teachingenglish
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PERMISSION TO WRITE
KERR’S ASS
We borrowed the loan of Kerr’s big ass
To go to Dundalk with butter,
Brought him home the evening before the market
An exile that night in Mucker.
We heeled up the cart before the door,
We took the harness inside –
The straw-stuffed straddle, the broken breeching
With bits of bull-wire tied;
The winkers that had no choke-band,
The collar and the reins…
In Ealing Broadway, London Town
I name their several names
Until a world comes to life –
Morning, the silent bog,
And the god of imagination waking
In a Mucker fog.
Patrick Kavanagh
PERMISSION TO WRITE
This year, we celebrate the centenary of Patrick
Kavanagh, arguably the most influential Irish poet of
the 20th century. On the face of it, Kavanagh was an
unlikely poet. He had little formal education and his
reading was hit-and-miss. He lacked the social poise
and cultural confidence of a Yeats or a St John Gogarty.
In the literary circles of the cultural establishment, he
was a wild man, a perpetual outsider, a clod-hopper.
Kavanagh wrote to live and made a precarious living
from writing. He reviewed films and contributed
articles and poems to whatever publication would pay
him. Many of his poems were jobbing pieces, sent out
in hope of quick-payment.
My father, who worked as barman in Dublin from the
early 1940’s, remembered Kavanagh as the customer
he did not want to see enter the bar. In my father’s
version, Kavanagh was rude and difficult, whose
hacking and hawking put many decent customers off
their drink.
The wonder of Kavanagh is the transformation he
undergoes in his best poetry. There the rough edges
disappear and Kavanagh creates poems of great
eloquence out of the material – personal, social and
linguistic – to hand. Seamus Heaney says of him,
"Kavanagh gave you permission to dwell without
cultural anxiety among the usual landmarks of your life."
This is what makes Kavangh such an exciting example
for teachers of English. He demonstrates that the
language of poetry is no different from the language
of daily life and that the sources of poetry are the
stuff of ordinary lives, lived in ordinary places.
At both Junior Certificate and Leaving Certificate level,
the aim of the English syllabus is to develop the
students’ capacity to use and shape language. However,
by-in-large, students are invited to respond to poetry in
discursive essays. Relatively speaking, there is little
invitation to students to respond in kind to poetry. If
Kavanagh teaches us anything it is that students have
the resources, in their lives and their language, to create
poetry. Perhaps what they need is permission to dwell
without anxiety among the landmarks of their lives and
record those landmarks in their poetry. Teachers of
English can grant that permission.
In marking Kavanagh’s centenary, this issue of the
Teaching English magazine celebrates Irish
Writers and writing.
Dr Kevin Mc Dermott is co-ordinator of English
for the Second Level Support Service.
If you would like to respond to this or any other
article in the magazine, please contact the
Teaching English magazine. See back page for
contact details.
MEET THE WRITER
Poet Eavan Boland writes about her poem, ‘This Moment’.
‘This Moment’ is about a time in my life when my
children were very young. We lived in a suburb which
faced the Dublin hills and where the summer light
lasted a long time into the evening. When I went out
to call in my daughter she would run into my arms,
just as the light was going.
If I apply it to “This Moment” I can see one particular
place in the poem where if not the soul then the
centre of the action sits. It’s the line about the
window and the butter. It’s the most deliberate and
intent image in the poem. I have a clear memory of
hesitating before I used it. But I went ahead anyway.
This is a very short poem. Its space is limited. If I
wanted to convey both magic and ordinariness, and I
did, I needed an image which would put the light of
that first window into the context of the downright
and plainspoken image of yellow butter. The effect of
the first needed the solidity of the second. So I went
ahead and did it, and it’s still the part of this poem I
remain most satisfied with.
This poem remembers that time, but in an
impressionistic way. I wanted to convey the stillness,
the waiting, the about-to-happen feeling of summer
light going. Most of those details in the poem are
taken from my life at that time: the moths of late
summer always caught my eye as they banged against
our kitchen window, and the first house lights
through the summer twilight were always an
evocative sight to me.
Eavan Boland
But it’s the mother and child who are the focus of the
poem. It’s as if the child’s reunion with the mother
makes the summer twilight shift and stumble into
real night. The stars, the moths, the sweetening of the
apples all happen as a result of the encounter.
Eavan Boland’s poem, ‘This Moment’ is from the list
of prescribed poems for examination in 2005. Eavan’s
latest collection (her tenth) Journey with Two Maps
is published by Carcanet.
And that’s my real subject. This is a poem which
puts human nature and actual nature beside each
other. It also puts nature under the control of
human nature, which of course it’s not in the real
world. But by suggesting it is in this poem I was able
to convey something of the power and beauty of
the meeting between the child and the mother. And
that’s what I wanted to do.
THIS MOMENT
The form of the poem is fairly open. The short lines
helped me create a sort of staccato effect. Small as the
space was, I wanted a hint of drama, of an event getting
ready to happen. But this kind of poem – which is over
almost before it’s begun – depends most on its images.
Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.
A neighbourhood.
At dusk.
Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.
But not yet.
One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.
As a young poet, I was influenced by my mother. She was
a painter and had studied in Paris in the thirties. She was
taught by a Russian artist called Leo Survage, who spoke
a strange and memorable phrase to her. “There is a place
in the painting” he used to say “where the soul sits”.
Despite the slight quirkiness of the phrase, my mother
remembered it and often
quoted it to me. Even
now, I find some
truth in it when I
think about a
particular poem.
A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.
Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
Eavan Boland
2
DEATH AND NIGHTINGALES
The novelist, Eugene McCabe, has kindly given the
Teaching English magazine permission to
reproduce his reply to two questions asked of him
by a Leaving Certificate student on his novel,
Death and Nightingales.
History. Held under chieftancy of Brian Maguire
(disaffected) crown escheated 1610. Original house
built by Thomas Winters under tenant of Sir John
Hume of Tully Castle. Burned in 1641 rebellion.
Rebuilt by Clement Winters 1660. Extended by
Captain William Hudson Winters (sea) 1793. Gates,
yard, gate lodge and the hamlet at Clonoula, etc.
Reverting back to your initial question. The first word
of the title is ‘Death’. The novel is permeated by death
itself and thoughts of death from the opening
paragraph where Beth is woken by the blaring of a
bloated, dying animal and then standing in Billy
Winters bedroom imagining him getting a heart
attack, and by the description early on of her mother
and unborn infant being killed by a frenzied bull.
The use of the bull in this chapter is designed to echo
the brown bull of Cooley and the “Pillow Talk” in that
enduring myth about pride of ownership (land and
cattle) and the never ending power between the
sexes, then and now. Following on that, Liam (Gaelic
for Billy!) Ward loses a calf and is preoccupied
throughout by his plan to murder and bury Beth and
abscond with the stolen gold to save his own skin. He
represents a callous greed and selfishness not unlike
that of Billy Winters and his colonising forbears, the
point being that, given power, we, the Irish, would
behave in a similar manner given half a chance!
Q. Why did you write the novel?
A. “Why did I write it?” Nuala Ó Faolain chairing a book
programme (Booklines) on RTÉ asked the same
question with negative emphasis: “I don’t know why he
wrote it!” I wrote it because I was fascinated by what
seemed an incredible tale and wanted to explore and
make it not only credible but relevant to present day
readers. You’ll see after the title page, the dedication,
For J.C. who gave me
the bones of this tale
in an April garden
Q. What is the meaning of Beth’s final reply to Billy
Winters, “Unto death, Mr Winters ... unto death.”
J.C. was John Collins (dead since, alas) a mountainy,
Fermanagh, cross-border neighbour and small farmer
who lived out by Carn Rock and sometimes helped us in
the Garden. Quite casually one April day he pointed
across the lake towards the old Clones road where
there is now a large area of scrubland adjoining the
lake. Away back at the time of the land war a drunk, he
told us, sleeping off excess one night in the middle of
the scrub land woke up to overhear two men talking
and digging what was clearly a grave. A girl’s name was
mentioned. He crept away, stopped the girl and told
her what he had seen and overheard. She had no reason
to disbelieve him. She went home and returned the
stolen money. When I asked what happened her he told
me went off to America a short time after.
A. Like her mother the unwanted foetus in Beth’s
womb is/was a foreshadowing of future political
trouble. That of course was easy to be wise about in
1990 after two decades of 20th century sectarian
murder in Ulster! Early on in the novel, there is a
description of the house, lands and ownership of
Clonoula (taken from Farms, Families and Dwelling
Houses of Fermanagh, London: Longmans, 1883)
where you can read details about the history of the
Ulster plantation, which is at the heart of this story.
The following quote contains the loaded, historical
word “escheated” (confiscated) and a reference to the
rebellion of 1641. The sense of a colonial class digging
in to stay is well defined:
3
All empires steal in the name of progress, justice
and civilisation! And they are all alike in this. The
brown envelopes in our Tribunals are a follow on of
this: grubby theft, impure and simple. The examples
are endless.
To me the key chapter in the novel is Chapter ten,
portraying Percy French, himself the product of a Big
House (French Park Co. Roscommon) and, in his own
way, as beloved and as enduring as Parnell. It tries to
convey the historical reality of the time, to show the
complexity and human contradiction involved when
the enormous power of Empire bears down on the
simmering resentment of centuries.
I hope these few comments are helpful. I’d hate to try
to write a piece about Death and Nightingales under
examination pressure. Good Luck!
The Film Rights of Death and Nightingales
In response to a question on the possibility of a film
version of the novel, Eugene McCabe told the
Teaching English magazine that the film rights were
sold within a month of the novel’s publication in 1992
to the company which made, among other things,
Bridget Jones’s Diary. A number of screenplays have
been written, including one by Eugene himself. One
“Hollywood hot-shot” was paid an exorbitant amount
of money “for setting it among wealthy, Irish
emigrants in a 19th Century Montana mining Town”,
though this, too, was turned down by “the fat men
with fat cigars. ‘Too Irish, too down beat!’ They want
happy endings to all stories.” Interestingly the
company involved made a really good film of Sam
Hanna Bell’s December Bride, though, by their
standards, it was not a commercial success. Eugene
says he believes only one in twenty of the film rights
purchased is made into a film and it will be lucky to
clear its costs.
That of course, was a dead end, story wise. The
families involved were still, he told us, in the Carn
Rock area. He named no names. I didn’t ask for them
or want to hear them. I was more than fascinated by
details, by the gross betrayal at the heart of this
unlikely tale. Clearly betrayal, and its devastating
effect, is the major theme in the novel. Critics quite
rightly fasten on that. For example, at the outset
Catherine deliberately betrays Billy Winters by
marrying him while pregnant by one of two men.
Mercy Boyle tells (betrays) details about her master
to her constable friend which a loyal servant would
not disclose. Beth, his stepdaughter, betrays his
absolute trust by stealing his gold. The really
profound betrayal is Liam Ward’s betrayal of Beth
and his intention to murder her. If you want to
elaborate this list, you could say Parnell was betrayed
by catholic bishops (who preached love and
forgiveness and were so blatantly loveless and
unforgiving), turning huge numbers of their flock
against Parnell’s brilliant leadership, simply because
he “loved not wisely but too well”, thereby crippling
what might have been the peaceful independence of
the entire island. Theft and human greed are not
alluded to especially by commentators. Billy Winter’s
old gold and land stem from a double theft, the
stealing by an ancestor of a shipload of beaver pelts
and, then, his moving in on escheated (confiscated)
land after The Flight of the Earls.
Eugene McCabe’s Death and Nightingales is on
the list of texts prescribed for comparative study
for examination in 2006. The novel may also be
studied as a single text, at both ordinary and
higher level, for the 2006 examination. Eugene’s
latest collection of stories, Heaven Lies About Us
(2004) is published by Bloomsbury.
4
AN AMISH RUG
Poet Michael Longley writes about his poem ‘An
Amish Rug’ in the context of some other poems he
has written about quilts.
AN AMISH RUG
In my last four collections there are several poems
about domestic artefacts (mainly quilts) from the last
century and further back. Although they were
intended for everyday use, sometimes these quilts
turned out to be artistic masterpieces. In most cases
we don’t know who the quilters were. My quilt poems
(and my Amish rug poem) are a way of celebrating
these modest anonymous geniuses (mainly women),
and casting the light of imagination on to heads
bowed in concentration at a kitchen table. They spent
long evenings with needle and thread, between
household chores, and in the midst of familial hubbub.
In their designs and patterns they reflected their lives
as farmers, their religious festivals, the seasons, the
countryside. In one of my poems I quote a quilter who
Thought her quilt as beautiful
As the wild flowers that grew in the wood
And along the edge of the road . . .
Like poets they gave their patterns beautifully
suggestive names: “Hole in the Barn Door”, “Sun Dial”,
“Grandmother’s Flower Garden”, “Cathedral Window”.
They made quilts for special occasions. A young brideto-be would create a quilt for her wedding night (and
for the rest of her married life) and conceal behind the
cloth love letters and other secret things.
Here is the whole poem “The Design”:
trimmings and leftovers, a radiantly colourful rug out
of a pile of old rags.
Lancaster County in Pennsylvania is famous for the
communities of Amish folk who live and farm there.
This severe Protestant sect eschews all modern
inventions and contraptions, happily doing without
fridges, TVs, radios, electric light. They travel in
horse-drawn buggies, and wear exceptionally plain,
old-fashioned clothes, often black. They are brilliant
farmers who don’t ruin the soil with heavy machinery
and chemicals. The Amish also sell to tourists lovely
quilts and rugs which in their rainbow-burst colours
contrast disturbingly with the austere appearance of
their makers. Although I could never join their
religion, I admire these people. Their way of life is a
reprimand to our present-day lust for possessions, our
greedy destruction of this beautiful planet. When I
was last in Lancaster County in the 1980’s, I bought
an Amish rug as a gift for my wife. I wrote a poem
about it some time later, a love poem which is in a
way also religious. There is something devout about
making anything well. The Amish rug-maker who
pieced together our bedroom rug out of rags all those
years ago, now lights up our lives every day. He really
has created for us a cathedral window.
Michael Longley
Michael Longley’s poem, ‘An Amish Rug’ is from the
list of prescribed poems for examination in 2005 &
2006. Michael’s latest collection, Snow Water
(2004), is published by Jonathan Cape.
AN AMISH RUG
Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings,
the design
Made up of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?
The quilts and rugs also impress me because they are
created out of nothing more than bits and pieces of
material, odds and ends that are transformed and
given a second life. To quote another of my poems
(“The Sunburst”)
Made out of uniforms, coat linings, petticoats,
Waistcoats, flannel shirts, ball gowns, by Mother
Or Grandmother, twenty stitches to every inch...
All art is to a greater or lesser extent improvisatory,
conjuring something out of nothing – a quilt out of
As if a one-room schoolhouse were all we knew
And our clothes were black, our underclothes black,
Marriage a horse and buggy going to church
And the children silhouettes in a snowy field,
I bring you this patchwork like a smallholding
Where I served as the hired boy behind a harrow,
Its threads the colour of cantaloupe and cherry
Securing hay bales, corn cobs, tobacco leaves.
You may hang it on the wall, a cathedral window,
Or lay it out on the floor beside our bed
So that whenever we undress for sleep or love
We shall step over it as over a flowerbed.
Michael Longley
·
WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM ·
THIRD ANNUAL ‘WRITE A POEM’ COMPETITION
CALLING ALL POETS
Last Year, the Teaching English Support Service
Poetry Competition attracted over 1000 entries.
This year the Teaching English Magazine is again
inviting students to Write a Poem. There are two
categories: Junior Cycle and Senior Cycle. We hope
that the competition will encourage young writers
to compose poetry and encourage teachers to
support the writing of poetry. Poems written in
response to poems studied for Junior Certificate and
Leaving Certificate English are especially welcome.
We encourage teachers to send a selection of the
most promising work from their classes.
RULES OF THE COMPETITION
Each entrant may submit one poem.
Each entry must typed or written clearly
in legible handwriting
Each entry must contain:
The title of the Poem.
The Name of the Entrant,
The Name and Address of the School.
The Category.
Each entry must be stamped by the school or signed
by an English Teacher.
Where an entry is modelled on, or written in
response to, or a poem, the name of the poem and
the poet must be clearly stated on the entry.
All entries must be sent to Esther Herlihy, English
Administrator, SLSS, Navan Education Centre,
Athlumney, Navan, Co. Meath.
Please note that entrants should keep a copy of
their poems, as no poems will be returned.
Winners and highly commended will be published in
the Summer 2005 issue of the Teaching English
Magazine. Winners will receive book tokens and a
commemorative plaque.
Closing date for receipt of entries is Friday 18th
February 2005.
POETRY AND CREATIVE IMITATION
The new Leaving Certificate English syllabus,
examined for the first time in 2001, encourages the
idea of creative imitation as a means of developing
the art of writing. In essence, this involves the
young writer, in this instance the young poet,
·
reading a poem to discover what it can teach him or
her in his own efforts at writing. Seamus Heaney,
writing on the way we come to poetry, observes:
In practice you hear it coming from somebody else,
you hear something in another’s writer’s sounds that
flows in through your ear and enters the echo
chamber of your head and delights your whole
nervous system in such a way that your reaction will
be ‘Ah, I wish I had said that in that particular way.’
This other writer, in fact, has spoken something
essential to you, something you recognise
instinctively as a true sounding of aspects of yourself
and your experience. And your first steps as a writer
will be to imitate, consciously or unconsciously,
these sounds that flowed in, that influence.
Many of the winning entries in last year’s
competition were written in response to a poem,
and that is how the writing of poetry often begins:
you find your voice in response to another voice;
you read a poem and you write one of your own.
However finding your voice is not enough to make
a poet – there’s something else needed. Raymond
Carver the great American Poet, writes of that
something else.
He tells how, as a teenager, working as a delivery
boy, he delivered something to a customer in a
small town in Washington. As he was waiting for
this elderly man to write a cheque, he began to
notice the books all around him, and he saw an
anthology and a poetry magazine. He’d never seen
a magazine devoted to poetry, and he was
astounded. The older man saw his interest and gave
him the magazine and anthology as a gift, saying:
“Maybe you’ll write something yourself someday. If
you do, you’ll need to know where to send it.”
Carver continues: ‘Where to send it.’ Something – I
don’t know just what, but I felt something
momentous happening. I was eighteen or nineteen
years old, obsessed with the need “to write
something,” and by then I’d made a few clumsy
attempts at poems. But it had never really occurred
to me that there might be a place where one
actually sent these efforts in hopes that they would
be read and even, just possibly – incredibly, or so it
seemed – considered for publication.
The competition hopes to offer students the
opportunity to see their efforts published in a
magazine that will be posted to every second-level
school in the country.
WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM ·
·
WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM ·
THE WINNING POEMS FROM THE 2004 COMPETITION
1st Prize Junior
Senior 1st Prize
SHORT STORY ON A SEVILLE POSTER
CONNEMARA – IMPRESSIONS
They are in an elegant pose,
Under the blossoming tree.
He has his left arm around her shoulder
Gripping it tightly.
Her gown is pink,
And puffs out like a bed of flowers.
The sky is green with passion,
Like emeralds in the blazing sun.
He is dressed in black and white
And sings to her,
His hands crimped around his castanet.
He longs, in the Sevilla sunset.
It was the pine tree
That welcomed my arrival,
Mimicking the wrath of the sea
In its wind tossed rustling.
Modelled on ‘Short Story on a Painting of Gustav
Klimt’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Jennifer Baxter
Community School, Carrigaline
Co. Cork
Just beyond a monster sleeps,
Hidden under a blanket
Of moss and wilful weeds,
Asleep for ten thousand years,
In a grey endless dream.
The wind blows with a force
That could frighten the weak
Or give life to the inspired,
Transforming the hues of the world,
And exhaling into the sea
The ferocity of wakefulness.
The waves multiply
Till the sea becomes enslaved
To the surface movements
Of thousands of minions,
Moving like troops
In unison, and with lives short-lived,
Dying in beautiful white foamy bursts.
Around the anonymous harbour
Grow tufts of green grass, amid the vestiges
Of burnt umber hay.
Across the bay
Stand masses of crosses,
Bequeathing to their owners
Eternal landscapes of beauty.
The wind blows stronger,
Reaching into the worn crevices,
Of Fahy’s forlorn castle,
Now forsaken to nettles,
Thanks to the ambitions of foreign lords,
And a last resistance, drowning under time.
A solitary figure,
Standing vulnerable on the slip,
Tendrils of hair obscuring my vision.
I am small, and overwhelmed by these
Impressions of nature,
The vastness of time,
And my position in it.
Treasa Ní Dhubhluachra, Coláiste Chillian
Cluain Dolcáin, Baile Atha Cliath 22
·
WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM · WRITE A POEM ·
THE IRISH TIMES SCHOOL MAGAZINE COMPETITION
TO LAUNCH IN JANUARY 2005
New Second Level Competition to Teach Students
How to Construct a Magazine
will be especially useful as a resource tool for teachers
of media studies and graphic design.
Sponsored by The Irish Times, this new competition
gives secondary school students the opportunity to
study what goes into making a magazine while also
learning about current events and other topics of
interest. It will be launched in January 2005 with an
Irish Times supplement covering different aspects of
creating a magazine (design and layout, research
methods, journalistic skills, editing, feature writing,
etc.) Any type of magazine can be made as part of the
competition and it can therefore be anchored in any
subject area; English, Art, History, Science, etc.
Prizes will be awarded to both the junior and the senior
sections of the school. In each section there will be five
writing categories (e.g. best film review, social
commentary, etc.) and three artistic categories (e.g.
best cover, cartoon, etc.) A special supplement will be
published in The Irish Times in May showcasing the
winning magazines (Junior and Senior), the category
winners, along with highlights from a selection of other
magazines entered. The winning teams will receive
their prizes at a prestigious awards day in Dublin in
May 2005 attended by students, family, and the press.
Each fortnight after the competition launch an article
about the project will appear in The Irish Times’
‘Transition Times’. In addition to offering additional
information and tips, the pieces will focus on one
school’s progress (St. Vincent’s, Dundalk). The features
The deadline for entries is 18 March 2005. All
entries should be sent to Real Event Solutions, 54
Ballyhooley Rd, St Luke’s, Cork.
Contact: Real Event Solutions, [email protected],
021 455 0434
INIS
A VALUABLE RESOURCE FOR TEACHERS OF ENGLISH
INIS Autumn 2004
Inis is the magazine of Children’s Books Ireland, aimed
at teachers, writers, librarians, booksellers, publishers,
academics, anyone, in fact, with an interest in
children’s books.
It is an interesting, useful and well-produced magazine.
The content includes:
An extensive Review Section
The reviews cover fiction and non-fiction as well as
professional and academic books on the subject. The
reviews go far beyond publishers’ blurbs to offer
thorough and thoughtful accounts of each book.
With at least twenty reviewers featured in the
magazine, there is no shortage of expertise or
opinion in the reviews.
A Country Profile
In the autumn issue, the focus is on Scandinavian
literature which, apart from offering an overview of
young people’s taste in literature, alerts readers to
work which is available in translation. There are also
interesting comparisons between the reading habits
of children in Norway, Sweden and Denmark and
insights into why some children give up the habit of
reading when they reach fourteen or fifteen.
8
Profile of a Classic Author
Hans Christian Andersen is the featured author in
this section and the article is academic and wellresearched, without being too solemn. It raises the
extent to which Andersen sought to addresses both
an adult and a children’s audience in his writing, and
the degree to which his playful, ironic stance is lost
in translation.
Sam McBratney
Mark Time (1976)
Aubrey Flegg
Wings over Delft (2003)
Carlo Gebler August 44
(2003)
Elizabeth O’ Hara
The Hiring Fair (1993)
Aubrey Flegg gives the
background to his three novels,
Katie’s War, The Cinnamon
Tree and his award–winning
Wings over Delft. As you would
expect, Aubrey writes with
warmth and good-humour.
After four years as editors,
Siobhan Parkinson and Valerie
Coughlan are stepping down as
the editors of Inis , and are
leaving the magazine in splendid
health. This is a magazine
produced with real flair by people
who know their subject and
know how to present it.
Special Feature –
Robert Dunbar’s Top Fifty Irish
Children’s Novels
In the special feature, Robert
Dunbar takes the bull by the
horns and nominates his
personal list of the best Irish
fiction written for children and
young adults. Keeping in mind
the criteria of ‘greatness’ and
‘pleasure’, Robert offers a list
of fifty titles and accompanies the list with a useful
essay in support of his choices. It’s a terrific list that
could easily form the basis of a class library for first
and second year students in secondary schools.
Robert’s top ten are:
The magazine is produced quarterly and is available
to members of Children’s Books Ireland. Details of
membership can be obtained from CBI, First Floor, 17
Lr Camden Street, Dublin 2 or from the website,
www.childrensbooksireland.com
Sam McBratney
The Chieftain’s Daughter
(1993)
Kate Thompson
Annan Water (2004)
Mark O’ Sullivan
Angels Without Wings
(1997)
Kate Thompson
The Alchemsit’s Apprentice (2002)
Siobhan Parkinson Call of the Whales (2000)
Maeve Friel The Lantern Moon (1996)
9
JENNIFER JOHNSTON – ON WRITING
Acclaimed Novelist, Jennifer Johnston, author of
How Many Miles to Babylon?, looks back on thirty
years of writing and offers some advice to the
young writer.
and in the bookshops in Dublin and the shelves of
University libraries and thought to myself that
everything that had to be written had already been
written and where was the point in me taking on the
onerous job of making the shelves even fuller than
they were. So I stopped writing and felt no pain in
the stopping. The pain I felt at the age of thirty-five
troubled me and I bought myself a typewriter to try
and see if I could write the pain out of myself. It took
my three years to teach myself to write; I filled
wastepaper basket after basket with unfinished
novels and stories, never satisfied, tearing them up
without giving them the chance to become real
finished works. Then one day when I was about to
throw out a half finished novel a voice spoke in my
head, quite loud and clear: “Finish it, you fool. Finish
something. You must finish something.” It was then
I discovered that when the joy and pleasure you get
when you start something new is over, the work
starts. You have to then use your head, your heart,
your imagination, your native wit. That is the
moment that divides the sheep from the goats. That
was lesson number one.
ON BEING A WRITER
I find it hard to speak or write about writing. I have
never worked out why this should be; possibly
because it is like breathing to me and I couldn’t find
much to say about breathing except I know I have to
do it. My life was a mess or rather, I should say, the
inside of my head was a mess until I discovered what
I wanted to do with my life ... at about the age of
thirty five. I had for several years been wondering
what I should do with my life, which had made me
snarly and somewhat difficult to live with. I knew I
wanted to do something that other people didn’t do.
I didn’t want my life in any way to belong to a
corporation, I really wanted to be my own person,
making my own rules as I went along. I have never
wanted to be pushed around nor have I wanted to
push other people, beyond of course the common or
garden pushing that all mothers and wives have to
do from time to time, such as “If you don’t tidy your
room I’ll kill you.”
Looking back from here I can consider what I have
learnt through thirty years of writing: reading is
probably the most important thing that any writer
can do. Every great writer has his own individual
way of saying things. Like every painting the work is
textured and rich with meaning, wit, charm, anger,
sorrow and style. You learn about the techniques
and the passion of other writers as you read their
work. You learn about the subjects they dare to
broach, the idiotic mistakes they make. You feel the
human being behind each book; your understanding
is expanded with everything you read.
It didn’t occur to me at that time that I might
become a writer. Years before writing was the only
subject at which I had excelled at school - it had
never seemed like work to me, writing and reading
had been pure pleasure. Ever since I had been able to
read I had devoured books and from the age of
about eight I had written plays that we had acted in
school and stories that I kept firmly to myself. At
about eighteen I looked at the books in my home
10
Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? is
on the list of texts prescribed for comparative study
for the examination in 2006. It is also one of the
texts which may be studied as a single text at
Ordinary Level, for the 2006 examination. In her
2002 novel, This Is Not a Novel, Jennifer returns to
the subject of the First World War.
Listening to people, not just to idle chatter, but also
to real talk. You have to learn the rhythms and
patterns of speaking. There are many quite
successful writers who are totally incapable of
writing dialogue – they drop dull, lifeless words onto
the page and the characters never become alive. The
reader has to be able to believe in the reality of the
characters, that one day somewhere you might meet
one of them, that they have real lives beyond the
confines of the pages of a book.
Grammar is important, no matter how many people
tell you that it is not. It truly is worth stewing over
the grammar books until it is all in your head and
when you know the rules so well that you have
forgotten them – like riding a bicycle – you may then
break them as long as you know why you are dong
it. There is nothing uglier on the page then an illconstructed sentence. There is nothing more
infuriating that a lack of clarity in writing. It is
totally allowable to write sentences without verbs
and such like, but only if you know why you are
doing it. Rules were made to be broken, but you can
only break them if you know and understand them.
Words are our magic invention: we, human beings,
invented them and continue to do so. Language is a
growing, changing living thing. Our wonderful
servant. We must never be afraid to use words and
experiment with them, play games with them and
build magical castles in the air with them.
Jennifer Johnston
COURSES FOR TEACHERS OF ENGLISH IN SPRING 2005
APPROACHES TO THE TEACHING OF FILM
IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM
THEATRE AND THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM
This popular course, offered in partnership with the Irish
Film Institute, will be repeated in two venues in Spring.
One course will take place in Waterford Education
Centre and one will take place in Blackrock Education
Centre, Co Dublin.
This new course, developed in partnership with the
outreach/education department of the Abbey Theatre,
will be offered in Drumcondra Education Centre and
Dublin West Education Centre in Spring 2005.
Full details will be posted to all schools.
Full Details will be posted to all schools.
11
MEET THE WRITERS WHO TEACH
In this issue of the Teaching English magazine, we feature four writers who are also teachers
Mary Rose Callan teaches English in Colaiste Bride in
Clondalkin Dublin 22.
Mary Rose grew up in Sligo,
overlooking Benbulben and
feels that living in a place so
rich in natural beauty and
literary associations made it
almost inevitable that she
would fall into writing. She
has fond memories of her
time in the Ursuline
secondary school, where
there was an emphasis on
writing and the arts. All
students were encouraged to
enter writing competitions
and compete in feiseanna. A
prize for an essay in a
competition sponsored by The Sligo Champion
was an important source of recognition and
encouragement. Learning poetry and Shakespeare
by heart was a feature of her education and she
believes it tutored her ear to the rhythms of various
forms of verse.
However, it was the discovery of contemporary
American poets, in particular, Elizabeth Bishop, that
really quickened her interest in poetry. In
researching the life and work of Elizabeth Bowen
and reading the biographies of others writers, Mary
Rose was tempted to begin writing herself in a
serious way.
feels her own interest in learning from the poetry,
and the excitement she finds in examining how, for
example, a poem is constructed, communicates itself
to the students.
A workshop in Creative Writing, facilitated by John
Kelly in New Park Comprehensive School, set her on
the road. Mary Rose is currently a member of the
Thornfield Writers Group at U.C.D. This group of ten
or so poets meets every two weeks and has a visiting
poet or critic as moderator once a month. Being part
of a writing group helps to maintain focus and to
stay disciplined.
In teaching writing, Mary Rose believes that her
students want to create and experience the pleasure
of their creativity. The best thing about teaching
writing is being able to publicly acknowledge the
work of students. However, she is quite happy to set
writing exercises that the students may show or
keep private as they feel appropriate.
The sources for her poetry are random and varied.
She quotes with approval Michael Longley’s
observation that if he knew where he got his ideas
for poetry, he’d go and live there. Every new poem,
she feels, is a jump into the dark. For Mary Rose the
most enjoyable part of writing is the working and reworking of a draft, the shaping and figuring that lies
at the heart of writing.
To help students over the fright of the blank
page, Mary Rose encourages them to use the first
line of their favourite poem from an anthology
like Niall MacMonagle’s Real Cool to get things
going. To help students write tightly focused
stories, she often uses the example of the story
based on a character outside of a phone-box
overhearing the conversation of the person on
the phone. It’s a simple way of suggesting the
unities of time, place and action.
Her interest in writing influences how she teaches
English. Reading the poetry of Bishop or Boland or
Frost is an education for herself as a writer, and she
12
Transition Year, she believes, is an important year to catch
the students on the wing and give them confidence in
their ability to write. The hardest thing for a young writer
is believing that they have something worthwhile to
communicate.
Mary Rose believes that students can be drawn into
reading and writing through good novels. Her Junior
Certificate class respond to the crystal-clear prose and the
short paragraphs and chapters of Seamus Deane’s Reading
in the Dark, while her second year students enjoy the
quirky humour of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of
the Dog in the Night Time. These works provide starting
points for the students’ own work.
POEM FOR APRIL
Your helpless cry
comes in the faltering minutes
before the bell,
when the girl with the best voice reads
a poem that ends
with a four foot box,
with snowdrops,
paler than the dead child’s skin.
Too late, I remember
the story you told
of your sister, knocked down
before you were born,
whose name you were given.
April, murmurs the boldest girl
cradling your head,
as I cannot,
on the unloved blue jumper
that flattens her chest.
as if she knows
the overspill of snowdrop
flooding the trail that brought you here,
its sudden, enormous petals
choking all
that’s left of your cry
in the emptying room.
Mary Rose Callan
‘Poem for April’ comes form Mary Rose Callan’s second
collection, Footfalls of Snow, which will be published by
Bradshaw Press in March 2005, during Cork’s tenure as
European Capital of Culture. ‘Poem for April’ is one of
the poems in a sequence written from the perspective
of a teacher. Her first collection, The Mermaid’s Head
(2001) is also published by Bradshaw Books.
Noel Monahan teaches English at St Clare’s College,
Ballyjamesduff, Co. Cavan.
Noel grew up on a farm, near Granard, County
Longford and went to secondary school in
neighbouring County Cavan. In his current
writing, he is discovering the extent to which his
childhood on the family farm is lodged in both
memory and imagination.
His parents were avid readers and reading, even after
the advent of television, was their preferred pastime.
Noel remembers his father coming home from the
local library with works by Plato and Aristotle. Not
surprisingly, given this background, Noel believes
that reading is, as he puts it, “essential”.
In school Noel did not consider himself a writer-inthe making. In fact, he showed no precocity in
relation to literature and describes his schooldays as
a period of “observing and storing.” He enjoyed
English in secondary school but Latin was his
favourite subject. The Latin teacher had a
passionate enthusiasm for the subject and the
students learned by heart the odes of Horace
(‘Dulce et decorum est ...’) and passages of Virgil’s
Aeneid. Like many of his contemporaries, Noel took
four languages for his Leaving Certificate. In French
he was introduced to the poetry of Baudelaire,
while O Direain and O Riordain were on the syllabus
for Irish. When these are added to the poets he read
on the English course, then his apprenticeship in
writing may be traced to his schooldays, though he
was not aware of it, at the time.
Noel went to Maynooth to study English, History
and Philosophy. While he wrote some drama
reviews for a college magazine, his main interest
was in music. When he began teaching in
Ballyjamesduff, he tried his hand at writing a
musical for the school, based on the story of Deirdre
of the Sorrows. The lyrics he wrote were, in effect,
his first poems.
Over the years, the relationship between school
and writing has remained close. Each year he
writes and directs a play for his Transition Year
students. A recent one, Exits and Entrances, was
developed from Jacques’ ‘Seven Ages of Man’
speech in Shakespeare’s As You like It. The
Transition Year plays are performed in the Ramor
Theatre, in nearby Virginia.
Noel writes or reads for an hour first thing every
morning. The interest in mythology, which goes
back to his study of Latin in secondary school, is as
strong as ever. He is also drawn to Jungian
psychology and its mythic symbolism, which, as he
expresses it, “feeds the imagination.” A number of
his poems interpret contemporary life in symbolic
or mythic terms.
Noel was heartened by the response of Jessie
Lendennie of Salmon publishers to the first poems
he submitted to her. He tries to offer the same spirit
of encouragement to his own students.
THE FUNERAL GAME
That winter we came to terms with death.
Every shoe-box was a coffin
For anything small and dead
And we wrapped them in calicoes, velvets …
We grabbed hats, coats, umbrellas,
From the hallway to dress as mourners,
Someone struck an iron girder in the hay-shed
To sound the funeral bell,
John Joe beat the dead march on a saucepan.
We held wakes, issued death certificates
To old crows, kittens, chickens …
Lined the graves with stones,
Erected crosses with ash sticks.
We pretended to cry, struggled with Latin prayers,
Filled the wet graves in the clover field,
Genuflected in the direction of a whin bush,
The rain pelting down,
We left by a side-gap,
Back to the hay-shed for tea, bread, butter …
For all who travelled long journeys.
Among his favourite poets are William Blake and
Patrick Kavanagh. He regards ‘The Great Hunger’ as
one of the great poems of the last century. He
suggests that Kavangh has much in common with
the dispossessed poets of the Gaelic tradition, poets
like O Bruadair or O Rathaille. Noel is also interested
in the poetry of the Russian poets, Osip Mandelstam
and Anna Akmatova.
Noel Monahan
‘The Funeral Game’ gives the title to Noel
Monahan’s fourth collection of poetry, The Funeral
Game (2004), published by Salmon Poetry. His
previous collections – Opposite Walls, Snowfire and
Curse of the Birds – are all published by Salmon.
With Heather Brett, Noel runs Windows Publishing.
The annual Windows Poetry Competition is a major
national competition. Full details can be obtained
from the Arts Office of Cavan County Council.
Noel believes that teaching and writing complement
each other. He believes that the more he reads and
writes the better teacher he becomes. In teaching
poetry, he teaches as a poet, sharing his enthusiasm
for the poet’s guile and craft. He feels that poets like
Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Patrick Kavangh
speak directly and powerfully to his students. They
provide models for the students’ own work at a time
in their lives when they, the students, have much to
say. Transition Year is a golden opportunity to offer
the students an introduction to a wide range of
poets and, at the same time, to explore the work of
individual poets in some detail.
In encouraging the students to write, he shares his
own writing processes with them. A poem can begin
with a single word, a feeling or an image. Once the
first element is caught, the students are invited to
work with it, to test and develop it and to put down
images. Noel loves the energy that comes with this
first phase of writing and the sense of possibility
that attends it. When the writing and testing phase
is over, the challenge is to shape and edit the
material. Most writers, Noel says, overwrite and,
therefore, the paring back of work is essential.
However, it is important that young writers find
their personal voice and decide if their writing
needs to be restricted and curtailed or released and
set loose.
15
she prepared her first collection, Eating Baby Jesus.
Enda Wyley is a primary school teacher, who works in
an inner-city school in Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street.
Along the way to becoming a writer there was much
encouragement from parents, tutors, editors and
established writers. However, that encouragement
was meet with an equal determination to put her
work into the public domain.
Today, writing takes up two to three hours of every
day, and, in addition, there is the writing that is done
in the back of the mind, as well as the notes and
ideas scribbled in notebooks. The worst times are
when nothing happens. The best are when a poem
comes as a finished piece. She likes Michael
Hartnett’s view that “the poet is the poem’s first
critic.” The working towards an achieved poem
demands a toughness and a willingness to edit out
every spare phrase. Sometimes whole poems have to
be let go. Enda quotes Yeats’s practice of writing out
in prose what he wanted to say in a poem. She
understands and admires the desire for clarity that
underlies the practice.
Enda grew up in Glenageary, Co Dublin and went to
school in Dalkey, which she remembers as a small
fishing village. It was a beautiful place to go to
school. The primary school looked out on the sea
and there was a swimming pool cut into the rocks.
To her young imagination, being there was like
attending Malory Towers, the school featured in
Enid Blyton’s series of novels. Enda remembers a
teacher – Mrs Healy- encouraging the students to
look out at the rocks and asking them, ‘What do you
imagine the rocks to be?’ It came as a pleasurable
shock to realise that you could imagine them to be
anything you chose. As she began to write, her
parents, both of whom adored reading, encouraged
her and entered one of her poems in the poetry
competition of the North Cork Literary Festival in
Doneraile. To their delight, their nine-year-old
daughter won first prize. From then on, Enda was
“the one in the family who writes poetry.” Both the
success and the encouragement she received
emboldened her and she sent a sample of her work
to David Marcus, editor of the New Irish Writing
page in The Irish Press. He offered advice and later
published three of her poems, alongside the poetry
of Paul Durcan, when she was just sixteen.
In teaching, Enda tries to bring her enthusiasm and
love of writing into the classroom. In undertaking
writing projects she feels it is important to create a
sense of everyone working together. She thinks
there are three stages in the process. The first is a
warming up stage; the second is the showing stage;
and the third is the writing.
The sense of free imagining nurtured in primary
school was curtailed by the academic demands of
secondary school, though there was an outlet for her
writing in co-editing a student magazine. After her
Leaving Certificate, Enda trained as a primary
teacher in Carysfort College and took English and
History as her B.ED subjects. She found the study of
English at Carysfort to be stimulating. She read to
learn and to observe how others write. Heaney’s
North and the poetry of Philip Larkin, with its quirky
humour, were revelatory. An MA in creative writing,
at the University of Lancaster, was undertaken in
answer to that desire to learn as much as possible
about the craft of writing. It was in Lancaster that
When the students have written their first drafts,
Enda does some work on editing. She uses Ezra
Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro’ to illustrate what
she means. The poem started out as thirty lines, which
the poet whittled down to the one startling image:
“I’m a real believer that you shouldn’t ever patronise
children,” Enda says. It’s important that the children
hear and read the best work so that they can write
their best work. Thus, in a recent project, she used a
recording of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young
Poet first published in 1904, as part of the warming
up phase. She took Rilke’s encouragement to the
young poet as the starting point with the students.
Rilke also suggests that to write you must observe.
When Rilke found himself unable to write he took
the advice of the sculptor, Auguste Rodin, to visit
the zoo. This led to the writing of one of Rilke’s most
celebrated poems, ‘The Panther’. The class read this
poem and then did a writing exercise based on close
observation. By the end of the process the children
had learned about Rilke, read a poem and written
something of their own.
The apparition of these faces in a crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Visits to an art gallery or a public garden are ideal for
developing the connection between writing and
observing. Enda feels that it is important that the
teacher be willing to participate in the writing exercise
given to the students. This heightens the sense of
everyone working to the same end.
16
The bringing in of a beautiful object, like an amethyst
stone or a colourful feather, is useful in the warming up
phase. Enda also uses a recording of a TV documentary in
which the late Michael Hartnett speaks about his
writing, as well as a recording of Gillian Clarke speaking
about her poetry. All classes respond to Clarke’s belief
that ‘Everyone needs someone to say ‘yes’ to you’.
POEMS FOR BREAKFAST
Another morning shaking us.
The young potted willow
is creased with thirst,
the cat is its purring roots.
Under our chipped window
the frail orange flowers grow.
Now the garden gate clicks.
Now footsteps on the path.
Letters fall like weather reports.
Our dog barks, his collar clinks,
he scrambles, and we follow,
stumble over Catullus, MacUser,
Ancient Greek for Beginners,
cold half-finished mugs of tea,
last week’s clothes at the bed’s edge.
Then the old stairs begin to creak.
And there are the poems for breakfast –
favourites left out on the long glass table.
We take turns to place them there
bent open with the pepper pot,
marmalade jar, a sugar bowl –
the weight of kitchen things.
Secret gifts to wake up with,
rhythms to last the whole day long,
surprises that net the cat, the dog,
these days that we wake together in –
our door forever opening.
Enda Wyley
‘Poems for Breakfast’ is the title poem of Enda Wyley’s
third collection, Poems for Breakfast (2004), which is
published by Dedalus Press. Her earlier collections,
Eating Baby Jesus and Socrates in the Garden are also
published by Dedalus.
THE PANTHER
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly—
An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Niall Williams teaches English in St Michael’s
Vocational School Kilmihill, County Clare.
Niall grew up in Mount Merrion, County Dublin and
attended the local CBS. As a student in secondary
school, he rarely sought to draw attention to
himself and, for the most part, was an anonymous
figure in class. However, in fifth year, in reading
Macbeth, the richness of the text drew his response
and he spoke up in class, almost in spite of himself.
He can remember the moment, in the same year,
when the possibility of writing presented itself to
him. His English teacher, Mr Mason, gave the class
an essay title, ‘An Elephant in the Sitting Room’
which caught Niall’s imagination. The teacher
responded generously to his essay and praised the
creativity it displayed.
In his own teaching he is alert to students’ intuitive
response to literature and to their intuitive sense of
feeling in language. He tries to recognise and
encourage the germs of imagination that students
display in their writing, in the way that his own
juvenile effort was encouraged.
His father was a reader and often took Niall to the
local Pembroke Library. Those visits, imaginatively
transformed, find their way into his new novel, Only
Say the Word.
In UCD he studied English and French. College
provided the luxury of reading. Within the English
department there were lecturers like Jim O’ Malley,
Michael Paul Gallagher, Declan Kiberd and Denis O’
Donoghue who believed that books and literature
mattered and conveyed this belief to him as a student.
As an undergraduate, he fell in love with the writing
of William Faulkner and was astonished by the
opening section of The Sound and the Fury. He
immersed himself in Faulkner, reading both the
fiction and the letters of the novelist. In Faulkner he
found the example of a life dedicated to writing,
irrespective of public success or failure. Niall’s
college essays expressed his personal response to the
literature he read, without recourse to the views of
critics or commentators. Perhaps, because his efforts
were not only encouraged but also rewarded by his
tutors, he finds himself today in sympathy with
students who approach literature from what he
refers to as “outside the correctable criteria”.
After college he spent a year teaching in France and
commenced work on a ‘Faulknerian’ novel, which he
completed though it was never published. He settled
in New York and married Christine Breen whom he
had met in UCD. In 1985, he and Christine moved to
West Clare to live in the cottage that Christine’s
grandfather had left to make hi life in America.
Niall’s intention was to make a living as a writer. His
first four books were co-written with Christine and
recount their life in their new surroundings.
Niall regards this period
as his apprenticeship in
writing. He discovered
that you could write
about what you saw and
that there was no limit
to writing. What he and
Christine saw was a way
of life that was fast
disappearing. They tried
to capture that life as
honestly as they could,
without embellishment.
In
returning
to
Christine’s
ancestral
home, Christine and
Niall were acting out the dream of many Irish
Americans and the books sold well in America.
position and the resting of a case. Logic, consistency
of argument, comprehensiveness of approach are
the mainstays of examination writing. Within this
context, he encourages the personal response of his
students in their writing. Niall sees his role as
helping the students to read well and to recognise
the craft of writing. He wants the students to have
confidence in their intuitive response to literature.
He muses out loud that he doesn’t really know how
he learned to write and find a voice, though he
suggest that the writing developed under the
surface of the reading. He hopes the same is true for
his students. In addition to creating the preconditions for writing, he offers the students the
example of his own writing life.
Some of the texts he enjoys teaching include Barbra
Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, (taught with
Dancing at Lughnasa and Dances with Wolves for
the comparative section of the 2005 examination)
and Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. He is aware that
the Kingsolver novel is challenging but, as he
expresses it, “you make a mark and invite the
students to step up to it.” He meets their willingness
to step up with his own enthusiasm for the text. The
pleasure is in seeing the students find their response.
He compares the feeling to an actor reaching his or
her audience.
If living in West Clare provided the subject-matter of
his first books, then the experience of directing the
local drama group acted as a catalyst to the writing
of his first play, which was accepted by the Abbey. In
addition to working with the drama group, Niall also
began to direct the school musical in St Michael’s,
the local second-level school.
Currently, Niall’s day is split between teaching in St
Michael’s and writing. He writes in the morning and
teaches in the afternoon. He does not adhere to a
strict writing regime. Writing, he says, is like a
relationship – it will blossom if you give it attention.
Being attentive can be when you are driving or
swimming. At this stage he has no fear of not being
able to write. He describes being a writer as being
akin to a chestnut tree being itself. Being a writer is
simply who and what he is. However, the
questioning of the merit of everything he writes
never ceases. The hardest thing, he observes, is
having faith in your work. The joy and exhilaration
comes from the freedom “to surf the imagination.”
Great Expectations
From Only Say the Word
The rest of the evening is mine now and the
anticipation of it is like something deep and delicious
inside me. I go up the stairs to my room and on the
steps my feet are not my own and I am not going to
my room [...]
‘Go in,’ she says.
And then there is that that hauntingly unbearable
exchange when Pip says politely, ‘After you, miss,’
and Estella burns his face with the reply: ‘Don’t be
ridiculous, boy, I am not going in,’ and walks
scornfully away with the candle plunging him into
that dark.
Because his students know that he is a writer he
believes that they attach weight and authority to his
judgement. In reading texts, he stresses the labour
and craft of writing as something almost physical or
mechanical. He reads to learn and to admire and the
students are invited to do likewise. He refers, for
example, to Dickinson’s use of ‘interpose’ in ‘I heard
a fly buzz’ or Kavanagh’s ‘niagarously’ and ‘stilly
greeny’ in ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand
Canal, Dublin’. On the other hand, he is not afraid to
show that he is sometimes unsure before a word or
a line, and that uncertainty is an important part of
the drama of the classroom. He wants the students
to see that reading involves a continuing
responsiveness to the words on the page.
I lie in my room and the words of G r e a t
Expecations capture my imagination more than
any I have ever read.
Niall Williams new novel Only
Say the Word is published by
Picador. His three other novels
are: The Fall of Light (2001); As
It Is in Heaven (1999); and Four
Letters of Love (1997). A new
play, commissioned during the
Abbey’s centenary year, will be
staged next year.
The focus of the Leaving Certificate examination
demands, he believes, a training in argument, along
the lines of a barrister. He refers to the making of
argument using evidence, the defending of a
19
SUMMER ISSUE
OF THE TEACHING ENGLISH MAGAZINE
In the Summer issue of the Teaching English Magazine
Tracy Chevalier answers some questions on her novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring
Teachers discuss combinations of texts for the Comparative Study
section of the Leaving Certificate Course.
A Guide to all of the Texts on the Comparative list for examination in 2007
David Little of TCD on Language Teaching in the English classroom.
Results of the Teaching English Poetry Competition
and publication of the winning entries.
Mary Shine Thompson on literature for young adults.
Ray Frawley of the Sate Examination Commission speaks
to the Teaching English Magazine
A review of the resource pack on The Playboy of the Western World produced by
The Abbey Theatre Education and Outreach Department
A report on the pilot project, The Teacher as Writer
And more…
Administration
Esther Herlihy,
The Teaching English Magazine
Navan Education Centre,
Athlumney,
Navan,
Co. Meath
046-9078382
[email protected]
This issue of the Teaching English Magazine was compiled by Kevin Mc Dermott
(087 2937302) on behalf of the Second Level Support Service. Design by Artmark.
Printed by Staybro Printing Ltd.
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