Words Unbordered

The Northern Boarder Literary Lands

Most Americans who visit Ireland rent a car or board a tour bus in Dublin or Cork and travel clockwise around the island. The Wild Atlantic Way could take them as far as Derry, but usually they turn right at Galway and head home. Which is fine with me, but to be fair I should point out that my part of Donegal is the best part of Ireland and worth the extra four hours from Galway.

In the Irish Times the other day, I see there’s a new route where tour busses seldom rumble.

The Literary Ways are nine different routes that take you through the border counties, where many of Ireland’s greatest writers were born, lived, and worked. The Dramatic Way is about playwrights, from the birthplace of Brian Friel, who created Dancing at Lughnasa, to Lisa McGee who created Derry Girls. Take the Nobel Way if you’re into Ireland’s three Literature Nobel winners. There’s a Novel Way, a Poetic Way, and a Singer’s Way. The Critical Way features the sort of people dreaded by the previous four types of creators, except that it includes Nell McCaffrey, a feminist journalist. The Warring Way traces battlefields, so beloved by Americans and British, which I would give a miss, but it includes the sites of Ireland’s Iron Age story cycle the Táin Bó Cúailnge. The Spiritual Way spans millennia, from Neolithic Newgrange, to competing St. Patrick’s Cathdrals, to the Mourne Mountains aka C. S. Lewis’s Narnia where everybody dies and goes to heaven but the stroppy teenage girl. Finally, there’s a route devoted just to Oscar Wilde who went to school in Enniskillen.

The route is created by Arts Over Borders, a production company who specialize in literary festivals that link what artists create with significant places in their lives. I wish they had included more women, but obscure lady scribblers don’t draw the tour buses.

Those bright scribbled lines crossing over and over the border excite me. That border is so artificial and recent. I’m optimistic about Irish Unity, but even though it’s only been 100 years, the six counties can’t be grafted onto the the root stock of the other twenty six now. Before the border is well and truly gone, the institutions— and more importantly the symbols— need to be sorted. Change the Flag? A new national anthem? Devolved internal political system with stronger provinces and less Dublin control? I imagine it will take years of technical conversations in dreary zoom meetings. While the technical wrangling can’t be avoided, it can be illuminated by all-island projects like this one, bringing artists, seekers, and dreamers into the heart of Ireland.