The Power of Contrasts, Liminal Spaces, and Cusps
An interview with Irish writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh about creativity, making art in darkness, the lessons of winter, and turning towards spring.
Happy February! and I are doing our two-part workshop series this month on February 11 + 18. More info here.
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Today we pass into the second month of the year. But for many of us, the months of the calendar may not be as important of markers for us as the seasons. We look for other cues of transition and change.
In Ireland, February 1st marks Saint Brigid’s Day (Lá Fhéile Bríde) rooted in the Gaelic festival of Imbolc, an ancient celebration new life and fertility. Meaning “in the belly,” it indicates a time when seeds are beginning to stir. A festival of renewal.
Ireland’s only female patron saint, the Celtic goddess and feminist figure (who now has a public Irish holiday in her name) helps to mark this midway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It’s a turning of sorts: the edge of winter, on the cusp of spring. This day has long been celebrated as the traditional start of spring in Ireland, and Brigid guides the way into it.
Even if we’re not in Ireland, and even if we’re still feeling the depth of winter days, I think it’s a lovely celebration to consider how we shift from this midwinter cocoon into something more external.
In my world, the temperatures these past few weeks have felt so off. Extreme lows, countered by unseasonal warms. Two weeks ago there were remnants of snow and ice. A few days ago I wore sandals and sat outside to eat lunch. Yesterday I saw the first pussywillow.
As we work our way through winter—no matter what that looks or feels like in our own creative cycles—marking these shifts and cusps can be a powerful practice. Paying attention to the larger cycles that we’re all a part of, honoring them as we pass through.
In honor of the Irish festival and this seasonal shift, I’m bringing you an interview with Irish writer
. I came across her work thanks to (you can listen to a great interview between the two of them here). I’ve had her book Thin Places on order from the library for ages, but it’s so popular I had just been patiently waiting for months for it to show up.Then, right before I went to my January art residency, I spotted both Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home and her latest book Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year at my local bookstore and I knew I had to get them then and there to take along with me.
I do believe that things land when we need them, and our own constellations of thoughts and ideas often intersect with others. Such is the case with Kerri’s work, and it was such a joy to connect with her for this conversation on liminality and power of thin places, what it means to be human and an artist in a painful world, what winter does for our creativity, and how we start to shift out again.
-Anna
Anna Brones: Since I read Thin Places, I have been thinking so much about how twilight time, dusk and dawn, is this beautiful thin place. They're potent times.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh: That's so gorgeous. I just love the way creative fires and people can call similar people towards them. We could talk for hours about how that works! The last word that I typed before we came on the call was “twilight.” I haven't typed that word, I haven't said that word, for a really long time.
We have this idea of these things that come to us, and they come in these various ways, because creativity is a thin place. Like giving birth is a thin place. I told myself in my second book, “I just want to be done with liminal spaces. I just want to be done with thin spaces and all of that terminology.” I was kind of joking, but I really did think for a long time that I was really done with that idea.
But I realized that these tropes of our life, we don't choose them really, they choose us. The more that I enter into relationship with life—with love and with being alive, and trying to live well, trying to bear witness to what we're living through—the more I understand that we're given so many ways into our own inner worlds.
There are spaces that can really scare us and haunt us, or can really strengthen us, can really inspire us. Like dawn and dusk. Twilight. There's all those other beautiful names for twilight.
AB: “Crepuscular.” Another one of my favorite words.
KD: Oh there's so many beautiful words like that. There's a reason for that, right? Why there are so many beautiful words to describe this really beautiful thing.
The more that I enter into trying to understand the creative world… the more I understand that these liminal spaces hold so much for us. We get offered these ways back into our humanness by the natural world, in such a myriad of ways. One of those ways is being around children. Somehow for me, children are a real indicator of the way that our humanity really is. How it is unfiltered, how it is before all the things that we have allowed to take the place of things like community and togetherness and that connection.
How children act and how they respond in really particular situations is quite eye opening for me. For me they hold real wisdom. They're the real guides: our elders and our children.
We've somehow allowed our society to push those down so much that we in the middle have lost that guiding wisdom that those two sets of people hold. We can extend that out and look at things like edge land places, being those pillars. The edges of day—the dawning of day, the end of the day—being those kind of children and elders in our circle.
There are thin times as well. They're liminal times. I had this very odd experience that I only realized when I was writing the book, which is that I was born in the complete midway point of The Troubles in Ireland. But I was also born in the midway between Christmas Day and the end of the old year, the 28th of December. I was a child of a Protestant and Catholic, a kind of midway point there as well.
In the last few years I’ve also really been entering into an observational practice during the Omen days, an old Celtic tradition, where you begin the day after Christmas, and you run right through to Nollaig na mBan, or Women's Christmas. That period of time is a totally liminal space.
It's a time where we should enter into dialogue with the natural world around us and allow ourselves to be guided for the year ahead. There are 12 days and each day represents a month of the upcoming year. We have this encapsulation of a year in these days, with time of great inner reflection—the meeting of the inner reflection of that time meeting with going into the outer world and allowing each to influence each other, which I find quite moving.
Your creativity is like a little bird. You can either shoo it away, or you can let it come close.
-Kerri ní Dochartaigh
AB: I love it. When you wrote about it, I thought, “why aren't we all doing this?” It had me thinking that this space of inner reflection and looking out and moving out is also how the creative process works, the space of needing to have both of those things, often at the same time.
KD: Absolutely. I don't want to speak for other people, but most of the creative women that I know are really taken by the process of creativity. They want to understand, they want to come closer. I love nothing more than reading about the creative spaces of women I admire—their process, or who they turn to for guidance, or what their rituals are.
I think moods of people are the same. We are witnessing things in our world in quite quick succession, the likes of which we haven't seen before to this degree. The brutality that we're seeing against our Palestinian kin, against our seas and our lands across the world, the poisoning of rivers, wiping out of ecosystems—this is a kind of brutality that we are not used to, and it takes a very different way of being in yourself to be able to continue to be in the world that's happening and continue to be in your own creative practice.
They’re very linked. I believe really, really firmly that what happens in the outside world is reflected in us. Rebecca Tamás writes about this in her beautiful collection, Strangers: if there's something wrong with the world outside, there's something wrong with the world inside.
She doesn't say this but I'm taking it further: if not, then we’re either not paying enough attention or we’ve been numbed to our humaneness.
Intriguingly my Omen day experience, or the equivalent of October last year, was exceptionally dark, like hugely dark. Fear, loss, grief, brutality. When I read back over my notes, there was also very much a pull towards community, women's voices, and creativity.
We're way past 100 days of the brutality of Palestine and I think there's a form of transformation happening. We’re being met with this brutality, but I'm witnessing tenderness. I think of Christina Sharpe in her beautiful book, Ordinary Notes, talking of another artist [Gayl Jones] who's speaking of her work. The interviewer [Claudia Tate] says to the artist, “you know, there's a lot of brutality in the work.” And the artist responds, “Yeah, there is. But there's also tenderness which could be the counter for brutality.”1
In the world that we're living in, our creativity is definitely impacted by external factors as well as internal factors. We need to really think about all of the people who have experienced depression, or the fog of new motherhood, or the grief of losing a family member or someone they really love, and how that impacts their creative practice. It can take years to fall back into alignment, to be attuned once more to your own creative sense of self.
Your creativity is like a little bird. You can either shoo it away, or you can let it come close. I think a lot about the psychology around rearing children, whilst being busy. You’ll not be able to respond to your child in the way they want you to all of the time, but you can respond. That actually can just be a hand on their head, a word of encouragement across the room. To say, “I am busy, but I'm here for you.”
We can extend that to our creativity. If we imagine that our creativity is a little bird, we are busy—we’re paying our bills, we're dealing with grief, or whatever—but to not allow the bird to fly away so that it's a bigger hassle to coax it back. Keep it on our shoulder.
It’s the same as the world. Yes, it's really hard to show up in the world, especially during genocide, especially during ecocide. But it's about allowing these things to remain close enough to us that we can continue to bear witness, as well as continue to be in the world.
AB: That's something I've been thinking about too: how do you crack open that space a little bit by attuning to a different cycle, or how something is impacting you. Acknowledging those ebbs and flows more instead of trying to just push through. Because I think that space holds quite a bit for us.
KD: My ancestral identity has really supported me in navigating darkness, internal darkness and external darkness. For a very long time, like all of my teens and my twenties, I would have just kept on, not taken the time to really be with how I was feeling.
I write about it in Cacophony of Bone how that in the Irish language, there's just the sense of how impermanent feelings are. A very Buddhist idea as well. In the Irish language, you wear a feeling, it's almost like a cloak. There is a moment where it can be removed.
I am also learning how to do this through parenting my son, because he's a really deep feeler, he really shows his feelings. He's very demonstrative, and that was something that was never encouraged me. I suppose that I'm learning so much through our relationship, because he's part of my ancestry, and now he's the next member of the line of quite a troubled ancestry. Healing can work both ways. I can learn so much about how to be gentle with myself and tender with myself and therefore tender and gentle with the world as well.
Before Cacophony of Bone was published, I had never once said that I was proud of any piece of work. I suddenly shifted. I'm trying to understand the how or the why, because the book is never going to be a bestseller. When it came out, it didn't have any big reviews. A lot of people would think that instantly would mean that you shouldn't be proud of it. But I feel really proud of having written it. Of what went into it. Of the change that it signals or indicated for me and my work.
When I'm teaching new writers or when I'm mentoring, I’m always really interested by what they think would mean that they've done really well, because it's all so individual for us.
My friend was in the bookshop at the Dublin airport, and he sent me a picture of Cacophony of Bone: number one in the Irish nonfiction bestseller in the Dublin Airport! Yes, that was lovely. It was really great. But it’s interesting because when I really sat with it, it was like, I don't know, I can say that is less of an indicator for me of success, than something like writers that I really value using quotes from my work, or in their own teaching. I'm beginning to understand that for me success doesn't look I thought it would, and that's really brilliant.
I’m working on my third book right now. I'm just about to come out of the sweet spot, because it's going to go off to my agent. I've had a year on my own with the manuscript and been able to be in this really soft, quiet, but also agonizing relationship with it. To use the baby analogy—which I don't like when we're talking about books, I don't think it necessarily corresponds—but in this instance about the manuscript it does. because so many people keep their little one at home for a year and then have to give them out into the world. They've had this little cozy little environment and then it changes.
I suppose that's how it is with a manuscript. It’s going from being just me in my little attic room, the manuscript just growing like a little seed in the corner. And then it goes out. The [creative work’s] life is tripartite: that first period before anyone else is involved, and then you've got your agent and then publishers, and then it goes into the world.
I believe really fully that darkness is this deeply nourishing thing for us as beings, as mammals. We learn seasonally. We love seasonally. We grow seasonally.
-Kerri ní Dochartaigh
AB: I was thinking as you're saying that analogy of the child at home and then going out, there’s also a seasonal analogy. I know that for myself, spring can actually be a kind of uncomfortable time creatively, because it's coming out of that internal hibernation nest phase where you're just pulling things in, and percolating in it. Then you move into having to do things to allow it to grow.
Which is why I was thinking about Saint Brigid’s day. I'm curious as to how winter fits into your creative cycle, and how you shift towards spring? What does this time means for you with that shift of moving from the internal to the external world?
KD: I think winter and Saint Brigid are definitely the two things that I have probably written about the most in my life, because I'm always trying to make sense of how they work together, how we emerge. I'm always taken by emergence—emergency and emerging—and how we navigate darkness.
I believe really fully that darkness is this deeply nourishing thing for us as beings, as mammals. We learn seasonally. We love seasonally. We grow seasonally.
Saint Brigid guides us towards spring. She is this figure of guidance, but she's also your embodiment of the liminal person. Those thresholds of a door neither here or there, and she works with the middle.
There’s a real sense that she was probably the first person in Ireland to administer an abortion. Birth is already a kind of a thin place, and the ending of a birth, like the ending of a winter.
The stories of her that I'm the most drawn to show this real strength, even in tenderness. When we think of winter, or we think of spring, we always have quite binary ideas about them. In the Celtic ways, they're not, they're just continuation. It just depends what part of the circle that you are at. So I'm drawn to that idea.
It’s not just because I was born in winter that I'm drawn to winter and to Saint Brigid. She champions the underdog, so she speaks to me on so many levels. Orphans, the poor, sailors, milkmaids, single mothers—all of those figures who have always been at edges of things.
When we think of how identity sits within us and in our culture, we're quite homogenous. It’s quite a gray area in many ways. We need that reminder of those sharp, brightening moments of how we continue, how we keep going. So I suppose Saint Brigid represents coming into spring, but not the spring in itself. It is this cusp, this turning point.
There’s something that is communal caregiving on Saint Brigid’s. It’s never been planned, things have just happened on this day. Many years ago I was leaving Ireland, and I was due to leave at the end of January. The storms were so bad that the boat didn't go until Brigid’s Day. There is a very old story of Brigid being carried from Ireland across to Scotland by oystercatchers, it’s quite a beautiful story. Then a number of years later when I was first coming back to living in Ireland, I organized a group project by women, called “Carry,” examining the things that creative women in Ireland were carrying that they didn't want to carry.
The ideas was to just let go of these things. A local women's center was going to host us for the opening meeting, and the only day that they could do was Brigid’s Day. So we all met for the first time on Brigid’s Day, this group of women who were writing about things that they needed to let go of or share. It was a real turning point for me and for my creative practice.
And then last year, we bid on our first house on Saint Brigid’s Day. We didn’t get that house, but it was a very cusp moment. These things, they come to us, and I have to really listen to what's there. That’s even more deepening for me, of how integral Brigid’s story is.
This year we are going to have a public holiday in Ireland for Brigid’s Day. It’s an outcome of the lockdowns, the pandemic, in celebration of and in honor of the key workers. And it makes sense that the first Irish public holiday in honor of a woman would be for Brigid, for a woman of that nature.
Winter is just such a gift for me. I grow deeper into understanding what winter offers every year. I go deeper into learning how it’s supposed to be. I know that next year I need to make sure that I take a proper solid break, which I’ve known I've needed to do for years. There is something in me that feels like we still have a long way to go before really, properly understanding winter, to get to the root of what it is and why so many of us are drawn to it, outside of this kind of little coziness idea of it.
AB: I've been thinking about that a lot too, because the cozy element is only doable because of contrast. It's facilitated by the darkness. You don’t feel that light and warmth without the external world being dark. It’s like what you said earlier about brutality and tenderness. These contrasts allow for these things to arise that we might not draw from otherwise, which I think is also a very strong aspect of creativity, this light and dark.
KD: A book that I really, really value on winter is Winter Solstice by Nina McLaughlin. Her main thing is, which I think maybe we both share with her as well, is this idea that we do need dark to appreciate light.
I'm really drawn to that and drawn to what winter teaches us about continuing and how there's a need in us that we can feel deeper in winter. I don't know if you've experienced this, but there's a desire and there's a need in us. There's an ache in us that I'm confidently feeling more fully in winter. We're less able to forget something that's there, that kind of niggles at us in winter. I'm always trying to get to the heart of that in my journal and in my writing.
I love winter. I just absolutely love it. I fear it, but I love it. I just want to go into a deeper relationship with it.
RESOURCES + INSPIRATION
As Kerri says, “Poetry has been soothing me so much recently.” Here are some of her recommendations:
“A Bilingual Poem from Gaza” by Refaat Alareer
“You Are Who I Love” reading by Aracelis Girmay
How to Read by
on
Be sure to check out Kerri’s newsletter Glimmers.
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In this interview, from 1979, Jones is talking about her novel Corregidora. “There seems to be a growing understanding—working itself out especially in Corregidora—of what is required in order to be genuinely tender. Perhaps brutality enables one to recognize what tenderness is."
1. Your book is ordered, can't wait!
2. I love Saint Brigid's day.
3. Just lovely words overall from both of you. Thank you for sharing.
4. I've had a major transition myself this winter in allowing the dark along with the light. I always thought, "If I can just get over this hump, or if we can just fix this one thing, then everything will be perfect." And I kept holding out for that time when everything would align and I'd have my shit together, and all the problems would be solved. But it's not like that. And you play they cards you're dealt, the best you can, and the dark is just as important as the light. Winter is just as important as summer.
I love how serendipitous this whole interview was (from you finding the books 📚 to words like twilight ✨). And perfectly timed for this weekend’s feature 😉