Sometimes ‘the music of what happens’, as Seamus Heaney put it, sings out rather beautifully. For example, the timing of the creative writing workshop I gave recently at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace coincided serendipitously with this Kitchen Inspiration series. ‘What has poetry got to do with kitchens?’ you might ask. In Seamus Heaney’s case, quite a lot. For his childhood spent in a farming community on the banks of Lough Neagh was a rich source of inspiration throughout his life. And the kitchen sat right at its heart.
Heaney returned again and again in his writing to the people and places of his birthplace. He returned often to the vicinity in person too, and at the end of his remarkable life he was buried in St. Mary’s churchyard in the village of Bellaghy. That the visitor attraction and arts space curated in his honour in Bellaghy is named The Seamus Heaney Homeplace seems very fitting. Its thoughtfully curated exhibition celebrates Seamus Heaney’s stellar literary career, but in so doing it tells the story of everyday life in this part of Ireland. And that’s a story that otherwise might remain unsung.
As someone in awe of Heaney’s writing, it was a delight for me to be invited to participate in the creative life of the Homeplace. I was asked to give a workshop drawing on my writing in this blog, reflecting the inspiration I find in Heaney’s poetry and prose. I called the class ‘Blogging for Joy’ because I wanted to say that writing can be fun. But I was thinking too of C.S. Lewis’s concept of Joy in which moments of beauty with a small ‘b’ can instil in us a desire to find Beauty with a capital ‘B’.
Given this joy-ful theme, I was glad the day was sunny as I drove through the Ulster countryside towards Bellaghy to take the workshop. I was thinking about one of the activities I had planned for my writers. They would picture in their minds something they had seen on their own journey that morning, and use that picture to write a ten-sentence story. Rehearsing as I drove, I paid attention, making a mental note of things that I noticed through the car window. There was a flock of whooper swans grazing in flat, half-flooded fields. There was a slender spire rising up into blue sky over Church Island. There were cautious yellow daffodils peeping out from the grassy verge. And there was the slate-coloured expanse of Lough Neagh itself, that great mass of water that hems the fabric of the Heaney townlands.
One of the writers arrived some time after the others. I only discovered why when she read aloud her ‘what I noticed along the way’ story. She had written about a couple she had noticed on her way to the workshop venue. They were cutting the grass in their garden. I’ll let Heather tell her story in her own words:
Journeying towards Blogging for Joy
There were two of them, possibly husband and wife. Hard at work, they probably didn’t notice me as I drove past them first time. But I noticed them; potential sources of information, I thought. Second time, they had to notice me. No option. They were helpful in directing me to Seamus Heaney’s ‘home place’. Third time, the lady was surprised to see me again. Kindly re-directing this wandering stranger, she wished me well as I waved goodbye for the second time. Kind, yes, my new grass-cutting friend, but sadly not fully understanding my quest. It was the owner of Seamus Heaney’s original house – in fact, his niece – who finally gave me the directions to the Exhibition building and sent me on my way to Blogging for Joy.
Heather’s account of her circuitous journey to the writing workshop made us laugh. That was a moment of joy. But her story emphasised also the immediacy and authenticity of Heaney’s family roots in the local countryside. This is not just a place Heaney visited from time to time; it really was his home. To those of us who live relatively close by, it seems like an ordinary place. But Heaney had the gift of finding ‘the marvellous in the ordinary’, as Gerald Dawe put it. His creative work was often inspired by the people and traditions of this farming community, by his school days, by life in the garden and in domestic spaces. Even by life in the kitchen.
Heaney drew on culinary life in several poems. ‘The Other Side’ imagines a neighbour out in the yard, waiting awkwardly for the family to finish saying their prayers in the kitchen before knocking the door. And who can forget ‘Blackberry Picking’ with its hungry foragers and inky evocations of ‘summer’s blood’? In ‘A Drink of Water’, a glimpse through a moonlit window shows water in a jug, sitting on a table, carried from a pump by a woman in a grey apron. Heaney is careful to recall the ‘admonishment on her cup, / Remember the Giver’. By a different window, in ‘The Singer’s House’, we see a table, this time, with ‘knives and forks set on oilcloth’. And ‘Oysters’ conjures up luxurious epicurean experience with an explosive opening appeal to the senses : ‘Our shells clacked on the plates. / My tongue was a filling estuary, / My palate hung with starlight’.
As it happened, our workshop took place on the eve of International Women’s Day. We discussed two of Heaney’s poems that feature women in the domestic space. He dedicated an exquisite sonnet in ‘Clearances’ to his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney, capturing a poignant moment of intimacy as mother and son work together in the kitchen: ‘When all the others were away at Mass / I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.’ He also wrote ‘Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication’, for his aunt, Mary Heaney. The first of these poems, ‘Sunlight’, is a masterclass in powerful communication. It’s a poem about his aunt baking a local kind of bread known as a ‘scone’. If my family experience of Irish home-baking is anything to go by, this was most likely a round wheaten or soda bread, made in kitchens here for generations. But this poem is more than a story about baking. As another writer in the group put it, it’s like the ‘working out of salvation’ talked about in Scripture. This is nourishing and life-giving; this is love lived out around the hearth:
'Here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.'
At our workshop in the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, we learned again that Heaney’s writing exemplifies thoughtful curation of words, creative connection, and powerful communication. He invites us into his home as it were, into the heart of human life. His writing is a hospitable place – Kitchen Inspiration at its finest.
