Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Knitting Stories

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“Let me show you how it’s done,” the knitting woman said. She knitted a series of stitches before she came to a point where she slipped one stitch from the needle. While the single stitch sat untethered, she knitted the one just beyond it before slipping it back on the needle creating the twist in the fabric.

In a small shop on Inis Mór (also known as “Inishmore,” or ‘big island”), one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, the woman showed me how to do the honeycomb stitch, a pattern I liked so much that I included it in a scarf I’m knitting. The difference between my knitting and hers is that when I’ve done similar cable stitches, I’ve relied upon a cable needle to hold those loose stitches in place. I prefer a hook that keeps any stitches from unraveling before I bring them back to the needle. This woman, a skilled practitioner, didn’t knit the piece too tightly to put the single stitch at risk. She had the confidence to simply let the stitch stay apart until it was time to bring it back into the design.

The Story Behind the Designs

The Aran Islands are known for their knitters. Anyone who appreciates a beautiful sweater know of the Aran designs. The women have traditionally designed sweaters unique to each of their families. The men of the family fish its rugged coastline. When one of those men does not return from a day of fishing because he’s been washed out to sea, he can be identified by the design of his sweater if his body washes on shore.

A Brush with the Famous

After I bought from the first knitter a cloth that described the meanings behind the different patterns, I went next door and met another knitter who talked non-stop while sorting through her sundry items. “I’d rather you knit your own sweater than buy one from me,” she told me when she heard that I had started knitting one that I’d left at home. Then she went on to describe the celebrities she’d met: Amy Adams and Stephen Spielberg, and Sharon Stone who was taller than the first two. All had bought the woman’s work, she said. She told me of rescuing two newborn baby lambs in brutally cold weather by slipping them inside her sweater, grateful that the ewe hadn’t given birth to triplets as she had before.

Designs of My Own

At a third shop, I bought yarn that left the feel of lanolin on my skin, two needles and a quick suggestion as to how to knit a hat. When I returned to the ferry, one of the drivers milling about before the next schedule trip thought it was funny I had purchased yarn there. “There aren’t any sheep on the island,” he told me. I just smiled, thinking about the woman, the ewe, the two lambs, and all the sheep I’d seen along the way. I continued to roll the thread into a ball and waited to begin the trip over the water to return me safely to the dry mainland.

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William Butler Yeats

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One writer most influenced the dreamscape of my youth—the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. I read his poems in assigned texts in my high school English class. I memorized two of them thanks to songs by folk singers Judy Collins—the poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”—and Donovan—“The Song of the Wandering Aengus.”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

This poem always conjured up thoughts of a place in a clearing in the woods, a place of solitude and contemplation. Who can resist the lure of a small cabin and living ‘alone in a bee-loud glade’?

While Innisfree took me to a quiet cottage in the Irish countryside, “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” presented a mysterious story full of unusual and mystical images. According to Wikipedia, the Aengus (Old Irish: Oíngus, Óengus) is a character from Irish mythology who is a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann—a supernatural race. He is “probably a god of love, youth and poetic inspiration.”

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

 

The trout becomes a ‘glimmering girl,’ who calls him by name and runs, fading through “the brightening air.”

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

 

Two recent books brought Yeats back to mind for me. In the recent young adult novel, The Hazel Wood, by Melissa Albert, is the story of seventeen-year-old Alice Prosperpine, who finds out about her grandmother’s death while on the road with her mother. Her grandmother, a children’s book writer, lived on an estate called The Hazel Wood. When Alice’s mother is kidnapped and taken to a supernatural place where her grandmother’s dark fairy tales are set, Alice is left no choice but to search for her mother with the help of one of her grandmother’s avid readers.

The actor David Duchovny wrote his most recent novel, Miss Subways, based on an obscure play by Yeats that has its roots in the Ulster Cycle of Irish Mythology. In the play, “The Only Jealousy of Emer,” Emer falls in love with the warrior hero Cu Chulainn. When Cu Chulainn inadvertently kills his own son, Emer is presented with a cruel bargain by a faerie Sidhe. If Emer gives up Cu Chulainn and her hope of growing old with him, the Sidhe will let him live. Duchovny’s book, Emer is a 41-year-old school teacher and her writer boyfriend is Cuchilain, otherwise known as Con. The modern Emir is presented with a similar bargain as her ancient counterpart. The Sidhe in this retelling is a doorman, and the bargain is that if Emer gives up her dreams of a life with Con, who is at that moment flirting with another woman outside a restaurant, he will be spared the fate of being hit by a car. Decisions, decisions.

I have no doubt that Yeats helped to inspire my book, The Mists of Na Crainn, and the mystical place I’m often fantasizing about.

 

 

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Myths, Folklore and the Child who Melts into the Night

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Flying Girl copyBefore writing my book, The Island of Lost Children, several times I read the book that inspired it, Peter Pan. One of the sections in J.M. Barrie’s book that intrigued me most was Peter’s explanation of how the lost boys came to be:

“They are the children who fall out of their perambulators when the nurse is looking the other way. If they are not claimed in seven days they are sent far away to the Neverland to defray expenses.”

I’m not a scholar who has examined the work in the context of its times. Still, I have a theory that Peter’s explanation is in response to conditions during a period when infant mortality was still quite high. This was a time when children died of all sorts of illnesses like influenza and diseases prevented by vaccinations which didn’t exist at the time. Barrie’s explanation of lost boys disappearing and being spirited to a magical land might have been a comfort as well as a simple explanation for curious children.

I wondered about how stories from folklore in other times and settings might have served the same function. In the folktales of many cultures, mythical creatures steal babies or young children and leave a sometimes deformed creature in its place. In Irish mythology, for example, faeries substitute a child with a changeling, a less than perfect version of the baby it replaces or even an old faery brought from the Otherworld of the sidhe to die on the human side.

After recently writing about the myths of Chiloe, a group of islands off the coast of Chile, I encountered the story of the invunche. The invunche is a first-born son fewer than nine days old who has been kidnapped or sold by his parents and who eventually ends up in the hands of witches or warlocks and guards their caves. The story is quite gruesome: one leg is broken and his foot attached to the back of his neck, and he’s fed on black cat’s milk, goats, and even human flesh. You know, what every parent wants for his or her son.

As disturbing as these stories are, I’m always fascinated about how the human mind conjures up explanations in the most creative ways. These tales in the oral traditions of the past, or in a popular book like Peter Pan, are testaments to our eternal search to try to understand. To convince ourselves that there’s some way to make sense of what may be incredibly difficult to accept.

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The Otherworld in Killarney National Park

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When I used to imagine Ireland, I had two visions. One was of rolling green hills filled with cows and sheep. Another was of a more mystical place, a land of forests that held secrets amidst the foliage lining paths that weave through the trees.

The rolling green hills of the first vision were prominent as we drove across western Ireland last May, carefully navigating the curving roads. Then, on an overcast day, we happened upon Tír na mBeo, the land of the living, the Otherworld of Irish mythology. Or maybe the luminescent leaves of trees and strands of sunlight through the upper branches of a small ringed forest were just the boundaries of that place known only in legend. Killarney National Park, a stunning gem adjoining the city of Killarney, seemed so different from the miles of green countryside that we’d passed on the way there.

I took photo after photo, but only a few came close to doing justice to the dreamlike spaces within the park. We opted to spend time there immersed in nature rather than joining the traffic on the nearby Ring of Kerry, a 180 or so km drive around the Kerry Peninsula. The hours we spent in the park, a large lake ringed with forest, following paths that threaded through the trees until we ultimately arrived at the Torc Falls, were some of the most memorable and visually stunning of the trip to Ireland.

I found the wood where my fictional character Lyric Doherty lives in a cottage with her father Michael and her brother Padraig. A voice in those woods calls her from sleep to alert her to small gifts that later link her to a lost loved one. I stood at the foot of the mountain where another character, Andrew Devlin, climbs in the evening, hoping to glimpse the sliver of sea that might link him to his mother who disappeared long before. Both characters populate the Mists of Na Crainn, ‘na crainn’ meaning ‘in the woods’ in Gaelic.

The book is still in revision for future publication, and I knew it would never be finished until I actually travelled to Ireland to see the country that inspired it for myself. No matter that the fictional Village Na Crainn is wholly a product of my imagination. Killarney National Park brought into full view the setting of the novel as a gift.

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Imagining Ireland

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The Torc waterfall in the Killarney National Park, Ireland
The Torc waterfall in the Killarney National Park, Ireland

One evening before an All Hallow’s Eve, I found myself driving alone in the dark on a road not that well-traveled that time of night. Because it was the night before what we know as Halloween, the playlist of the radio program focusing on Celtic music was made up solely of dark songs suitable for the holiday.

One song in particular eerily fit the moment. It told the story of women, kidnapped by faeries and held with their babies in a cave. The song was of women singing to their loved ones left behind in the hopes that their families would find them.

As the song played, a line appeared in my thoughts: “You’re part faery, aren’t you?” The line wasn’t found in the song but came somewhere from my imagination. It inspired the premise for the story of young Lyric Doherty and her friends Andrew Devlin and Saoirse O’Suilleabean, The Mists of Na Crainn, a young adult novel still in progress. The three share a common purpose, to find the knowledge denied to them–science, math and other aspects of how the universe works.

This May, I make my first trip to Ireland. Even though I largely completed Mists sometime ago, I knew it would never be complete until I had the opportunity to visit the place that inspired its setting and some of the characters, Ireland and its mythology. The Village Na Crainn, where magic is everyday life, isn’t exactly like the Ireland where we’ll land in a short time but I anticipate visiting there will have an impact on the novel’s final draft.

What also came with preparation for the trip is a new beginning based on some very good feedback from someone who read early drafts. With time and this trip, I hope the novel takes its final leap toward publication for anyone to read. I look forward soon to sharing this world, created by me but still fascinating to me.

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