Voting is open for the Fascination Awards and my blog is nominated in the Creative Writing Category! To vote click on the link below, scroll to the very end of the nominations (I am the last one) and click on the +1 symbol. I am new to Google+ but I think that's how it works! Any problems voting, let me know... https://plus.google.com/114115129339565269276/posts#114115129339565269276/posts

I just found out that my blog has been nominated for a Fascination Award: 2012's Most Fascinating Creative Writing Teacher blog. Seemingly someone nominated me and the comments posted in response to my posts prove my content inspires my audience and creates discussion! Reading that last sentence (a sentence every writer wants to read) I feel both delighted to be nominated and inspired and determined to post more regularly... In the meantime a big thank you to whoever nominated me and to everyone who has posted and commented. I will post again when I find out how you can vote for me -I think the category opens for voting next Monday.

Feeling my way through the dark

I am walking up Broadway, dazzled by colour. A segment of green in a street vendor’s umbrella. Converse on a shelf behind glass– orange, pink. The sunlight cuts shapes out of shadow, on brick, on steel. After ninety minutes of having my eyes closed, each detail of the street is reflected back at me, as if brand new.

I have just come from a yoga class, Elena Brower’s yoga class, which I’ve been making it my business to get to every Tuesday at midday. When I first started coming I couldn’t get over how many other people made the effort too – fifty or sixty of them sometimes. Who were they, these people, who had two hours to spare in the middle of their day? Were they actors, freelance designers, stay at home mums? Maybe they were unemployed? Last November, when I first came to class, I used to wonder about these things. But I don’t anymore.

Elena is a teacher I happened upon by accident. I’d been going to Vira Yoga whenever I was in New York, and of course I’d heard of her, of course people had urged me to try her classes. But for some reason, I resisted. I don’t know why – maybe I was nervous that it might be too hard, maybe I couldn’t spare two hours in the middle of the day, back then. And so it was only when a botched attempt to see Sianna Sherman one lashing August Sunday, led me to a workshop she was doing with Elena the next day, that I realised this was where I was supposed to be all along.

Each class has a theme that builds on the last, and lately, we’ve been going very deep into our bodies. You might be thinking – ‘doesn’t all yoga go deep into the body?’ – and yes, it is does, but this is different. It’s like we’re explorers, miners, adventuring down through layers of tissue, burrowing through sinew and peering under bones to find out what is happening deep inside, really happening. We circle around the sensation, listen to what it has to tell us, before letting it diffuse through the rest of our cells.

If it sounds all heady and new agey, it’s not, or maybe it is, but I don’t care because it’s telling me a lot about myself, that in 37 years I had somehow managed not to know. These are not things I always want to know, mind you, but things I need to. The thoughts I have, the feelings, the spaces where my body contracts and clenches, these are what make me who I am. Surely it is in my best interests – never mind everyone else’s – to spend some time reading my own user manual?

Today, sitting with our eyes closed, she starts to tell us about a student of hers who is also a teacher, who teaches yoga to people who are blind. We go into all fours, still with our eyes closed. I am getting the point – the attention paid to sensation is greater when vision is taken away – and I hope she is going to make it through one or two poses, not a whole class. But no, we are in down dog, plank, chataranga, up dog, all in self-imposed darkness. My eyes flicker open. My feet are wonky on the mat and I see she has turned down the lights. I close them again.

As we move through the poses I am glad that I take this class regularly, that this sequence is familiar, and yet it is not familiar at all. Right foot forward between my hands – where are my hands? – left high, for standing split. Even though I often practice getting deeper into poses with my eyes closed, it is not like this, it is nothing like this. I never shut my eyes during transitions, never move into the darkness. I wait until I am grounded in the pose, settled. Safe. Perhaps this is the point.

I run my fingers along the edges of the mat, checking where it stops. My foot finds the ground somewhere behind me. Steps on something – someone’s fingers? Navigating this 6 x 2 feet rectangle of rubber feels as terrifying as if it is balanced on a ledge of one of the city’s skyscrapers. I feel the fear in my body, ripples of it, waves, moving into each pose, followed almost immediately by relief when I land at my destination.

Through the blackness Elena’s voice is strong, clear. I trust it. I follow it. I am learning to trust myself.

We pick up speed. I can hear my breath, the breath of the girl next to me. Occasionally our arms graze. Who is in each other’s space? Does it matter? Bending forward we are instructed to feel our collar bones widening, an instruction I have heard many times. There is a tiny movement somewhere I didn’t think could move, it feels like the bone itself is stretching. I have never felt this before and as well as understanding the point of the class in my head, I feel it too now, in my body. Feel how removing the floodlights of vision allows me to hold the torch beam steady, into the recesses of myself I can’t usually see.

Buoyant with my new insight I push into down dog again, through plank and onto the floor. The rhythm of the class is changing, I know it well, can feel the trajectory towards a slower, stiller place. Lying with my head on my hands I reflect on the progress I’ve made since starting yoga four years ago. When I first came to the mat it was a shock to see just how much I compared myself to other people, just how competitive I was. I always knew I liked to be good at things – OK, then, better at things – but yoga was something at which I had to get used to being bottom of the class. People who were older than me, heavier than me, newer than me, didn’t seem to struggle to open their bodies the way I did. It took me a long time to realise the only person I was competing with was myself.

I smile, right before I realise that the pose I am in feels all wrong. My eyes pop open – I can’t help it – and everyone else is lying flat, while my knees are on the floor, one arm reaching back awkwardly for the opposite foot. I lie down quickly, cursing myself for not listening, chastising myself for still not being able to stay present for a full ninety minutes, before I remember that my job is only to observe, never to judge.

After class is over, we move as if in a daze, putting mats and props away, our gazes mostly on the wooden floors, occasionally glancing at each other shyly. In the changing room I unfold my jeans slowly, as if they are precious, a gift. Maybe they are. It is crowded but we move out of each other’s way easily, as if it was a dance, that somehow we all know, even though I don’t remember ever learning it.

In the hallway I put on my shoes, head towards the stairwell. As I open the heavy metal door I hear a voice – I think I do – calling out: ‘Goodbye, Yvonne.’ I can’t see anyone, there is no-one there, but it might the woman in the reception area who said it, from her room at the end of the hall. I peer down only there’s a shadow across the desk and I can’t see if she’s there or not, if anyone is there.

‘Goodbye!’ I call out anyway. And I smile, just in case she can see me. Because I’m beginning to realise that it’s OK if I don’t see everything, all at once. That sometimes it’s enough just to be seen, to be seen, exactly as I am.

Thirteen Boxes

The boxes take up nearly all the floor space. I count them quickly.

‘Twelve?’
‘Thirteen,’ the delivery man says.

I count again. He’s right. I sign. He leaves, grumbling one last time that the building needs an elevator.

Each of the boxes says ‘Cassidy, New York’ in red marker, and something about that makes the move more real than any other time during the three months it has taken them to get here. I open the first one, slicing through brown tape to find books – my books, the same creased spines. The fact that they are here, that we have all made it to the same place, is amazing and thrilling. As I gently take them out, I imagine their journey across the sea, on docks, in warehouses. It took me seven hours to get here, less, but three months seems more like the kind of time it should take to move from one country to another.

Last October, packing these boxes, I was somehow shielded from the reality of what was happening. I knew I was moving to New York – of course I knew – but even as I was busy dismantling my life in Dublin, some part of me didn’t fully get it. Like a child who doesn’t understand time and space, New York ceased to be a real city and instead only existed in my head.

New York has existed in my head – and my heart – for a long time, long before I ever set foot here. And yet, I never thought I’d live here. I thought New York was destined to forever be the place where I’d wished I’d lived. But life can take us in directions we don’t expect, or maybe directions we’ve always been coming in, and for me that direction was across the Atlantic.

It’s amazing how easily a life can be dismantled. Houses can be rented, cars can be sold, businesses can be wound up. Bit by bit, the tiny little details and grooves of our days, our weeks, can be taken apart and packed up or given away or let go of entirely. Until what you have left fits in thirteen boxes.

As I empty the boxes I find things I’ve missed, but I will never find everything and that’s the hardest part. To make room for your new life, you have to let go of so much of the old. Family, for instance, can’t fit in a box, or friends. How do you pack up a yoga class? Or Dun Laoghaire pier? It’d cost a fortune to ship and besides, someone would be bound to miss it.

It has become a favourite story of the media, emigration, another oozing scar from our Celtic Tiger mauling. On television, we watch families wave off children, sisters, uncles, friends, as reporters hover, waiting for a sound-bite that will sum up a nation’s loss. The story is boiled down to its simplest form – the grief of leaving – but it is not simple at all. How can leaving be the whole story? Shouldn’t we focus on the arrival too? The opportunity it brings? The hope? If we let the cameras keep rolling beyond the security gates would we see a little glimmer of this? Would we see tears dry? The same children, sisters, uncles, friends, picking up luggage, hailing taxis, walking up the steps of an apartment building, smiling, glad to be home?

As I write, I am acutely aware that unlike so many others, I was not forced to leave. I know that makes it different. Leaving is hard enough when you want to go and my heart goes out to those who left because they had no other choice. But, even then, leaving can only ever be half the story.

Here, in New York, things are starting to feel a little more like home. I have a social security number, a bank account. I have started to receive junk mail. My thirteen boxes are all unpacked now, space found – miraculously – for everything in my apartment.

And today, 104 days after I arrived, as I walk down Ninth Avenue I know I have more with me, than the contents of those boxes. There is ice in the air but the sky is blue as any June morning and something about the light reminds me of Sandycove. True, the sun reflects on glass and steel instead of water and rocks, but I can see that too, all around me, I can almost see it.

Because even though Sandycove is three thousand miles away it’s much, much closer than that. Like so many other things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes, I packed it somewhere else, somewhere there is no weight restriction. Dublin and New York will always be in parallel, they will never meet, but in my heart, there is space enough for both, for all the people and places and things I love, wherever they are.

And for me, for now, that’s enough.

Bar 82 Reading NYC March 5th

First New York reading of What Might Have Been Me took place in Bar 82 in the Lower East Side on Monday night.

To see the reading and find out what the title means check out the video on the Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/whatmighthavebeenme

Commenting on this blog!

I know a lot of people have previously been unable to comment on this blog so I just wanted to let you know I have adjusted to settings so everyone can comment freely!

As you can see I don't always post that often but more frequently updated content such as book reviews, info on readings and events etc can be found on one of my two Facebook pages...

www.facebook.com/theotherboy

www.facebook.com/whatmighthavebeenme

Thanks for reading!

Yvonne

A tribute to a special teacher

About fifteen years ago, when I lived in London, there was an advertising campaign to encourage people to become teachers. The ads ran in cinemas and they featured head shots of men and women who looked straight into the camera and slowly said a name, before it panned to the next person. They were young and old, these people, their faces were different shapes, different colours, but they had something in common – whatever name they said made every one of them smile.

“Mrs Sanders.” “Mr Singh.” “Ms Watson.” “Mr Johnson.” At first you didn’t know what the names meant, that was the idea, but when the screen faded to black, one simple sentence ran across it, in white letters: ‘you never forget your favourite teacher.’
Watching those ads, in the darkness of the cinema, I said a name too. I said it in my head, in the silence between the other names. Her name would have sounded good as part of the ad, I always thought, it would have fit in well.

Mrs O’Neill.

The fact that she was my English teacher strengthened her odds of being my favourite teacher, of course it did, but the thing is, I didn’t love English, not then. Not yet. Sure, it was OK, it was certainly better than a lot of other subjects, but I didn’t love it. At home, I loved reading – I read everything – and I loved to write, but school English was different. School English was old fashioned, complicated, written in a language I didn’t understand by people who I had nothing in common with. English had nothing to do with my life. Of that I was absolutely sure.

So, there I was, fifteen years old with my mind made up and Mrs O’Neill changed it.
I feel like I can remember the first day I took my seat in her classroom and that she changed it right there, that day, and even though I know that can’t possibly be true, it feels like it’s true. I feel like I can remember opening a new copy of Hard Times, starting to read and thinking “more of the same” right before something changed. Before everything changed.

In the two years in Mrs O’Neill’s class, I seem to remember more than the rest of secondary school put together. I remember her explaining what Dickens was doing when he chose the names Bounderby and Steven Blackpool and Thomas Gradgrind, explaining it in a way that made it into a conversation, where we had a voice too, an opinion that counted. I remember acting out MacBeth, the day Mrs O’Neill turned the classroom into a courtroom and how I got so into being Lady MacBeth’s defence lawyer, I was gutted when the double class ended, even though we got her off.
In my memory, Mrs O’Neill always had our attention and yet I remember too, her writing “sex” on the board, to get our attention. In a convent secondary school, it was a technique that was always going to work.

Of all the things that I remember about Mrs O’Neill, though, what I remember most in her class is being seen, being encouraged, being understood. Mrs O’Neill was the first person who noticed I liked to write, who told me I was good at it, that I should write more. She was adamant that I should choose the creative writing essay from the list on the exam paper rather than pushing me in the deathly dull direction of the ‘factual’ essays which had always been drummed into us all as the way to score higher grades. Goodbye, ‘Discuss Ireland’s unique role as an island on the edge of Europe.’ Hello, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’

Maybe English had more to offer after all.

After I left school I chose English for my degree. I read Jane Austen and Robert Frost and Samuel Beckett. Bertolt Brecht and Caryl Churchill. I learned more about what I liked to read. It was after college when I moved to London that I went to my first creative writing class, the first of many, many classes. I had lots of teachers. I learned why I liked to read the things I liked, what made them good. I learned that writing was hard work, that it wasn’t as easy as I used to think it was back in Mrs O’Neill’s class, but that in some way I didn’t fully understand, I had to do it. To keep doing it.

My first novel was published in May 2010. I felt a little silly, sending a launch invitation into the school, wasn’t sure if Mrs O’Neill would get it, if she’d wonder why I’d asked her, but I sent it anyway. On the evening of the launch, walking down towards the bookshop, things felt a little unreal. In the windows there were posters of the cover of my book, with my name on it, inside, a whole bay of shelves was devoted to it. Someone had put it in the ‘best seller’ section.

I stood with my parents by the window, next to one of the posters while some friends took photos. I wondered if anyone would show up, if it would be half empty. Peering through the glass, I saw there was at least one person there already. It was a woman, who had picked up my book, was reading it. She had her back to me and it was a back I recognised, I thought I did. The woman was still reading when I came in, she only turned around when she heard me behind her. When I saw who it was, I hugged her without even thinking about it, like it was the most natural thing in the world to hug a teacher I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.

The fifteen year old me would’ve been mortified, she’d have sworn that that would never happen, never in a million years, especially in public. But then again, as it turned out, she didn’t know everything.

I don’t know if they make ads any more about teachers, if an advertising campaign ever ran in Ireland like the one I used to see in those London cinemas, so many years ago. But I know that if I am ever asked to name my best teacher, my favourite teacher, the teacher who has had the most impact on me, that from all the wonderful teachers I have been so lucky to have in my life, there is still only one name I will ever say.

Thank you, Brenda, for everything.