Interview with Patricia Monaghan

February 9, 2001

Krone Conservatory, Cinncinati, Ohio

"We are not land based as a culture in America. We don't know the stories. So how do you begin to root in a land where you're denied the storied link?"

Patricia is a prose writer, poet, and educator. A member of the faculty of De Paul University in Chicago, Patricia teaches both literature and science. Her work in mythology and especially her studies of the goddess and Irish religion have appeared in her large collection of books (listed below). Patricia's most recent work, The Red-Haired Girl on the Bog: Celtic Spiritual Geography, focuses on the relationship between story and landscape in Ireland. Dancing with Chaos, a collection of poems which explore the relationship between chaos theory and daily human life will appear in a first edition this spring.

To find out more about Patricia, visit her website.

During the course of our interview we were pelted by red flowers from a pohutakawa tree, visited by a nosy squirrel, and treated to the creative plant naming attempts of two school groups. In between all of that, we managed to share stories, talk about the importance of place and language, and reflect upon role of story in American culture.

LVG: It was your poetry of chaos that got me thinking about how do you integrate science and art. How to access your creativity. How do you combine all of your passions together so beautifully? Taking quantum theory and putting it into poetic form?

PM: A lot of these themes of place have been important for the last little while because I was called to write this book - and I really mean that - on that slope down towards Clarion, PA on route 80, I had this entire book in my mind, but I hadn't been thinking of it. It was remarkable. That was four years ago and I've been working on it steadily ever since. One of the things that I learned from living in Ireland and visiting there for 25 years at least once a year, is this connection between story and place.There actually is a specific form of literature, mostly poetry, called the dindshenchas, and in the dindshenchas, it's like the Australian walkabout. The going to sacred places. By sacred I don't just mean sacred to ritual, but sacred through story. You know, the important places.And then telling the story of "this is the cave of Onaga and on such and such a day emerges, driving before her the cows of the underworld. It was at this cave that Nera, the great hero, left the Rath of King Ailill and Queen Maeve and walked out to take a leak."

I remember the very first time I realized that place is drenched with story. I had been out - in order to contextualize this I have to say that I was living above a pub- and I was the only person in history who ever lived above this pub, because although they advertised a b&b, they never intended to actually have a B&B, it was just so they could serve liquor after hours and to claim that they were serving it to their B&B clients. So, I happened in there, looking for a place to stay and they thought I would just stay the night but as it turned out I stayed for many months! (laughing) Much to the surprise of my landlady, who remains a good friend 25 years later. She really adopted me into her family.

But anyway, I had come back from my explorations and there would be the gang, the lads. I'd have to report on where I'd been that day. "Well you were out at Kilmacdugh. Now, Kilmacdugh is the place where St. Coleman's pants fell off when he was trying to take a leak." And I said, What? Yes, Left King Guaire's castle, the one down the coast from Kinvara. He said he would walk till he was caught short. He kept walking over areas that he didn't think were perfect for his monastery. And he thought he would hold his water until he found the perfect monastery site. But, at Kilmacdugh his pants fell down, and he was forced to take a leak right there, and that's why they built Kilmacdugh right there. And I was thinking this is 1974, and I'm thinking, when was this? Fifth Century. So they'd been telling this story about Coleman's pants falling down for 1500 years! I was pretty astonished by that, the liveness of the story tradition. And they're not random stories.

I have this dear old friend, I met the first year. He's turning 82 this year. And I drive around the countryside with Tom and it's quite remarkable. I can't sit at Tom's house and interview him about the stories because he won't remember the stories until he sees the sites. He once told me " I could probably find the biggest cow pie that was ever passed in the Gort area." So there's this kind of memory that is spurred.

I took him to Kinvara one time and we sat on the dock and he told me all the stories. "Now that's Kinvara castle. Now in that castle was where the Tain was reconfigured by the great Fergus-" and there's this kind of site that people remember. We're talking very small stories and very small sites. Often it's not just that they'll remember the site of the Gettysburg address but this story of Coleman's pants falling down and he stopped to take a leak."

LVG: Does everyone know those stories?

PM: Pretty much everyone in that specific area will have heard these stories. Then of course there will be these people who are antiquarians like my friend Tom. There is not a tree in that area that he does not know the whole story of. So we drive around the countryside and he just tells the stories. He is quite elderly now but he loves to tell the stories and have someone who listens to the stories, driving around the countryside. Every so often I'll send him on an agenda, like "I want to see all the places related to Brigid" and he's spent time but most of the time we just drive around and he randomly will tell stories. Stories that go back 1500 years or maybe "that was the hill where Michael Slattery's sheet got out of the German, Oli's field. He shouldn't have let that field get quite so run down. " So there will be local little stories that I find out and then stories that have existed in the oral tradition.

Most of these stories haven't been written down. So, there are a couple of areas around Ireland that I know really well. The area around Gort where I've been going for 25 years. I know really well. I'm starting to turn into one of those people myself. My friend Jessie, who lives a little bit away, she says that she can see me at the age of 80, rocking in that porch. " No it was in that lake that -" I've looked at this one little area over and over again for years and years and years, and I can tell you that the line between these very tiny distinctions.

So I've assimilated into this story culture, and one of the things about the Irish is that it is in the name of the place. The names are not- here there is some focus group that sits around and says, "Brittany that's got a lot of potential." The names don't grow out of the landscape, they're appended to and often inconsequential to the place itself. But there, the story is often connected with the names. "That's call such and such because -" So there's this constant naming and the naming reinforces the story.

LVG: Have you read Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines?

PM: Actually, I've talked to a number of Australians who were amazed when they got to Ireland to find the story culture which is so similar to the idea of the songlines.

LVG: I worked in Labrador collecting folklore. A very similar feeling about that. Lived with a 72 year old woman who told me all the stories. It was the same thing. If you didn't move with her, you got some stories at home, but she came with me to do all of my interviews because she could get the stories out of people. She would start in with "Remember up on crow head-" and that was all it talk.

PM: Right, right

LVG: How much do you think storytelling is linked to walking? Because I was struck, as you were talking, that it's impossible to tell a good story while driving, if it's all place based. And, that Ireland, like lots of places, were walking places. And I'm wondering if the distance of the story is related between place to place.

PM: That's a really interesting question. Many of the stories are too long to tell while whizzing past a place.

LVG: But if you were walking from location to location. I wonder if there's a geography that says you can't have a story this close to that story. Do they need a space between them or are they on top of each other? PM: Actually, a lot of them are on top of each other. Not only that, there are layers. No names don't die out. In the dindshenchas, Croagh Patrick, sacred mountain of the west, they tell the story of the change of the name from the earlier name to Croagh Patrick. It has been called Croagh Patrick for 1500 years. So the story is 1500 years old and it maintains Croagh Patrick that used to be Cruachan Aigle. Nobody knows why it was called Cruachan Aigle but that's at least 2000 years old. So we know the story of why it was changed from Cruachan Aigle to Croagh Patrick and we know that it was changed to Croagh Patrick because of the myth that he brought up the curse of the goddess Caornach on top of the mountain. So there is, for that one mountain, a steady continuity of place-name story connections that goes back traceably 2000 years. It's oral. Many of these things were not written down at all. And held in local memory.

One of the things that's been interesting, when I first started going there, I heard "He's the last of his breed, his like will never be seen in these parts again-" and where my friends my age are turning into it. We all are kind of turning into Tom. I don't know if everyone have to know the stories, but some do. If the lineage is broken, then that would mean that the story gets lost. The stories are kept very locally. I mean someone in Dublin is never going to have heard the story of Coleman being taken short, but everyone in Gort knows that story. Some of the stories are extremely well known and others that are only held by the real fanatics among us

. LVG: We were talking about the idea that the culture of your family is told through your stories. Do you think that the culture of communities is told through their stories, too, or are they the product of where they are. It's that question of are you shaped by the land or does the land shape you? I'm sure it's a little of both. Are there people from certain towns who are known for being more lighthearted because their stories are more lighthearted, or is it in heavy mountainous areas, are people rougher and tougher and near the sea is it lighter?

PM: I don't know. I'll have to think about that. I do know that in the work I'm doing there are definite figures attached, the goddess of the land in each area is quite different. Maeve is this wild thing and she's in the wild Cruachan of Mayo, and Cailleach is from the Burren area where it's all rock. So there seems to be some connection between the mythic figures of the area and the stories told about them. Because these same figures are found in other places, but they don't become the prominent one.

I've been working a lot on this intersection between story and space. This time-space thing is interesting because story is the link. Story based in space is told of a time, in a time, and there's a real sense in Ireland that you're bumping up against story. There's a kind of denseness to the atmosphere that's very hard to describe. There are some people who have written about it. Christopher Banford has written about the way ritual, done in a specific space, changes the actual energy of the space. He's not a New Age kind of person either, he thinks that we're bumping into the consciousness of that ritual, that it somehow alters the landscape in a way that even a stranger can perceive. Very interesting theorist about land. There are a couple of interesting people. Patrick Sheerin, he's written about land consciousness in Ireland. I find in Ireland that because of the continuity, and I think it's through story, there is this kind of people will define areas similarly, even if they've never visited them.

People will talk about how wild Connemarra is. Of course Connemarra is filled with wild divinities. Now did the land give rise to those divinities or have the divinities have become more materialized because of the stories being told for many generations? But certainly, people can wander around Ireland and feel these different sense without necessarily knowing the stories. By knowing the stories, it enriches it. I just have found over the years, that the more I study the stories of the area, and I keep going back to Gort, it's a little like going back to Paducah. My friends in Ireland say, "Gort, how'd you get to Gort?" Nobody goes to visit Gort.

One saying locally is that it's a town that looks like it sounds. (laughing) It actually means field. Full name Gort Inse Guaire, which means fields of King Guaire. Or the one from whose castle Coleman started out. So then they all kind of form this network so that in the area, you're aware of the idea that you're bumping up against history all the time.

As a kid is walking to school past Kilmacdugh, he needs to take a leak, he's got this kind of resonance into mythic history. So then he might say, "Well, I was going by Kilmacdugh, and I stopped to take a leak" and everyone say "Right, you and Coleman". Now that's going back 1500 years. We have no sense of that in America. Part of what fascinates me is this connection to a place where -

Ireland has been invaded more times than not, and yet to me the peacemaking that's occurred, the bringing in of new people, has been done in part by telling them the stories of the place. The local Anglican pastor can tell you about Coleman just as well as the Gael down the block. So here, I have theory that might have something to do with Protestantism. Catholicism, because it came from Rome, did what the Roman legions did. Roman legions came in and said, "Ah yeah, we have one of those too, we call her Minerva." In the same way this kind of syncretic Catholicism appears, so you have Guadeloupe, St. Brigid. They don't even change the name. (laughing) Easter, whatever. That meant that there was continuity.

America was settled after Protestantism. Protestantism is Catholicism with the paganism taken out. My definition. So, we do not have syncretic native religions where people continued to hold sacred the same places, and called it a different thing. We are not land based as a culture in America. We don't know the stories. So how do you begin to root in a land where you're denied the storied link? I don't know. That's my next question. I'm very interested in that by making this, by amputating the stories from the land, Americans remain homeless. We talk about being Americans, but I'm an Alaskan. Not only that, an interior Alaskan, that's the only area I really know the plants and the ecosystem. I mean, I know that area. I don't however, know the myths. I wasn't brought up Athabaskan. My closest connections in Alaskan with the Yupiak people. I know their myths, but I don't know the Athabaskan myths.

So I don't even have the groundedness in the area that I'm most familiar with, much less in Illinois. I don't know what stories were told about that rock. I know some of the geological stories about. I know the story about the retreat of the glaciers forming the ridge where I live. But I don't know anything about the people who lived there, or the great myths of my immediate neighborhood. I don't know them. So, we make up these artificial myths. Like the 1968 convention in Chicago. But that's not the same as being told in a bar about Coleman being taken short 1500 years ago. The difference in depth in connection to land is stunning. Just stunning. What I'm doing right now it just tracing those regional areas. Certainly not everything about Ireland is in this book that I'm doing, but certainly the places I know best and the myths associated with them in a kind of walkabout. And then in the course of that, really talking about the land itself. Because there is a resonance between the land and the stories being told.

But it remains a puzzle to me in terms of what to do in terms of America because, the fact is that I come from the invading culture. It's not my job to go take some Native American material and make it my own because I yearn to be rooted here. How does one begin that process. I think that we made a big mistake here in America by detaching story from place.

LVG: When I worked in Labrador it was very interesting. The same people, Irish and English, and their accents were retained. So in Forteau, where I lived, people were from Jersey and you knew that. The next town was Irish, and the next town wasn't. They retained everything, but the history is new enough that full settlement has only happened there since 1812 that people stayed over and brought families. So stories were maybe only 150 years old at best and yet they were being told all the time. As soon as television came. It was over. No more stories. They had just put a road in. The first year the only way to get to Red Bay was to go over the road they were building which would take about an hour and a half to go a couple of miles. By boat, it took nothing. When I came back there 10 years later, it took 10 minutes to drive that road, but I lost all of the stories. Because it was so slow driving that road in the past, I used to hear all of the stories along that road. That's why I asked about walking.

One night I went out to the bar in Blanc Sablon, which was 18 miles away, couldn't get a ride back, so I walked home. Trying to get back before she woke up to know that I'd been out at the bar all night. And I walked her old trail because she had told me how she used to go home instead of taking the road. So I went up over the hills, and I realized I was walking the old path to Blanc Sablon which no one knows anymore because the road doesn't go that way. So all of her stories made more sense because now I understood why you went up over the hill instead of all the way out and around, and it was amazing. It was a completely different geography because of her stories.

PM: I did run into that - Every field has several names. Each one has a town name, a barony, a different political division of Ireland was retained. It has incredible complexity. They didn't get rid of the barony's, they kept them along with the town lands. If you were to identify a field according to all of its names, it might be twenty, thirty names. Even today, when Irish people meet each other, they'll say, "Where you from." Practically the first question. From where? From where? And you get down to. When people tell a story they'll say that they went via the Kinvara road. Now this is an incidental. If I were an American teacher of English, correcting someone's paper, I would say, "Not necessarily detail" and yet, the places that you pass en route to other places are all named. So ask people to talk, there's this, "Oh, so you went out to Oughterard well did you stop at Sweeneys? People are constantly orienting themselves. Even when people talk about driving into town 10 miles, they give you the path. It isn't just about the bull, it's about the journey. The naming reinforces.

You never would say that you went into to town. You would want to give the route you took, because it's important. Because each of those names is important. The name has its route into story. When I'm talking about this area that I know so well, I lived for a summer in Ballinderreen, a town of four buildings, two of which are pubs!(laughing) And so it's the local joke, when you say you've been in Ballinderreen, you say "Near which pub?"

LVG: I'm from New Jersey. I get the "which exit." It's the same joke. How much do you think people need the resonance in the storytelling because they're busy remembering every time they've been to those spots. It's like a revisiting. You are reliving - I'm interested in the concept of ritual and when you participate in something that is their ritual, you get to relive the time it was your ritual every time you go through that. My best friend's father died last week and she missed the whole funeral and viewing and I said that every time I relive it but in some ways it was so much easier, because I knew what it would be. You get pieces of your own intermingled and now I'm part of her family's story of their grieving. There will always be those pieces of stories where her mother put out the food for my father's funeral and I put out the food for her husband's funeral. So it was a circle closed. Or every time I got to a wedding I think about mine.

PM: In addition to that there is no question to iterations of that. Storytelling is based in iteration. It's not a story if it's told once. It's only a story if it's retold. So I've been many times in Ireland watching a story emerge from conversation. Somebody tells a little anecdote and then they'll tell it again and embellish it and refine it. Then it becomes a process. Then the next one who sits down will say, "Tell 'em about what happened on the way here." Then the story will be told. "What about the part when -" and I've heard the same story told 20 times in an evening. Each time it has gotten until it has gelled into its final form. This very living storytelling culture. There has been a lot of talk of how television is destroying Irish culture. I have to say that compared to the poverty of American culture, Irish culture is richer. Quite richer. I don't actually know. I tend to hang out with people I've known for a long time. They tend to be people very into the old values. I don't know if I'm getting a distorted view of things. I have a lot of friends who are professional storytellers. But for example, within the context of our seminar. Cindy told her story of her near plane crash, once. In a real storytelling, we'd be retelling that regularly. It's kind of the foundation myth of her experience here. We don't have this searching for foundation myths. I have noticed it when people are getting together as couples. The ones that are going to work are the people who are very soon telling the story of how they met.

LVG: How interesting

PM: A friend had all of this trauma and the day her children left for college she had a blind date and it was like a month ago, and now it's become the foundation myth of their relationship. And meanwhile another friend of mine is trying to get together with this guy, and I'm noticing there's no foundation myth. Every time she tells the story of how they met, it's kind of different. Like she can't find the story. And they don't share a foundation myth. So, in relationships I think there is still the foundation myth that goes on. But we don't have the foundation myth of the first day of our seminar here. People don't tell the story of when they moved to this house. To me the personal story should replicate the kind of global story, the kind of creation myth.

LVG: I was thinking that in storytelling we "re-iterate" and it's in the word right there of iteration.

PM: That's interesting, too, because I'm thinking about learning and iteration. Storytelling is iteration and iteration is chaos. Mathematically it is chaos. Does storytelling lead to chaos? I'll have to think about that.

LVG: I think it makes things grow-

PM: Certainly it leads to other things. What you're trying to do in the iteration of the story is not get it right so that the iteration of the story is a creator as opposed to a shutting down.

LVG: To use the David Bohm language, it's the Implicate Order and then resonating to you and to another. So I think a that a group of people talking, and really listening to each other, the situation becomes more complex because they note their connections through storytelling. Then they become connected to each other. I told my story last night, because Joe told his. Systems move towards complexity and then to a stasis where you've heard each other's stories and that's what I think marriages become. Until you're in other company you don't tell those stories. Or in families, too, there's the burden of history and there's also the collection of stories. Both.

PM: Just as the Coleman story will send people into laughter, it's even funnier if a woman tells it. Implicit in that one phrase is the whole story.

LVG: Have you read Keith Basso's Wisdom Sits in Places? It's about the Apache who do the same thing.

PM: The one story that I've found in America that seemed so much like Gort is. I like to say I don't know Ireland, I only know Gort. It's the story of Bliss who brought Beautyway to this world. She went over….and I was thinking this is so familiar to me. It is the way you talk when you're in a known landscape and every name you bring up is going to bring up the memories of…

LVG: They ring like a bell-

PM: It's fascinating when I'm in the country, when I'll start with " Which way did you go to…" An enormous concentration and depth of connection in very small areas. I have on my wall in my study, a map of the six miles around Gort. And it's the size of the map of America because it has all of the sacred sites on it. All of the colleens which are the baby graveyards, the old ruins. You just look at it - People will leave a ruin, they'll clear a field but they'll leave the ruin, so they're accessible to anyone coming over. So, you are just constantly trapsing through other people's fields, and seeing the holy well. Looks like we're out of time.