-INTERNATIONAL NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER-
ANTHONY J QUINN
LOST LANDSCAPES STORYTELLING
CONNECTING PEOPLE THROUGH LANDSCAPES AND STORYTELLING
The Lost Landscapes Storytelling project takes its inspiration from an observation of Agnes Varda in her autobiographical film Beaches of Agnes: "If we opened people up, we would find landscapes." As an author and creative-writing tutor, I believe that the most resonant stories we have are about the places we grew up in, their features and landmarks, the buildings and people who populated them, as well as the boundaries and the journeys we took through those landscapes. These places carry personal symbolic meanings and help us share memories, evoke associations and stories, and make links with others. They create connections across time, places and people. Sharing memories and stories in a group setting helps give us a sense of psychological well-being and adds meaning to our lives.
The aim of the Lost Landmarks and Thresholds project is to preserve and bring back to life these landscapes and memory maps, and its people in the form of stories and visual artworks, while giving the participants a stronger sense of identity and group belonging.
Click on the PDF icon to download a copy of the most recent anthology, Teddy Cool and Other Stories
Participants in the Lost Landscapes Storytelling Project 2023-2024 with facilitator Anthony J Quinn, funded by Cavan Arts, Age Friendly Council and Culture Ireland.
Whereas most writers spend their lives looking for something to write about, the writers showcased in the latest volume of stories demonstrate that the best stories are waiting right before us, in our own landscapes and pasts. As an historical and crime fiction author, I’ve set most of my own novels in the border counties of Ireland where I grew up and still live, and I believe that the most resonant stories we have are about our childhood landscapes, their features and landmarks, their buildings and the people who populated them, as well as their boundaries and the journeys we took through those landscapes. These settings carry personal symbolic meanings, act as metaphors and help us share memories. They evoke powerful associations and stories, and help us create positive connections across time, place and people.
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The stories brought together in this collection emerged out of a course of creative writing workshops, which I designed and facilitated over the summer of 2023 involving writers with connections to the border counties of Ireland, and with the help of Cavan Older People’s Council and Cavan Council Arts Office. The theme of the storytelling project was lost landscapes – the idea that we carry around a mental suitcase of the landscapes we have lived in and loved, and that these settings can be unpacked to tell powerful narratives. The stories that were inspired by the workshops were then refined and edited during one-to-one mentoring sessions with myself to help facilitate the writers’ development as confident storytellers.
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The writers showcased in this volume have been busy making meaning out of their childhood landscapes and relating to one and another in powerful, emotive and humorous ways. They understand that stories can’t take place in a vacuum, and, without a strong sense of place, readers will ultimately feel lost. Stories should take readers out of their own worlds into a different reality, and this is the greatest gift that these writers give the reader - the chance to escape!
One of the literary nuggets that inspired our workshops were the following lines from Patrick Kavanagh: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience, it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a person can fully experience.”
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Kavanagh’s wise words have grown in relevance, I believe, since the strange, enclosed days of the Covid lockdowns. We’ve all been turned in on ourselves by the experience of these past few years and writing and sharing stories can be a powerful way to overcome this state of mind. Deirdre McKenna fulfills Kavanagh’s advice brilliantly when she turns her intense scrutiny to Wellington boots and her home landscape of Killeeshil, Co Tyrone. Like the rest of the writers in this collection, she shows how our childhood imaginations were fed by our experience of these settings, and how these terrains can be used as metaphors to describe dislocating feelings and states of mind in adulthood.
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These stories are a celebration of childhood and also an elegy to what has been lost. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the freedoms experienced by Bob Gilbert’s, Marie Quinn’s and Ann O’Donoghue’s child protagonists, as they wander widely across their home territories, is far greater than the freedoms experienced by children today. Bill’s story ties together nature, daydreaming and a thrilling kidnapping plot. With its description of mythical hounds, Teddy Cool also taps into the magical strangeness of our childhood landscapes. Ann O’Donoghue’s stories, Grandad Brady’s Prized Grotto and The Wild West, capture a child’s sense of adventure and the power of family bonds, whilst Marie Quinn’s story, Polehill, 1954, is full of awe for the dreams and hard work of her relatives, and the landscape to which they have chosen to return.
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Ultimately, it is child narrators as much as the landscapes of Ireland that rise to the fore in this collection, the youthful voices of the writers, which fit in and belong to the settings as much as the hills, rivers and trees. Their stories are about children exploring and taking risks such as in Veronica Williams evocate Salt Tears, children growing up and learning about loss and shame as in Nollaig Byrne’s The Left-handed Child, children discovering their power in the landscape and over others, and the gifts their settings bestow upon them. The Left-handed Child evokes the spirited stubbornness of childhood and explores family lore, poetry, song and history. It’s so richly detailed and saturated in anecdote that the reader feels they can step back into late 1940s Killeshandra and be engulfed by the setting. Veronica’s story, set in her vividly described native Dublin speaks to us about the resilience of childhood and shows us what hope and bravery look like in spite of setbacks and cruelties.
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Similarly, the unbridgeable silences and dark moods of adults are touched upon in Marian Dudley’s and Olga Maughan’s stories. Ireland, My Ireland and Every Dog but this Dog conjure up a world of emotionally-loaded crossings between England and Ireland, pain and laughter, forgetting and remembering. Many of the writers have been living with family histories full of puzzling questions, but somehow these stories have helped them find the answers and write them down.
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Kathleen Grogan’s story captures the excitement and fear of emigrating to America. The comparison of her experience on the US ship SS United States to the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale distils the sense of danger and mystery superbly. It’s a poignant leave-taking but once again her story speaks to us of hope and adventure. Deirdre Tighe’s A Fond Farewell offers another emigration story of love and loss and is a moving tribute to her great-aunt Susan. It has a familiar backstory of separated families and depicts a rural society struggling to grasp that its young women might want more out of life than domestic servitude. Cecilia O’Neill’s A Day to Forget movingly recounts an accident with a cooking range and the peril that comes with independence and autonomy. Her story shows how the lessons we learned as children arm us for the life ahead.
​Evelyn Brady’s Lakes of Evelyn captures how our lives and our imaginations can be fed by nature, and in particular bodies of water. She shows how these lakes can work powerfully in a memoir, giving a stage, a setting, that can be used as metaphor and to create a mood or feeling in the reader, as well as being a source of suspense in their own right. Ellen McKenna’s landscape stories capture a world living on borrowed time, on the cusp of fading away. Like the other stories in the collection, her writing shows us the advantages of anchoring our writing in a real place and the way we can draw inspiration, and some old ghosts, out of familiar streets and fields.
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The writers of these stories have shown how the past is always there, especially its landscapes and landmarks. No matter how obscure or shadowy it might appear, the act of writing and time itself can slowly make it more visible. So, I hope you enjoy their stories. Read them with a child’s imagination and find your way back into your own landscapes where the world still feels huge and is full of strange and exciting discoveries.
