About ten years ago we ran the first Kiltumper writing workshop ... In all writing workshops you are handling intimacies, and there is an air of vulnerability, both of which I acknowledged in myself. But somehow, over the course of the long weekend, around the big hearth in the ancient house, an extraordinary thing happened, not only a bonding, which is natural, but what I'll call a sense of communal vocation. Maybe because each writer had had to set out for Kilnunper from a distant elsewhere, had had to set aside the time and find the funding, had had to postpone or pause their life for a few days in order to devote themselves with all seriousness to fiction, there was already a charge loaded on the workshop. But the thing that also came about was to do with aloneness. Every writer is alone with their work, always. Every writer, if they are at all truthful, knows that their work fails the standard of their own imagination, but they must keep trying. That standard is not measured by publication or reviews or prizes. It is inside you; it rose up the first time you read something that stopped your day or entered your dreams, and kept on rising every time you read something that made you say That's just perf ict. So, what happened that first weekend with twelve writers gathered in our sitting room was a shared sense of the private, silent, struggle with language, the impossibility of success, and the acknowledgement that we were all alike bound to that same struggle.
Or something like that.
We finished late on the Monday afternoon. Chris had joined us, she sat on the back step, on her face a cl wed look with the realisation that somehow, she too had pulled it off. With borrowed chairs and stools, mismatched plates, a prima donna of a water pump that had decided to act up under so much use, somehow we had pulled it off. She had said we could do it, and now here we were, in the last moments. When I looked at her, I could feel the deep part of myself welling. In our life, she has always, been the daring, the visionary one. To the writers I said a last few words, thanking everyone for coming, wishing them well as they returned to their lone battles in different corners of the world. I said all I could say other than The End.
And there was silence.
Nobody moved.
The writers were arranged on two couches, armchairs, kitchen chairs, in a semicircle around the fire. I was sitting with my back to it. I closed up my folder. And still, nobody moved. Nobody looked at each other, they just stayed perfectly still. It was as dose as I have come to a sense of spell. I didn't want to fracture it, nor could I stay in the seat any longer. I had nothing more to give, but knew that if I startedtalking again the afternoon would go on into the eveningand the night. (And for a moment I could picture that, TheWorkshop That Never Ended, the writers that never left, theycame to Kiltumper, and then...) I looked across at Chris,and, as always, she rescued me. She stood up and opened thedoor out into the kitchen.
Silently, I got up and joined her, stepping through the scattered written pages on the sloping floor in front of all the writers. We went into the kitchen, and stood there waiting for the spell to lift.
And then it didn't.
None of the writers came out after us. They stayed where they were, gathered around the big fire in the open hearth. It was as though they wanted to preserve not only the moment but the entire weekend, and knew that the moment they left our fireplace ordinary time would be switched back on, they would go their separate ways, lose this sense of solidarity that had built up over the four days and be once more in the lone battle of all writers, against doubt, against the eternal unanswerable question: Is this any good? And so, without saying so, in a kind of communal accord, none of them got up to go. In the kitchen, just the other side of the door, Chris and I listened and waited. She raised her two palms in a mime of 'What's happening?' I didn't know what to answer.'You have to go back in,' she whispered.'No. Give them another minute. They'll come out.'
We did, they didn't.
When that first play I have spoken of was in rehearsal at the Abbey Theatre, the doorman at the theatre had told me he could always tell how successful or not a play was by the speed at which the audience left the auditorium and pushed open the doors to get into Middle Abbey Street. There was an exact mathematical relation, he maintained: the faster the leaving the worse the review. 'Feet don't lie,' he told me, with the peculiarly flat certainty of an older Dubliner. Well, on the opening night of The Murphy Initiative there wasn't exactly a stampede, but we knew. I can still picture my parents in the lobby as the audience flowed out past them, and the sense I had of a public shame.
Well, here was the very opposite of a stampede. The curtain had come down, but no one was
getting up from their seat.
Go on, go back in.'
Going back into the room was one of the strangest feelings I've had in this house; it was the only time I felt like an intruder in our home. I really didn't want to go back in, because I too had the same sense, I knew something special had transpired over the few days, which was in essence the defeat of loneliness, the particular kind that all writers know. And though we knew the victory would be short-lived, everyone wanted to preserve the life of it a little longer, and I was no different. I was aware of the remarkableness of the workshop, not just from the point of view of our having pulled it off, of all these writers trusting we had something to give them, fortheir stepping out of their lives to come to a two-hundredyear-old farmhouse in a remote place in the west of Clare, but also in what the writers and their work had taught me,what they had given me, not least their part in vanquishing my own aloneness. As I have said, I was also aware that over thirty years ago, while in the glass canyons of New York, we had dreamt some version of this, and was not a little dazed with the realisation that it had now just happened.
To announce myself, I made a bit of business of opening the door, and stepping down the two stone steps into the room. I think there was a m oment when it must have seemed I was going to resume the workshop, and that time-outside-of-time, Kilumper-time, would continue.'
Would anyone like a cup of tea?' I didn't say 'before you go'. But the mundane will always shatter the sublime, and at last the group stirred. They came into the kitchen and continued to talk to each other, animated and intense, in a way that made it seem they had known each other a lifetime. None of them were particularly interested in speaking to Chris or me, but the kitchen was buzzing with their talk. There was an after-theatre sense, as when a number of people have privately shared the same experience. I realised something extra, for what they had shared was perhaps the most personal, intimate parts of themselves, the thing that came from their deepest selves, their writing. And so, for these hours at least, they were bonded profoundly. All of this, I now understood, I had underestimated, or not estimated at all. We had some responsibility here, so as the tea finished — and no one made a (231)
Extract from Nail Williams & Christine Breen, In Kiltumper: A Year in an Irish Garden. Bloomsbury 2022.
