Spreading a spirit of gravitas and grace

Powerful readings from from Anne Enright, John Banville and Hugo Hamilton were among the highlights at Listowel Writers' Week, an oasis where writing truly matters, writes John F Deane

IN THE EARLY summer of 1972, I drove from Dublin to Listowel, my heart pounding with excitement. I was to be a student in a writers' workshop which the master himself, Bryan MacMahon, was to lead. I was thrilled that an entire town was giving itself over to celebrate writing in a practical way. Perhaps writing really mattered. I took the coast road from Limerick and stopped at a small chapel, Our Lady of the Wayside, to offer thanks and to stand gazing down over the fields towards the Shannon estuary, relishing the grace that blossoming furze offered the world, a gold set off by profusion of the May flower. Bryan's story, The Windows of Wonder, sang across my mind.

Last week, Colm Tóibín remarked, at the opening of the 2008 festival: "If anyone was looking for an example of best practice in how to match a festival with a community, in how to make clear to people of every age and every type that the written word, in all its variety and beauty and levels of complexity, belonged to them, then it is Listowel Writers' Week."

In its 38th year, the festival appears stronger than ever, with every event of the highest standard and packed to overcrowding; the organisation that keeps it all together and powerful as the Munster scrum in going forward, is unobtrusive (unlike that scrum) but effective.

The president of the committee, Michael Lynch, reminded us of Bryan MacMahon's dictum that at all times we should remember to "keep our feet in the cow-dung". This is a festival where everybody, from the rawest beginner to the most sophisticated practitioner, stands on an equal footing. Seamus Heaney, in his opening address, emphasised this when he said, "You don't always need to take a workshop with a writer in order to be helped by him or her. Your self-confidence and sense of self-worth can be strengthened just by being in the company of artists you respect, just hanging around with them." The agenda was set: here is a world where writing matters, and where airs and graces have no place.

DURING THE FESTIVAL we suffered a number of thunderstorms, and a downpour so huge one longed for the presence of a great wooden ark. Nobody was deterred. For four hours of intense concentration every morning, some 230 people attended workshops in everything from short fiction and advanced poetry, to songwriting and "writing funny". This is where the real work happens. Then there were the readings, the lectures, the theatre. And Heaney, in his gentle but insistent way, reminding us of gravity: it is good for us to be here, he said, "we are still unlucky enough to live at a moment of brutal wars and civil wars and holy and unholy wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and Israel and Palestime, a moment when huge griefs and gashes are being suffered by the populations of China and Burma and Africa, a moment when we cannot help but wonder about our right to the happiness which a festival like this provides." If Auden said "Poetry makes nothing happen", it is all too easy to forget that he went on to say, in the same poem celebrating the life of WB Yeats,

it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

As the festival developed there were intense presentations of their work by Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Diarmaid Ferriter, to name a few. Enright's powerful reading was offered with a fine humility as she suggested "you can only be praised at home", and her delighted audience knew she was referring to them, the ordinary people among whom she lives and who help keep the writer's feet in the cow-dung.

Hugo Hamilton read from his new novel, Disguise, which touches on the theme of war and identity, questions he has approached from a deeply personal insight in his magnificent memoir The Speckled People. Diarmaid Ferriter spoke at a great pace on the life and legacy of Éamon de Valera and held his audience enthralled as he opened up the different perspectives from which that great man may be viewed.

With all of the intensity and urgency, it was important to get away for a few moments and wander the streets of the town where preparations were underway in an almost relay fashion, for a second festival, the Listowel races. A pint of plain helps, strangely enough, in the settling of all these diverse offerings in their place in the mind; it loosens the tongue and starts off a wealth of conversation and robust argument which may well be interrupted, and graced, by music. Such was the effect Dubliner John Sheahan had when he produced a tin whistle, then his fiddle, and eased away the labours of the day in a glorious and impromptu session.

RTÉ recorded a lively Sunday Miscellany, with local, national and international writers represented, and Sean Rocks directed a provocative Arts Show from a room in the hotel. Here, once more, the perennial question of art and its ability to "change the world" surfaced. The conclusion was that if indeed art helps "change the world" it is merely as a side-effect, because art and literature have no duty other than to themselves, to produce the best writing, the best drama, the best poetry of which an author is capable and leave the rest to the human spirit to respond.

Which brings me to the small but real disappointments of this year's otherwise magnificent festival. Firstly, and this is not Listowel's fault - Per Petterson, scheduled to turn up from Norway to read from his award-winning novel Out Stealing Horses, did not appear. More sadly, I was disappointed in much of the material that had won the writing competitions; the standard here appears to have dropped in some areas and this is startling and regrettable.

Finally, the event run by Amnesty International in association with this newspaper, let me down with a crash. Four authors read work commissioned to appear every Saturday in The Irish Times, taking one of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as the theme, an opportunity squandered in work that was merely of the brain, without passion, heart or much literary merit, save for the work of Carlo Gébler; his story touched with passion on the human right of education for everyone, it was real, from the heart and deeply moving. "Everybody has human rights, including those you don't like" was his clear, unambiguous and moving statement.

And still the rioting of dandelions down along the banks of the Feale brought the heart quickly back to song. Freddie White, offering a course in songwriting, urged the collaboration of the writer with others of like mind.

A visitor to the festival, Teresa O'Grady, spoke for many when she queried the form of questioning allowed after readings and presentations: all too often the questioner paraded his or her own opinions. She was most deeply moved by the reading John Banville gave from his work in progress.

Banville's chosen passage, set in Venice some years back, was striking in its detailed and imaginative presentation of characters and setting, his precise, musical prose building a slow crescendo which may, or may not, turn out to be a real crescendo; it is work that invites the listener to become a ghost among the words, expecting the arrival of Banville's ghosts.

GERARD REIDY, A FINE poet in his own right, suggested that the organisation in Listowel could be viewed as a template for how such festivals might be run: serious work and relaxation offered in equal and rewarding measure.

After it all, I drove back along the coast road, my head spinning with words and ideas. I relished again the gleaming sunlight on the surface of the Shannon, and raindrops lying like pearls on the offered silken petals of the rhododendron. There was silence in the chapel by the wayside, and I knelt a moment and whispered thanks that once again I had been in a place and among people where gravitas is admitted and where grace perpetually counters that downward pull of gravity.

Poet and fiction writer John F Deane facilitated some of the writing workshops at this year's Listowel Writers' Week