The Harp and The Loon Anthology: Literary Bridges Between Ireland and Minnesota

By Celtic Collaborative

This volume showcases eighteen authors whose works span the various forms of poetry and song; drama and comic sketch; essay, memoir and autobiography; fiction and humorous tale. These writers explore the perennially fascinating question of the links between Minnesota and Ireland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Celtic Collaborative
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996775212

Book preview

THE HARP AND THE LOON

ANTHOLOGY

Literary Bridges Between Ireland and Minnesota

Edited by Tracie Loeffler and Patrick O’Donnell

THE HARP AND THE LOON

ANTHOLOGY

Literary Bridges Between Ireland and Minnesota

Edited by Tracie Loeffler and Patrick O’Donnell

Celtic Collaborative Press

2015

Copyright © 2015 Celtic Collaborative Press

Copyright © 2015 Copyright of each work belongs to the respective author

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number

ISBN 978-0-9967752-0-5

ISBN 978-0-9967752-1-2 (e book)

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Edited by Tracie Loeffler and Patrick O’Donnell

Cover artwork by Brooke Kenney

Design and Typesetting by Brooke Kenney, Laughing Graphics

To make inquiries about this book or for permission to reproduce or quote from it, please contact us at: www.celticcollab.org or by email at: [e-mail]

For Lily, Kate, and Aine. Three treasures beyond price. Patrick

For John and Rory

&

The Dubbers and Merms

Tracie

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note from the Executive Director by Tracie Loeffler

Introduction by Patrick O’Donnell

PART ONE: HISTORICAL BRIDGES

Gary Brueggeman | Nonfiction

Excerpt from Minnesota’s Oldest Murder Mystery: The Case of Edward Phalen: St. Paul’s Unsaintly Pioneer

Amanda Hughes | Fiction

Excerpt from The Sword of the Banshee

Natalie Nugent O’Shea | Drama

Excerpt from Get Up Your Irish! (Forgetting Ireland)

Patrick J. Hill | Poetry

The Irish American Club

Katie Murphy

James S. Rogers | Nonfiction

Minnesota’s Irish Writers

Patrick O’Donnell | Nonfiction/Drama

The Public Dream Kingdom of Two Private Irishmen: Guthrie and Dowling

Ironic Meetings of Ghosts at the Irish Fair of Minnesota

The Cure: A Little Sip of French Wine

PART TWO: BRIDGES OF MEMORY

Ethna McKiernan | Poetry

Deora Dé

Eastern Standard Time 9-11-01

Still-Life on Inisheer

Driving the Coast Road to Dingle

Going Back

Tom Dahill | Nonfiction

St. Paul to Galway: The Story of a Highland Gurrier

Paddy O’Brien | Nonfiction

The Shinny

David O’Sullivan | Nonfiction

Leaving

Eddie Owens | Nonfiction/Poetry

Easter Thursday

Righteous Rebels

The Leaving

Bury Me Deep

Bill Watkins | Poetry and Song

The Bones of Santa Claus

Farewell to Ballyshanny

Paddy’s Trip to Hell (The Omnium Song)

Dickens in Dublin

PART THREE: CONTEMPORARY BRIDGES

Erin Hart | Fiction

Excerpt from Lake of Sorrows

Mike Faricy | Fiction

Excerpt from Last Shot

John Dingley | Fiction

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Tracie Loeffler | Nonfiction

Postscript ~ Europa

Bridget Murphy | Nonfiction

The Last Rites

Carol Connolly | Poetry

Payments Due

A Gentleman’s Invitation

Author Contact Information

Acknowledgments

NOTE FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

I’ve had the good fortune of meeting many of the contributors to this anthology through hosting Irish literary events over the years, and their personal lives are as intriguing as the stories they write. So for me, one of the most exciting parts of this collection is the author biographies. Normally, reading traditional author biographies—ones that limit the author to a few compact sentences of publications and accolades—is not something that tends to elicit excitement. But these are different. They are short stories in and of themselves that bring our vibrant Irish literary community to life.

The Celtic Collaborative has brought some of our contributors’ writing to life in recent productions as well. For the Collaborative’s seventh show, also titled The Harp and the Loon: Literary Bridges Between Ireland and Minnesota, Artistic Director Patrick O’Donnell created dramatic scenes based on the authors’ works. Inspired by Gary Brueggeman’s book, Minnesota’s Oldest Murder Mystery, Patrick wrote the scene The Cure: A Little Sip of French Wine—both of which are excerpted in this anthology. Building on that idea, our following show—and most successful to date—featured local musician Tom Dahill. In Tom Dahill’s Irish memories of St. Paul, Tom’s stories and music were intertwined with dramatizations of a world of prohibition gangsters, and crooked and honest cops. His stories from that night are featured in his anthology contribution, St. Paul to Galway: The Story of a Highland Gurrier.

I’d like to thank the authors for their enthusiasm and contributions to this project, as well as Brooke Kenney who created the striking cover design which blends the Cliffs of Moher with the bluffs of Minnesota. As the Managing Editor, it has truly been an honor for me to help bring this anthology to life.

—Tracie Loeffler

INTRODUCTION: LITERARY BRIDGES BETWEEN IRELAND AND MINNESOTA

Patrick O’Donnell

From the hills of County Kerry,

To the shores of Londonderry,

From Galway Bay to Dublin,

And their numbers were not small,

Came each youthful Boy and Maiden,

With health and beauty laden,

To uncles, aunts, and cousins,

Who were settled in St. Paul.

(Patrick J. Hill The Irish American Club)

Paddy Hill’s poem commemorates the familial and personal connections that Irish people have had to Minnesota. Although the Irish American Club began in the 1940s, Irish identity in Minnesota clearly emerges beginning in the 1830s with the exploits of Irish ex-soldiers from Fort Snelling, and continues to reinvent itself in business, cultural, educational, athletic, artistic, and dynamic formations up to the present. While Patricia Monaghan edited The Next Parish Over: A Collection of Irish-American Writing in 1993 that included a sprinkling of Minnesotans, no previous anthology has tried to sketch a continuous line from the 1830s up to the present day that deepens the North Star state’s understanding of a colorful section of its immigrants and citizens. The purpose of this anthology is to curate, record, contain, and nourish writers based in the 32nd state in the Union who are stimulated by the perennially fascinating question of the links between Minnesota and Ireland. It collects eighteen authors working in the genres and forms of poetry and song; drama and comic sketch; essay, memoir and autobiography; and, novel and humorous tale. Whether they are Irish-born, Irish-American, or simply friends of Ireland through travel, marriage, or artistry, these writers’ imaginations fling speculative bridges between Ireland and Minnesota.

Constructed around the elusive questions of history, memory, and place, the anthology’s title derives from a pub, The Harp and the Loon, that Tim Fitzgerald, a hugely pivotal figure in the Irish community, wanted to open on Rice Street in St. Paul. Fitz, a Brian Boru bagpiper, professional house painter, Irish Fair of Minnesota board member, and remarkable balladeer, passed away in 2010 before his dream could take shape. I worked with him as a painter’s laborer before joining the teaching profession, and remember him talking at length about a pub centered on his love for Irish music but infused with a Minnesota menu. Irish wit and Minnesota Nice aligned, he’d beam. Ya gotta love it! Paint splattered and beaming with corpulent glee, Fitz was the most cheerfully fat person I’d ever known. Slapping his belly in delight like a bearded Celtic Buddha as his Diet Coke sloshed in his glass, he took endless amusement out of his adiposity. He was fascinated by his pub’s title, The Harp and the Loon—Ireland and Minnesota—mutual rivers of culture and connection—feeding and enriching each other. For what connects the apparently land locked state of Minnesota with the island of Ireland is water—the spring-fed Lake Itasca’s currents circulate down the whole length of the Mississippi into the Gulf and, as Stephen Dedalus murmured in James Joyce’s Ulysses, All Ireland is washed by the Gulf Stream.

Symbolically, Minnesota’s own understanding of itself can be seen as an immense river. Irish-American history and culture is a proud broad tributary feeding into that central river. Filled with family stories, recipes, accents, fragments of song lyrics, curious old country expressions, phrases from Ireland’s ancient language, and quotations and paraphrases from Irish literature, history, biography, folk tales, and mythology, it contributes a conversational vitality and wit to Minnesota. The Irish-born-immigrants directly from Ireland are a second bustling tributary river of living energy which galvanize and further that vitality. Their connections to Ireland feed into the Irish-American river new interpretations of traditions in dance, music, literature, drama, business, and sport. The two tributaries—one deeply sourced in Minnesota’s own history and the other sourced in ancient and contemporary Ireland—mingle into one broad form of Irish-Minnesotan identity and community that could be mythically termed Shannonippi—a compound of the largest Irish river, the Shannon, and the Mississippi. This Shannonippi river, a confluence of the Irish-American and Irish-born, is a quicksilver river of talk, music, and dreams. It feeds into the great central river of Minnesota’s historical memory which has in turn been fed by other great and powerful tributary rivers of ethnic heritage: Scandinavian, German, Czech, Italian, Latino, Hmong, Somali, and so on.

While it is impossible to sum up a vast ethnic heritage, the Irish seem to have earned respect as verbally ingenious storytellers with a fidelity to memory and history. As intricate artisans in the quarry of wit and humor, they appear to be conversationally athletic, intuitive, spiritually serious, politically adroit, and socially extroverted. They are concerned with justice and fairness in society, particularly because they carry a weight of trauma and melancholy from their wounded colonial past. While overlapping in socially conscientious values, they provide a counterpoint to the stereotypical image of the superficially nice, introverted, wholesome Minnesotan. With populations of just over five million people and conversationally obsessed with the extremes and variability of their weather, the 32nd state and the thirty two counties of Ireland (the North and South), have many strangely contrasting commonalities. Both have vistas and natural wonders that stretch off and touch infinity. The wonder of the gleaming vastness of the nation’s largest freshwater lake in Lake Superior matches with The Cliffs of Moher glinting above the horizon-blurring Atlantic. Both have landscapes like numinous manuscripts inscribed with ancient mythic place names and tales whether Dakota and Ojibwe or Celtic and Viking. For Scandinavian Minnesotans, the founders of Dublin were Vikings, and through intermarriage and assimilation over hundreds of years, they became absorbed into Ireland.

What ties Ireland and Minnesota together these days is the airport and the relative ease of international travel. In the mind’s eye, picture an imaginary tourist flight directly from contemporary Ireland to Minnesota. It is organized by Harp and Loon Airlines and as it drops out of the sky above the Twin Cities, the Captain begins his explanatory talk pointing out the natural features such as Phalen Lake named after an Irish ex-soldier from Fort Snelling. As the plane descends more sights pop into view. Two signature buildings point to the intertwined links between Minnesota and Ireland: the Cathedral of Saint Paul, crowning Summit Avenue with its grandeur and the new midnight blue Guthrie Theater gazing benignly down on the Saint Anthony Falls and the Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis. The first, the Captain would explain, was the culminating vision of Kilkenny-born Archbishop John Ireland (1838-1918), who arrived at the age of fourteen to the frontier town of St. Paul in 1852. The scars of the Irish Famine were embedded in his family’s memories as his biographer James Moynihan makes clear: In the spring of 1949, abandoning the hopeless struggle for a decent livelihood for himself and his family, Richard Ireland, accompanied by his sister, Nancy, crossed the sea in search of a new home. The second was the culminating vision of Dubliner Joe Dowling who transformed and expanded the Guthrie Theater with a brisk energy over twenty years from 1995-2015. Dowling’s formation from 1967-1985 had been in the Abbey Theater in Dublin (which had been founded by W.B. Yeats and his colleagues, Lady Gregory and John Millington Synge, opening in December 1904 to become Ireland’s world famous national theatre).

Once the plane had landed, a tour coach awaits to show the visitors more Irish links. First, they would drop into Fort Snelling and then down Shepard Road to read the plaque describing Pig’s Eye Parrant’s Fountain Cave whiskey shack adjacent to Phalen’s Landing before driving over to Payne Avenue to walk along the Connemara Patch beneath Swede Hollow. Later they’d swing up to the Cathedral on Summit Avenue and walk around the altar to the statues of the nations to admire the noble figure of Saint Patrick. Perhaps they’d drop over to the 1891 James J. Hill mansion to observe the dignified portrait of Mary Mehegan, the Irish waitress from the Merchant’s Hotel, whose 1864 engagement ring from the future Empire Builder sparkles in a glass case. Hill’s father was an Irish emigrant from Armagh and his mother was born in Tipperary. The bus would then whisper down Summit Avenue past the sites connected with the great Irish-American Catholic novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald: the University Club and Summit Terrace where he completed This Side of Paradise in the summer of 1919. The bus would loop back past the old Commodore Hotel where F.Scott and Zelda lived in 1921, before swinging down to the University of St. Thomas to wander in the O’Shaughnessy Library, take a quick glance into the Celtic Collections archive, inspect the statue of the university’s founder, John Ireland, and admire the serenity of the beautifully landscaped campus spread out over the old farm land of Irish immigrant farmer, William Finn. Perhaps a break would be called at the Dubliner Pub on University Avenue before a jaunt over to the Guthrie Theater whose founder, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, crystallized the idea for this nationally important regional theatre in long irreverent whiskey-fueled conversations before his log fire in his County Monaghan home in 1959.

What really connects Ireland and Minnesota is the sardonic wit that is evident when Irish people and Minnesotans gather. Neither takes its home place too seriously. Both are mockingly rueful on the self-absorbed question of their own uniqueness. A lady on winning a prize for being the Distinguished Irish-American received only a barbed response from her husband: Distinguished from what? Mark Twain, on observing a river steamboat gliding along the Mississippi, described it as a wedding cake without the complications. Howard Mohr, who wrote the satirical, How To Speak Minnesotan, speculated on whether Dubliner Samuel Beckett, author of the absurdist drama Waiting for Godot, wasn’t really a secret Minnesotan because his depiction of mundane repetition, pointlessness, and listless waiting seemed quintessential to life in the Gopher state. The Irish comic tradition is replete with satiric humorists such as Jonathon Swift, Sean O’Casey, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien who mercilessly undermine the urge to pretentiousness or grandiosity. Minnesota has a long list of its own parallel humorists such as Sinclair Lewis, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Garrison Keillor, Howard Mohr, and Kevin Kling who equally deflate any exaggerated sense of Minnesota’s importance. Nevertheless, both places—the Land of 10,000 Lakes and the only politically independent Celtic nation—share bristling pride and a sense of geographical, historical, and cultural exceptionalism which invites hyperbole and its corresponding humorous counter reaction.

Both places have distinguished literary traditions: the first American Nobel laureate (1930), Sinclair Lewis, grew up in small town Sauk Center while the most significant Irish-Catholic novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald was raised in the pristine and dignified environs of St. Paul’s Summit Avenue. Ireland, in turn, has produced four laureates: W.B. Yeats (1923), Bernard Shaw (1925), Samuel Beckett (1969), and Seamus Heaney (1995). The works of three of these laureates—Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney—have appeared on the stage of the Guthrie Theater, while two of these laureates visited Minnesota. Yeats arrived in 1904. Seamus Heaney visited to speak at the Guthrie Theater