A childhood spent in Strandhill inspires Una Mannion
AWARD WINNING WRITER UNA MANNION SPEAKS TO EDITOR JENNY MCCUDDEN ABOUT HER UNCONVENTIONAL CHILDHOOD BETWEEN THE STATES AND STRANDHILL, HER PASSION FOR WRITING, THE LURE AND HOLD OF SLIGO, AND HER FUTURE PLANS INCLUDING A NOVEL AND THE LAUNCH OF A NEW BA
HER childhood in Philadelphia was anything but conventional. Una Mannion’s parents had eight children in ten years and then split up when she was just four years old. The Hennessy award winning poet says she remembers being the only children in her neighbourhood with divorced parents: “This was 1970. Nobody was divorced.”
Whatever about her community in Valley Forge Philadelphia, divorce was not even legal in her father’s home place in Ireland. Michael Mannion from Cullenamore, Strandhill immigrated to the States in 1953. There he met his American wife Alice and forged out a life as a landscape gardener.
When Una thinks of her childhood she thinks of two places as home - Strandhill and Valley Forge. Every summer without fail the family would travel back to Sligo where it was forbidden to mention the separation. “For years when we would come home to Ireland my parents’ divorce was a secret. We didn’t tell the relatives here,” she says.
For IT Sligo lecturer Una, coming back to Sligo was always a highlight. From a very young age she knew she would settle here. “My father was the kind of father who built memories. When we came to Ireland, we would go up Knocknarea with him and down the Glen and pick cockles on cockle strand in Cullenamore.”
Mother of three Una still picks cockles there every Summer with her children but admits she’s become a ‘ bit more wary about eating them.’
Despite her parents separation, Una’s father who passed away after an illness in 2000 was always a huge part of her life.
She recalls: “We landscaped with him on the weekends and the draw to Sligo for us was so strong. In America everything is transient. When we came back here and people would say ‘ welcome home’ you would get that sense of place. Things felt like home.”
Those were the Summers of long days and nights, of bonfires and jazz festivals in fields. As Una recalls: “There was a freedom here that I definitely did not have in America.”
As a writer stories are central to Una’s world. And that talent for telling a good yarn runs in the family. “My aunt Kathleen Devins ( nee Mannion) is a story teller. As a child I loved listening to her. She had a story for every thing. She knows everything about Strandhill.”
Into her teenage years, the lure of the Atlantic was still strong for Una. She took a year out after school to study English at NUIG and spent every weekend in Sligo.
“My mother told me that I wrote her a letter when I was 14 during one of my summers in Sligo saying I was going to live here. She gave me that letter when I turned 40 and I had been living here for almost 20 years by then.”
In 1987 Una came back to Sligo for a year after finishing college before returning to the States to do an MA in Literature. Around this time, she met her husband musician Michael Holmes from Abbeyville in Sligo.
Michael is part of the hugely successful Sligo band Dervish. Fittingly enough, it was during the Fleadh in 1989 that the pair first clapped eyes on each other.
“He was living in London at the time and I was in the States. It sounds like such a cliché but we bonded over the Fleadh. I feel like I’m at risk of sounding like a groupie,” jokes Una.
Living in two separate countries they progressed their relationship - through the written word. “There was no email. An incredible amount of letters passed between us,” she says.
Those letters still exist today as Una explains: “We broke up once and I asked him for my letters back and I gave him his letters back but I photocopied them all first!”
The couple moved in together in Sligo in 1992 and got married in secret in 1999 in Savannah Georgia - where Una was working at a college for a spell.
“I would have felt like an imposter at my own wedding if I did the whole white wedding. That was not important to me,” says Una, “I sometimes wish for my father’s sake that we had done something as the next time we were all together as a family was when my father died in 2000.
“His ashes were scattered in Killaspugbrone in Strandhill
which is what he had wanted. My son was christened the same weekend and we had a big dinner in Markree Castle. It was a sad but nice time that we were all there for him.”
Una describes her late Dad as ‘ having been a nurturing influence.’ She remembers living with him for a year coming back to home cooked dinners left in the oven: “He made his own soups. He liked to cook.”
In contrast her mother rarely cooked. Una and her siblings ‘ ate McDonald’s many evenings after school.’
“My mum was not like other mothers. I grew up without TV. She would do unusual things like enrol us in a Russian Orthadox Church which we attended every single day for years - even though the masses were in Ukrainian. She even sent my sisters to an Armenian school for a time. We sort of infiltrated the Ukrainian community!”
So how has this rather unorthodox upbringing influenced her own life? One thing is for certain - her children, Dualtagh ( 16), Bronagh ( 14) and Aoibhin ( 12) - have never seen the inside of a happy meal. And another - her writing is all the richer for it. She’s even composed a piece on an ‘ onion church’ inspired by her childhood visits to the churches with the bulb like spires.
Indeed the memories of her childhood are what makes up much of her writing. One in particular inspired her Hennessy awarding winning poem Crouched Burial ( see above) in 2016. She was so moved by the picture of an archaeological dig in her family’s field that years later she penned the haunting work of art. The fact that the win came about in a time of the Tuam Babies scandal makes it all the more poignant.
A Lecturer in Performing Arts since 2000, Una came to creative writing rather late in life. “Every single new year’s day for years my resolution was to write,” she says.
But it was not until her late 40’ s that Una finally put pen to paper. A few years ago, she signed up for a writing course in Galway. This led to her forming the writing group ‘ Sandy Field Writers’ in Sligo. Now she writes whenever she can and has won numerous prestigious literary competitions.
“As I don’t have a lot of time, I’m really not precious about where I write. I write in the car for hours. I write when waiting to collect the kids from hockey or school. I was the mum in Sligo Swim Club writing away on a laptop poolside at 5.30 in the morning. I bought an old hippy caravan last year. It’s parked in my garden in Sooey and I write in there . Writing is so portable. You can do it everywhere. I write on a computer but I take notes by hand,” she says.
Una who completed an MA in writing last year at NUI Galway is working on a novel at the moment - which she hope to finish next year.
And her advice to aspiring writers: “If I could change something I wish I could have given my younger self permission to write. I have a sense of urgency now. I feel like I have less time. If you want to write - just do it. Particularly for women, it is so easy to put others needs first but the more you write the easier it is to write. It is a craft. You build that muscle.”
Una will be imparting more wisdom on writing as Head of a new course starting at IT Sligo in September, a BA in Writing and Literature.
“Living in Sligo we are surrounded by this amazing landscape that has shaped the poetic sensibility of so many writers. There are so many writers living in Sligo. We have the Yeats legacy and it did feel that the college had a role to play in guiding, protecting and nurturing that,” Una says.
“The IT sector has always been about applied skills. Writing is a hard skill as well as a soft skill. It is a craft. I think the way we are hoping to deliver it is really applied. The students will write and see writing as a process. It’s not just something you do once and hope for the best. You are always stitching or un- stitching, hacking, pruning, editing, trying to find that illusive thing that you know is in there.”
Una is excited by the prospect of teaching new students about her craft. She says the level of interest already in the course is extremely encouraging. With such a hectic timetable, the busy mum admits she is very fortunate to have a supportive family, healthy kids and a ‘ husband who is happy to cook do the grocery shopping.’
“Michael is always playing music. He restores concertinas at his workshop in our home in Sooey. He is passionate about his work,” says Una.
Perhaps this artistic passion allows him to be so understanding of Una’s ambitions. “He is a great support to me. He gives me the space to write. I have a rich life in so many ways. I love my job,” she says.
Una also feels blessed with where she lives in the quiet village of Sooey. “We landed on our feet buying here in 2000. Sooey is a really gorgeous community.”
FOR YEARS WHEN WE CAME HOME TO SLIGO MY PARENTS’ DIVORCE WAS A SECRET. WE DIDN’T TELL THE RELATIVES HERE