Brendan Hoban: Writing Can Often be a Redemptive Experience 

Western People 27.6.23

I write a lot. Now in retirement writing is (mainly) what I do. Sometimes writing seems almost effortless as words pour themselves on to a page. Sometimes it takes time and effort. And sometimes it’s just hard work. Moving words around on a page can be a mixed bag. Some sentences write themselves and sometimes there are multiple revisions before the words sing off the page. But, regardless, writing brings me a huge level of satisfaction.

My father who taught me in the old Boys’ National School on the Glen Road school in Ballycastle had a simple theory about writing – you won’t write well if you don’t read often. In later life, I came across the same insight in the words of the American writer, Pam Allyn: ‘Reading is like breathing in, writing is like breathing out’.

My father believed that the best way of cultivating an interest in reading was to encourage the young to read by connecting them to whatever a child’s compelling interest was. For my part, that interest wasn’t hard to decode. My particular boyhood obsession was the Wild West.

My interest in Westerns stemmed in part from comics I bought on days of liturgical festivals in shops like Brennan’s of Garden Street in Ballina where the adventures of Buck Jones and Kit Carson featured prominently. More specifically it was fuelled by the movies (or the ‘pictures’, as we called them) on Friday nights in the school which doubled as a cinema.

And every month when my father attended teachers’ union meetings in Ballina, he would return home with a  supply of Westerns courtesy of Ballina library. Zane Grey, I remember, was a favourite and (I remember) ‘Lanky’, a Corgi western by Max Brand, was by my judgement the best Western I had ever read.

I would discover in later life that whatever skill I had acquired in writing would – apart from the satisfaction it brought – have another unforeseen dimension.

After my mother’s death in the last days of 1999, I felt the need to record something of her life for her children and grandchildren but also as a way of giving thanks for her life and love. What I discovered was that the slight book that followed – ‘A Touch of the Heart’ – helped me to grieve her passing by measuring out in delicate portions a kind of emotion recollected in tranquillity.

The Austrian poet, Rilke, wrote that sometimes a man has to get up from his table and walk. And it helped me to be able, as a preliminary to writing the memoir, to almost daily walk Enniscrone’s picturesque shore with its sculpted dunes and to watch the incoming tide carve another unique pattern on the sand. And a placid reflection on time and tide became as natural as the water ebbing and flowing under my feet as I thought about my mother’s death and pondered the possibility of putting words on a page.

Somehow, in the second spring after my mother’s death with daffodils in bloom outside my window encouraging me, I felt brave enough to try to put words on what happened and how I felt.

It was a difficult write as the tears flowed and the riddle of our existence in this world played around the corners of my mind, as I attempted to lay to rest the ghosts of that winter year and to feel the rush of another spring.

In retrospect what I experienced felt like a kind of redemption. It was as if actually writing about my mother’s death – putting words on what happened and what it meant – was a kind of release, a validation of her life and of my love for her, an acceptance that gave me a strength to bear the burden of her going. It was as if the previous scribblings of my life had fortuitously afforded me the words and the confidence to understand and elucidate the experience of my mother’s life and death.

Recently, I read an article in The New Yorker by the prolific American writer Stephen King on a life-changing accident. King was out walking on a road when a van came over the crest of a hill and ploughed into him. He has to be cut out of the carnage. As a result of the impact, the lower part of his body had shifted to the right, his leg was broken in nine places and his recovery was peppered with delusions and hallucinations as the morphine and other medical necessities were pumped into his system.

When he got home five weeks later, even though he was in great pain, and with a smashed hip which meant sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, he wondered if he needed to get back to writing. His wife Tabitha, who often lectured him on working too hard or telling him to slow down, to his surprise agreed with him as she knew that the writing, in King’s words, had sometimes been for him ‘an act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair’. It became ‘a redemptive experience’.

At first he felt as if he had never written anything in his life, as if he was stepping from one word to the next ‘like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones’. Soon, however, he felt again ‘the buzz of happiness, that sense of having found the right words and put them in a line’.

Sometimes a routine satisfaction with putting words in reasonable sequence on a page can suddenly and inexplicably become a transformative even redemptive experience. Writing can be like that.