for atlantic oceanIn the January cover story “Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment,” staff writer Caitlin Flanagan writes for the first time about growing up with Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus. Heaney and what her family’s close friendship with the Heaney family gave her. She wrote: “Seamus gave me the one thing I absolutely needed growing up in that crazy family, and that was is a certificate of ownership”
In 1970, Heaney arrived in California with his family to spend an academic year in the English department at UC Berkeley, where Caitlin’s father, Tom, was a professor. Caitlin’s parents were nearly 20 years older than the Heaneys and kept the visiting family under their wing. their “Berkeley swings like a boat on a swing. Colorful event space And there are just as many incense sticks to burn. with the high altar in the Vatican,” Heaney wrote to his editor shortly after his arrival. The following year the Heaneys returned to Ireland and the Flanagans also returned to attend Tom’s wedding.
Before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and gained international acclaim, Heaney was a family friend of the Flanagans and second father to Caitlin. Heaney often compared his bond with Tom to a relationship. Between father and son: “I think you are destined to be a father similar to me,” he wrote to Tom in 1974. “How terrible.” Caitlin cares for the Heaney children; Heaney once built a bookcase for the Flanagan family. Decades later, Heaney would write Tom’s obituary. New York Book Review–
The two families were very close. On the occasion of Caitlin and her sister’s baptism in the Catholic Church in 1971, Heaney wrote a poem for the girls. Caitlin wrote: “When Seamus stood up and read the poem ‘Baptism: for Ellen and Kate Flanagan,’ I accepted everything. All at once, poetry, God, and myself, for half a century. That’s where I keep the onion skins on which he printed that poem. which is so thin that it is almost translucent It has been a blessing for the long and strange project of being Kate Flanagan.” (The poem is being published for the first time alongside the cover story.)
In the cover story Caitlin explores Heaney as a person and poet. And of the special impact he and his wife, Marie, had on her, Caitlin writes: “He had a feeling for others that anyone would be incapacitated. Once, when my children were little, I took them to visit Seamus and Marie. After drinking tea and hugging each other We got into a taxi and the driver said, ‘You have probably met the great man.’ Almost on the corner of the street was a billboard with his picture on it. to promote a new documentary. In the years that followed, he couldn’t escape himself. And the endless duties of this role must be fulfilled. He may fantasize about abandoning those duties. But he never shied away from it.”
In writing about Heaney, Caitlin also writes about relationships, kindness, and the indelible impression of the loved ones who have passed away in our lives. A few months ago, Caitlin visited Heaney’s grave in Ireland for the first time. A full decade after his death She wrote of this visit: “We can’t escape. Losing the people we love and need the most. Each death must be counted realistically. By recording it in a notebook. But there are people we know and love so much that death is another thing that can be broadcast.”
Caitlin Flanagan’s “Walk on Air Against Your Better Judgment” is published today at TheAtlantic.com Please reach out with any questions or requests to interview Caitlin about her writing.
Press contact:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | atlantic ocean
press@theatlantic.com
