Every summer, Bay Path University’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction writing offers a weeklong Writing Seminar based in Dingle, a town nestled on the Atlantic coast on the western shore of County Kerry, Ireland. Each day throughout the week, Seminar Facilitator Suzanne Strempek Shea gives participants a prompt to encourage writers to investigate new ideas and topics in their writing. During August 2020, we’ll publish our Emerald Blogs to showcase the diverse work developed from responses to Suzanne’s prompts.
From Suzanne Strempek Shea
Andy Castillo MFA ’19 wrote “Forgotten Desolation” during the 2017 Summer Writing Seminar on this prompt:
A Kindness:
The whirl of life frequently places us at the mercy of strangers. Write about the last time someone came from out of the blue to make a difference in your story, or that of a character’s.
I see in Andy’s piece the kindness of a stranger’s sharing of time and insight, and in the promise the writer makes to tell others what he learned that day—a promise Andy keeps here.
Forgotten Desolation
by Andy Castillo
Heavy is the ground that carries lost souls.
Heavier still, the voice of a man whose family is buried there.
I met him walking up Cairn Hill above Dingle in western Ireland. He’s smoking a cigarette and standing beside a small coupe on a dirt road lined with low-slung pastel houses with chipped paint and wildflowers growing in their front yards.
“Do you know where the famine graveyard is?” I ask.
“Just up the hill,” he grunts, his scratchy voice dripping Ireland. “Follow the road along about five minutes. Can’t miss it.”
I turn to go. “I’ll join you,” he says. “Heading that way myself.” He stamps out the cigarette.
We fall into step, boots crunching gravel, and talk about the weather and work. He’s a Dublin schoolteacher who grew up on the Dingle Peninsula. I don’t ask his name; he doesn’t offer it.
The road narrows, hemmed in by rough stone walls; grass runs down the middle. Green pasture sectioned with hedges and guarded by barking farm dogs rises into gathering dusk. Dingle lies behind us, a coastal city with a bar featuring live music and Guinness on every street corner.
Ahead, sheep graze as far as the eye can see. Crows squawk at us as black clouds roll in from the west.
“This has changed dramatically from when I was a young lad,” the man says, sweeping a hand back toward Dingle. “Town was incredibly quiet. No tourists. No restaurants.”
“Sounds idyllic,” I say.
Even now, despite the tourists, it’s a fairytale place. Red fuchsia wildflowers line Slea Head Drive, the narrow coastal road that winds around Dingle Peninsula. Towering cliffs drop sharply to the ocean far below. Quaint farmhouses and prehistoric ruins overlook endless blue sea, and sheep and cattle range across it all.
Modern Dingle is a picturesque snapshot of past rural life—but it doesn’t capture everything.
Famine ravaged Ireland between 1845 and 1852. One million people died in eight years; the country’s population dropped almost 25 percent. The cause of the tragedy: Phytophthora infestans, the microorganism responsible for the potato blight that destroyed the staple crop one-third of Ireland’s people depended on to survive.
“Desolation,” the man says, pausing in the road, his tone suddenly bitter. The gravel stops crunching.
“We had no control over our destiny. We were ruled from Britain and didn’t have any rights. The people who survived the famine went to America.”
Members of both our families were among those survivors. Mine sought a better life in South Boston, not far from where I grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts. The emigrants from his settled in Hartford, Connecticut.
We lean into the wind, trudging up Cairn Hill. There are no tourists here.
At the top, an iron gate blocks our way into a small stonewall cemetery.
Far below, Dingle’s lights twinkle on. Boats drift at anchor in the bay. Night has come. The man points over the city to a tower barely visible on a distant hill. It’s a famine relief tower he says, built by starving people. Across the bay is another, Hussey’s Folly, a solid structure that looks like it’s from the middle ages.
“If you didn’t work, you didn’t get fed. A lot of people died working like that. They would crawl to those places.”
We enter the cemetery through the creaking gate.
Boney hands gripping dirt, crawling up the hill; mothers screaming, clutching dead children to their chest beside a square yellow building near the burial ground. Hundreds of people crammed inside, rotting.
In my mind, I see them as clearly as I see the white, wind-tossed barley surrounding the dozens of unmarked graves, the chipped black stones sticking up from the cemetery’s uneven ground, the lone white cross in its middle. My feet sink into the soil. If I stayed, I fear I’d become a stone.
“Leaders believed the famine was God’s fate,” the man says, his voice now thick with emotion. I can’t see his tears, but I know they’re there. I can feel them drop like stones into the bay. His ancestors lie here.
“About 3,000 people were buried here in four years,” he says. “There were a lot of open graves. There might have been 20 people buried in one.”
He turns toward Dingle. “You ask the youth of society—they don’t know anything about it. We’ve collectively forgotten. Dingle’s a tourist town. The people there aren’t locals. The locals are gone.”
We stand silent in the gloom. A mist floats across distant hills and black clouds suffocate the sky. Rain comes, watering the graves, a cistern emptied out of inky blackness.
I ask what I can do.
“Best thing you can do is come back here tomorrow. Bring someone. Sit down here,” he says, pointing to a bench. Then he walks away, hitting black stones with a strand of barley as he goes.
“I’ll write about it,” I call after him.
“You do that,” he says without looking back. His gait is weary. I sit on the bench, watching him go until he’s just a speck moving down Cairn Hill toward Dingle’s blinking lights.
About the Writer
Andy Castillo is the features editor of the Greenfield Recorder newspaper (Greenfield, MA). He is an experienced editor who has worked for several publications in western Massachusetts and as a staff writer for GoNOMAD.com Travel. He holds a Master’s degree in creative nonfiction from Bay Path University and can be reached at [email protected].
Write with us in Dingle next year, July 31 to Aug. 8, 2021. Contact [email protected] for full information.
We welcome submissions to Multiplicity Blog (nonfiction prose of 1,000 words or fewer, poetry, and photography) all year. We also accept submissions of longer nonfiction works (up to 5,000 words), poetry or photography for the Fall 2020 issue of Multiplicity Magazine: At Work. Magazine submissions close on September 25, 2020. More details here.