Cassandra Lewis

Priosun Chill Mhaighneann, as it’s written in Irish, is the Irish Bastille. During the years the prison was open, from 1796 through 1924, it’s incarcerated the leaders of the major uprisings for Irish independence.

This is above the entrance:

Wolfe Tone and Thomas Russell of the United Irishmen’s 1798 Rebellion were imprisoned at Kilmianham Gaol after the Battle of Vinegar Hill. Wolfe Tone killed himself in the prison by slitting his own throat.

Robert Emmet’s death was especially gruesome. There’s a plaque dedicated to his memory in the room where the condemned man used to spend his last night. Oddly, the room has a peephole where the condemned man could gaze upon the platform where he would be hanged the next morning, where he’d take his last step before death. The hangman didn’t measure Emmet’s slight frame correctly and miscalculated the length of the noose. Apparently the noose is supposed to snap the spinal chord and if this doesn’t happen the poor man slowly suffocates to death. Emmet hung for thirty minutes before he was cut down and taken to another location where he was beheaded in front of the entire city.

A great play that explores the absurd idea behind “the art” of a hangman is Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. Behan based his play on his own prison experience at Mountjoy Prison.

By the time of the Easter Rising, the Kilmainham Gaol stopped trying to hang people and practiced execution by firing squad. (Isn’t it comforting to see how much we’ve evolved over time? We should be proud of our “humane” ways of murdering murderers).

The Easter Rising of 1916 was one of the most important events that led to the creation of the Irish Republic. On April 24, 1916, Easter Monday, 1,200 men under Padraig Pearse and James Connolly took over the General Post Office in Dublin. They burned down the City Center and other government buildings. The takeover lasted four days, 450 people were killed and 2,600 were wounded.

Pearse, Connelly and twelve other leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army were executed in the Stonebreaker’s Yard at Kilmainham Gaol:

James Connolly’s leg was so badly injured that he spent five days in a hospital before he was carried to the Stonebreaker’s Yard and tied to a chair before the firing squad. Here’s where he was shot and the cross that commemorates him:

This is where Pearse was was shot:

Joseph Plunkett, one of the fourteen killed, married his fiance moments before his execution at Kilmainham Gaol.

Some of the rebellion leaders survived Kilmainham Gaol. Most notably, Eamon de Valera, who fought with the others during the Easter Rising and was imprisoned at Kilmainham. Since one of his parents was from the United States the military court decided it would be bad PR to execute him. Eamon de Valera went on to found the political party called Fianna Fail, became the first Taoiseach and the President of Ireland.

I wonder what would have become of the leaders if they hadn’t been executed.

I have to say visiting Kilmainham Gaol was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had while traveling. If you’re in Dublin for a short time and can only do one thing–go to Kilmainham Gaol (especially if you’re Kevin). See it. There’s nothing like it. Although it may seem familiar if you’ve seen the movie In The Name of the Father or Italian Job. Also, Bono and Sinead O’Connor have recorded music in the prison’s East Wing:

The walls of the prison are constantly cold and damp. The viscous texture of the limestone feels as though it’s stuck to your skin, seeping all the way down to your bones. I can’t imagine living within the darkness of those walls. In addition to political prisoners Kilmainham imprisoned women and children for minor offenses like stealing bread or potatoes.

Here are some pictures of the yard:

I think it was Michel Foucault, in his book Discipline and Punish, who wrote that the best way to understand a society and their history is to examine their prison, the very bowels of society. I’ve also heard the same said about examining a society’s theatre–so, I’ll explore both while I’m here.

Martin Roper says the best way to be a writer is to write. He writes every morning and never lets anything conflict with the schedule he’s set for himself. He believes discipline is crucial.

To keep up with my goals as a writer, I’ve decided to structure my day to include time to work on my new play Terror Act or my novel Tracks. (This writing program is awesome and it keeps us busy, but it doesn’t cater to our long-term writing projects). I save the afternoons after classes, which usually end by 3 or 3:30 to spend at least two hours on my long-term projects. I hope I’ll still be able to keep up with the school assignments too.

I begin each day at 6:30. Before class, which begins at 9:30, I call Drew and I read something inspiring. My morning reading includes: The Collected Stories by Grace Paley, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time by Eavan Boland, and Samuel Beckett’s The Complete Dramatic Works.

Then I have the most glorious walk to school along the Grand Canal. Our school is in a part of town called Rathmines, pronounced “Rat Mines,” but the name is deceptive. I’ve only seen water, ducks and swans:

The other day I saw this drunken skipper who somehow got his boat stuck between the dam and the bridge. The man dressed in black is a Garda yelling at the skipper:

Most days begin with a workshop class. The eighteen students of the program have been divided into two groups. For the first three weeks one group works with Mary Morrissy while the other works with Martin Roper and then the groups switch instructors for the last three weeks.

Right now I’m working with Mary. She’s delightful. She has three books out: The Pretender, Mother of Pearl, and A Lazy Eye: Stories.

Mary says good writing should “look at the familiar and make it strange.”

Here are two writing quotes she wrote on the board on our first day:

“Perception is the first act of the imagination.” -William Carlos Williams

“Under the artist’s humid scrutiny, the object grows warm, it stirs and shies, giving off the blush of versimilitude.” -John Banville

We are to write an eight-page short story that somehow incorporates an email she distributed to us and we have until the 30th to turn it in.

On our first day of class, Mary handed out copies of Van Gogh’s Shoes and then gave us fifteen minutes to write what we saw and about who we imagined owned the shoes.

On our second day of workshop, Mary gave us three choices for a twenty-minute writing exercise that she’d gathered from the tabloid news:

1) Serial snippers busted for ponytail thefts

2) Piano stools helped retirement home nurses to get pregnant

3) Farmer’s wife turns husband into scarecrow

The idea was to try to discover the character’s motivation behind these crazy events.

But the most exciting writing exercise of my life happened on Thursday. Mary asked the class if anyone spoke Swedish. After she was assured we were completely ignorant of the language, she passed out copies of a poem written in Swedish. We were to translate it phonetically. It didn’t need to make sense. The idea was to sound out the word and write a corresponding word that sounded like the Swedish word.

This exercise helps writers to focus on language instead of story, instead of meaning. For many of us the language is secondary to the story or character that inspires the writing and this exercise it to help shift the focus back to language.

After we read our ridiculous translations Mary read a long list of words she’d gathered from a medical dictionary and from a Greek mythology book and told us to create our own poem with the assigned words. We were also allowed to use up to ten words from our translation too. It was a truly freeing exercise (especially since none of us are aspiring poets).

In addition to the workshop classes we have a literature class and a theatre class and weekly guest speakers. For literature we’re studying John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and Oona Frawley’s New Dubliners.

For theatre we’re attending a play a week for the next four weeks. Last week we examined Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World. For this week we’ll be discussing my man Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Lenane and Mark O’Rowe’s Howie The Rookie. These two plays are extremely violent and upsetting and are part of a new school (started in the late 1980s) called In-Yer-Face Theatre.

In fact, one of our secondary resources is a book called In-Yer-Face-Theatre: British Drama Today by Aleks Sierz. I don’t really understand this movement, though I appreciate Caryl Churchill’s work and I think McDonagh’s a genius for writing The Pillowman. But I’m trying to learn more, particularly whether my work has to be this vulgar in order to be successful.

As you can see, I’ve a long way to go. There’s so much more to learn. But at least I’ve established a structure while I’m here (between going to class and gulping Guinness).

I had my first Guinness last night at the Leeson Lounge. I didn’t intend to have one, but for some reason the pub didn’t serve Harp, which is the light beer or lager made by the Guinness company. The Guinness last night was like nothing else. The only things I can compare it to are coffee and steak. Its rich taste and color resemble coffee and it’s filling like a steak–that’s why I only had one before I switched to Carlsberg. Maybe I should start a new liquid diet trend–drink Guinness and eat nothing.

Before everyone showed up at the pub we went on a bus tour of the city. One of the places we passed was the Guinness brewery. After we passed the brewery and the ridiculously long line of tourists we stopped in front of a mental institution two blocks away.

Jonathan Swift founded the institution as a place where the disturbed could be treated as patients instead of as animals. The bus driver pointed out the absurdity of having a mental institution, which often houses people with alcohol addiction, within a couple of blocks of the Guinness brewery where you can actually smell the stout in the air.

A few stops later I went to the Writer’s Museum:

The two-room display (not counting the small library upstairs) is a quaint introduction to Ireland’s literary history. To see playwright and IRA member Brendan Behan’s typewriter and a handwritten letter about his time in Hollywood where he hung out with Sinatra and the Marx brothers was worth the six euros.

Did you know Brendan Behan was paid in barrels of stout by the Guinness company to create their advertising slogan? He guzzled all of the stout and at the last minute he came up with: “Guinness makes you drunk.”

June 16th is Bloomsday, the day during which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. Bloom refers to the novel’s protagonist Leopold Bloom. June 16th was also the date James Joyce met his wife Nora Barnacle. Each year Dublin goes wild celebrating this holiday known as Bloomsday.

However, this year’s events were suddenly cancelled out of respect to the passing of Irish politician Charles J Haughey. He died yesterday, but his statewide funeral was today. Check out the James Joyce Centre’s website for more information.

This program is so cool! Today we were given the option of taking a weekend trip out of town. Our choices were: a tour of Northern Ireland or a tour of Dingle in County Kerry.

The hardest decisions are when the potential outcomes are similar–in this case both are awesome. It took me all day to finally decide on Dingle. It’s on the Southwest coast of Ireland where I’ve always dreamed of visiting. Plus, they speak Irish there.

Irish is the official language of Ireland and English is considered its second language even though 95% of the population speaks English. All the street signs in Ireland, including in Dublin, are written in Irish with an English translation underneath. The Irish who live on the West coast speak Irish the most–it’s taught in school as their first language. Thanks to Kevin, who told me about Pimsleur, I’ve been learning Irish. Now I’ll have a chance to practice.

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, two police officers, which are called Garda Siochana here (Guardians of Peace), showed up to talk to us about crime (my favorite subject).

Here are some things they told us: “Don’t be walking around with wads of money on your hands.” You’d mostly have trouble from groups of young drunken lads, “cocky little yokels.” And “They can get a bit narky and strappy.”

Our first reading assignments for one of the two workshop classes is to reread “Eveline” and “A Painful Case” in Joyce’s Dubliners. Martin Roper, the director of the Iowa’s Irish Writing Program and the author of Gone, explained the importance of reading as a writer and to apply this notion while rereading these two short stories.

This is a term many teachers in creative writing programs throw around, but no one has ever taken the time to explain it as he did. Basically, it means to question (”deconstruct”) every bit of a piece and scribble notes all over the margins.

Ask yourself: How is it put together? Why the writer chose to present it this way? Is it honest? What’s the writer really trying to say, as opposed to what’s actually written? What’s the writer’s strategy with language? How would I write it?

For the other workshop class we are to select one of our favorite short stories, mark it up, and describe to the class why it is one of our favorites. My first inclination was to select “Big Blonde” by Dorothy Parker or anything by Sherman Alexie, but then I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say about them. They’re so brilliantly hilarious that there’s really nothing to add. I’m simply awestruck when I think of them. So, I’ve selected a Grace Paley short story (not that it doesn’t move me–just in a different way, one that’s easier to articulate) called “A Conversation with My Father,” from Sarah Stone’s great book on writing: Deepening Fiction.

Then we’re to do a 250-word free write about what we consider Home. Roper gave us a brilliant hand out listing philosophical questions to help stimulate ideas. I’ll summarize: Does it have to be a physical place? Can it be an ideology? Is it memory alone? What makes you homeless?

Then for the literature and theatre classes we’re to read John Banville’s The Book of Evidence and J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.

They’re going easy on us during this first week since most of us are jetlagged.

We were taken out to a fancy, three-course dinner downtown, paid for by the program and I got to sit next to Martin Roper. He was born and raised in Dublin, but now lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at NYU. He said it usually takes a person a day for each hour of the time change to adjust. Does that make sense? (I’m a zombie as it would take me eight days to adjust to the eight hour time change).

Before the fancy dinner, my flatmates and I took a quick walking tour. Here’s what we saw:

This is The Church of Ireland, which we mistook for St. Patrick’s. We still haven’t found St. Patrick’s, but it’s here somewhere.

This is part of Trinity College, but check out the windows–or lack there of.

Trinity College. Too bad I couldn’t erase all the parked cars. It’s timeless, except for those.

Trinity College. This is where Swift, Beckett, Wilde, Joyce, and many of the great Irish writers studied. Iowa’s Irish Writing Program used to be held on this campus.

This is one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever seen. St. Stephen’s Green. It’s in the center of the city and has been immortalized in Dubliners among other works.

Here it is again. I have a feeling I’ll be spending most of my time in this park. And I’ll take more pictures of it that aren’t so blurry–or I’ll try at least. This park is only twenty minutes from my apartment. (Drew, we found a more direct route, so please forget what I said yesterday).

I love this city. I wish everyone the chance to visit this amazing place sometime in their lives.