint on my two literary adventures from 2018-2019 and not letting those experiences evaporate into the ether. So here I am, sharing a bit of my impressions with you.
Brendan Flynn Founder of Clifden Arts Festival Clifden Co. Galway
So Last year I went to Connemara, in the belly of Ireland’s West Coast for a writing retreat led by earlier mentioned author of Art of Pilgrimage Phil Cousineau. I stayed in an unglamorous yet magnetic resort with a storied history on the water’s edge where W.B. Yeats honeymooned and people like Daniel Day Lewis and even Bono go to retreat from the world before we had to truly retreat. It's called welcoming, simple, slow and on a glorious stretch of beach paradise. For six days I explored this rugged and raw place with lots of writing, exploring, hanging with local actors, poets and storytellers. It was such a great way to breathe the land and the characters in real newly created, reenacted now part of my storied life.
For example, before the Patmos salon the day I arrived in Athens solo after a visit to Malta and with a groups of pals, ( yes I do actually travel with people I know), I climbed the Acropolis alone in the heat of the day. Henry Miller would have been impressed. I cheated a bit, jumped in line to get a ticket alone in 90 degree weather, ambled up the marble steps, soaked in the columns, the olive and cypress trees, the Greek air and my accomplishment of just doing it solo.
Then I followed my google map to find a fellow writer who was in my Facebook group, a poet from Telluride in the Plaka at a café where we drank Prosecco, ate salads and began a friendship. I followed my GPS and found a friend that lasted bloomed in Patmos and led us to the Aspen forests in the fall off roading where she lives. I read Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, his love letter to Greece and had my own Miller- esque adventure in both Athens before our sail to Patmos and back in Paris after the salon. Since our writer/ teacher George Saunders had us finishing Hemingway sketches or listening to fellow writers act out Lincoln in the Bardo at an obscure hotel over the Aegean, my world suddenly became very interesting and I had to live up to it.
After Patmos, I stuck around, took a boat to Kos, stayed at a strange resort Casa Kook, then flew to Paris without an agenda. I am single, and Bumbled (a dating app), myself into doing the tango on Pontes Des Artes bridge with a local Frenchman over the Seine on a full moon. I felt emboldened by all of that literature and the stories I wanted to keep inventing. Travel is the best way to do it prompted by some intense writers pulling out all of their tricks to keep us writing, traveling and transformed.
In Ireland, I stayed at a hotel where W.B. Yeats honeymooned and saw one act plays about his loves, his confidantes and their dramas. Each place captured a part of my fascination with writers’ locations and the big lives they lived and wrote about. After the Irish retreat, I stayed up until two o’clock in the morning with my fellow writers in the town of Ennis at The Poets Corner, drank Jamesons and showed off my best Maggie Smith accent. The next day, I took myself to Adare Manor House for my birthday and lived like aristocracy for a night. I felt compelled to experience life as literary adventure after focusing on poetry, prose and place. Life felt just a little more storied and so did the trips inspiring different moods and tones from the heat of Greece to the moodiness of Ireland.
Greece was more cerebral and sensual mixed with the Aegean and the white washed remote beauty of Patmos. Greece was summer and water and discussion and a lot of participants. Ireland was intimate, moody, lyrical and heritage focused.
Friendships on both of these journeys have endured and the scents, food, music, sound of buzzing vespas or regional accents still ring in my mind. I can visit my own writing with these places etched in my toolkit of what it is like to just be in tune with the greats and their inspirational places.
So as I dream, read and scroll through my photos and stories, I am lifted by my ability to be a student of the world right now during COVID19. It's almost like learning to walk again as I anticipate the next chapter and am thankful of the footsteps I have taken and followed.
The finale in Paris Homage to Ernest Hemingway @ The Ritz on the way home
