Unsinkable!

A Book Launch and a Homecoming to Ireland

A poem of mine, “Two Shipwrecks and a Slip of a Girl,” is part of a beautiful new anthology being published in Ireland by Salmon Poetry, UNSINKABLE: POEMS INSPIRED BY THE TITANIC.

Photo of Cobh, Ireland, the Titanic’s last port of call, by Mark de Jong on Unsplash

Along with a handful of other writers based in the U.S., I’ll be traveling to Ireland next week to participate in events around the Emerald Isle celebrating the book’s debut.

My poem is called “Two Shipwrecks and a Slip of a Girl.”

Come sit down beside me in my life-boat! We’ll forget about the scariness of the ocean around us, and get as cozy as we can, while I tell you the story behind the poem. It’s a good one.

Things were different then!

Fifty-one years ago, I arrived in Ireland on quite a beautiful one-class Soviet steamer called the Mikhail Lermontov. It was the cheapest passage I could find from New York to Cobh Harbor—$200, all expenses paid, with a student ID.

Just shy of my 21st birthday, I’d taken a leave of absence from my studies in English and French at UC Santa Cruz, to pursue my wild dream of living in Europe and becoming a writer.

I was at a bit of a loss as to how to make my dream come true. While on a visit to my mom’s house, I answered an ad on a 3x5 card tacked onto a bulletin board at UCLA—and agreed to meet with a person who said he needed help delivering a drive-through car, a Datsun 240Z, to New York.

It sounds crazy to me now—and my mom was duly horrified. But things were different then. The car guy, a nerdy graduate student, didn’t strike me as being dangerous when I met him. I’d been living without parental support since leaving home for college at the age of 17. Figuring that I’d earned the right to make my own decisions, I told This Perfect Stranger that I knew how to drive a stick-shift and would be glad to get myself to New York as his backup driver.

He was disappointed, once our journey started, to realize that I had no interest in the sexy adventure he’d apparently envisioned. As we crossed into New Mexico, he announced that he wanted to “do some drugs” with friends in the desert there, presumably with me in tow. I reluctantly agreed, letting him know that I had no interest in “doing” drugs and would refuse to ride with him if he seemed in any way impaired.

So there I was in the maxi-dress I’d sewn myself, dressed in the lace-up leather boots I’d found at a thrift shop, with my wild waist-length hair, and a few short stories and poems tucked into my backpack. Sitting around a campfire at the little adobe shack in Chimayo where we were invited to spend the night, I read some of my work to our hostess, an absolutely delightful woman who has remained a cherished champion and friend to this day. Before all of us went to sleep, she told me about the cottage her father had built for her in Ireland, high on a hill, next to a ruined watchtower in West County Cork.

In an amazing act of trust and generosity when we said goodbye a couple of days later, Louisa offered to let me stay at her cottage in Ireland, telling me that she’d always wanted to have a young writer live there.

Some cousins welcomed me, first on Long Island, then in Queens, once I’d parted ways with the car guy, who ended up dropping me off at a Greyhound Station in Philadelphia. My mother thought she’d throw a wrench in the works by calling me at Cousin Ruth and Irving’s apartment to announce that I owed her $200 for a fender-bender I had in her car before leaving L.A.

Undaunted, I set out to find a summer job that would get my savings up to $600 again, which I figured would be enough to feed myself while I lived at the cottage and worked on starting a novel.

With a year of college German under my belt, a good accent, and a large dose of chutzpah, I faked my way into a full-time position as a multi-lingual receptionist and telephone operator at Siemens’ corporate headquarters in Manhattan. I rented a tiny walkup studio in Yorktown, and bought a midnight blue Persian rug from a street vendor. The job paid $250 a month, and the office, which overlooked Central Park, had a fully stocked kitchen. I made lunch my main meal. By the time the summer ended, I could speak rather good-sounding conversational German, and was able to pay my mother back. I’m not proud of the fibs I told as a way to slip as gracefully as I could out of my commitments to my landlady and my truly lovely employers, who wanted to send me to Munich for training as a financial analyst of some kind. I knew the path I wanted to take: and that path was taking me to a cottage and tower high on a hill in West County Cork.

Ireland

Designed as a home for summer holidays, the cottage was made out of stones from a ruined tower built by the English in the 19th century to look out for Irish smugglers. The place was tiny but constructed and furnished with exquisite taste. The views were breathtaking. I felt and still feel grateful to Louisa and whatever twists of destiny had landed me in such a perfect spot to prime my fountain-pen and set to work.

There was radiant heating under the slate floors. There was a fireplace big enough to roast an ox. But the only heating source was peat, which makes for a miserly little fire. A resident there in every season but the summer, I would climb inside the fireplace on colder days and sit on a little shelf on the inside to try to get warm while the wind whistled and shook the window-frames.

But there were rainbows every day, and the cottage was beautifully appointed, with Connemara rugs on the bed and Waterford crystal on the sideboard. When I climbed the steps to the top of what was left of the Tower, I could see three lighthouses. There was a walled garden, where I tried to get the strawberries to thrive again. I planted vegetable seeds I ordered from the greengrocer, surprising him with my exotic choices—eggplant, tomatoes, and zucchini, none of them common plants in Irish gardens then. I even sowed some blue corn seeds I’d smuggled out of New Mexico. I wonder now, did the descendants of any of these plants survive?

I wrote for long hours every day. In the winter months, my fingernails turned blue when I sat still for too long. I walked everywhere, wrote poetry, gloried in the landscape, and wrote the first 100 pages of what eventually (after many decades!) became my fourth novel.

The Yank in the Tower

The villagers were all terribly nice to me. I had a great cultural curiosity and was very poor, living on £5/week. I traded sewing and some no-doubt very inept guitar lessons for milk and eggs from the farmer’s wife at the bottom of the boreen. I heard that people referred to me as the Yank in the Tower. I drank a good deal of sugared tea and ate an orange every day (I was afraid of getting scurvy—although, for some reason, I didn’t worry about the unpasteurized milk I used to cook my oatmeal).

Honestly, I wasn’t eating enough and I lost a good deal of weight. A farmer driving a horse and cart, wanting to say something encouraging as he passed me on the road, smiled down at me and said, “Gee, you look fat today!”

On one occasion, I attended a debate being held in the village: “Resolved: A Woman’s Place Is in the Home” (mind you, this was in 1976!). The only female participating in the debate was the time-keeper.

The little essay I wrote chronicling this event (”A Modest Proposal”) was published in what was then called The Cork Examiner. The editors sent me a check for £5, thus inaugurating my career as a professional writer.

Some ten years after my transatlantic passage on the Mikhail Lermontov, she was shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand. I didn’t learn of this until poet Kim Port Parsons asked me whether I might have a poem to contribute for a reading of Titanic poems she and Sandra Yannone (one of the anthology’s editors) were hosting. I didn’t have such a poem, but thought I might be able to confect one on time for the reading.

Finding out about the fate of the Mikhail Lermontov astonished me! Here I was, with a personal link to the Titanic, via my arrival in Cobh so long ago on another ill-fated ship. In short order, I wrote “Two Shipwrecks and a Slip of a Girl,” which Sandy and her co-editors, Susana Case and Margo Taft Stever, chose to include in the anthology.

I’m sure you can imagine how gratifying it will be for me to return to Ireland this month, to read my poem in the very place where my journey as a writer began.