Jean Wilson Murray

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Dervla Murphy – Bicycling Around the World

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Dervla Murphy, now 87, looks back on her life of adventure and travel and she says that the key to travel is to “embrace the unpredictable.” Murphy certainly has done that. She has traveled through three continents some of them with her daughter (when her daughter was 5!). She has written 26 travel books, and she has lived life as she wants to, not bowing to the modern world. She still lives in the same town she grew up in, Lismore, in Co.Waterford, Ireland, and she has no smartphone or television. She plays records (remember those?) and reads for entertainment.

From an early age, she knew EXACTLY what she wanted to do. At age 10 she stated:

“I wanted to wander alone, taking each day as it came.”

For her 10th birthday, she received a bicycle as a gift and made a resolution to cycle to England. She later changed that resolution, saying she wanted to bicycle to India.

Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveler is the story of her life before her first bicycle journey. Dervla grew up an only child with an invalid mother and a father who was a librarian. She was in and out of school because she needed to care for her mother, who grew increasingly difficult and demanding as she grew older. Dervla’s loves were her books and her bicycle. In the home of her paternal grandparents, she found solace in the stacks of books. At 6 1/2 she had already decided

“the world was full of books and I intended to read as many as possible before I died.”

Finally, at 31, after the death of her parents, she was able to begin her first journey – traveling by bicycle from Ireland to India. (In case you were wondering how that would be possible, she started from Dunkirk, in France.) The journey is recorded in Full Tilt, her first published book.

I loved this book! Dervla’s energy, her love of people, and her resiliency are contagious. She wasn’t afraid to meet people and make friends (although she did carry a pistol with her), staying with provincial governors and wealthy friends, but also the poorest of the poor, in their (sometimes flea-ridden) hovels (once in a bed with several dirty children) and eating the most ghastly, dirty, food with them. She started in January 1963 and traveled through Eastern Europe, Turkey, then Persia (Iran), Afghanistan, and Pakistan, ending up in Delhi, India in November.

Dervla’s bike, called Roz (after Rocinante, Don Quixote’s steed) had many problems. She seemed always to be dealing with punctures, brake problems, and various other issues. She took to leaving spare tires in strategic locations and having to wait hours or days for a ride. At one point a truck she was in broke down and she had to spend the night sleeping on tires waiting for help.

By Ryan Bodenstein [CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons, via Wikimedia Commons
Most of the time, she preferred riding, but she also took buses, and only occasionally a plane (she hated airplanes). She endured searing 110-degree heat and biting cold and snow, dysentery, theft, broken ribs, and many insect bites. I can’t imagine trying to ride a bicycle through the snow.

She did use her pistol twice. The first time she had to fight off some starving wolves in a dark Yugoslavian forest, one hanging off her shoulder and the other with a grip on her ankle. She admitted to being terrified but also thinking that the idea of being devoured by wolves was “faintly comical.” The second time she awoke to find an unwelcome male Kurd on top her. She fired into the air and he quickly left.

She traveled light, saying “the further you travel the less you find you need.” At one point, she was down to two pens, writing-paper, Blake’s poems (!), map, passport, nylon shirt,” with room for food.

Her attitude to everything was “what’s the fuss about?” For example, she said the Afghani people had no concept of time; a bus scheduled to leave at 8 a.m. might leave sometime in the afternoon. She said, “Personally I find all of this most endearing after a lifetime of being tyrannized by the clock.” When she lost some money, she commented that someone else must have needed it more than she did. 

People and Places

Dervla had definite opinions about the people she met, but in general, she loved them – and they loved her too. The word would go out to a town that she was on the way, and she would find the local police waiting for her to help her find a place to stay.

She found most people accepted her, but many thought she was a man. She said

“…the idea of a woman traveling alone is so completely outside the experience and beyond the imagination of everyone that it’s universally assumed I’m a man. This convenient illusion is fostered by a very short haircut and a contour-obliterating shirt.”

She often stopped to admire the sights, after a long bike ride, for example. Here’s what she wrote about the Ghorband Valley in Afghanistan:

It was …” the most wonderful cycle ride of my life. Surely this must have been the Garden of Eden….High hills look down on paddy-fields and vivid patches of young wheat and net vineyards; orchards of apricot, peach, almond, apple and cherry trees smothered in blossom, and on woods of willows, ash, birch and sinjid [like a Russian or Persian olive], their new leaves shivering and glistening in wind and sun. “

“…At intervals there are breaks in the walls of sheer rock on either side and then one sees the more distant peaks of the Hindu Kush rising to 18,000 feet, their snows so brilliant that they are like Light itself, miraculously solidified and immobilized. …If I am murdered en route it will have been well worthwhile!”

More Journeys of Dervla Murphy

Places she has traveled: Gaza, the Balkans, the Andes, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Nepal, Kenya, Transylvania, Israel and Palestine, Siberia, Bombay, far eastern Russia, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.

Most recently, she traveled to Russia (Silverland: A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals) in her 70s and her last book was a family trip with her daughter and granddaughters to Cuba in 2009.

She broke away from travel writing to write two books about current events in England and Ireland. In 1975  She wrote Tales From Two Cities: Travel of Another Sort about conditions among immigrants in Bradford and Birmingham, in England. In 1979 she wrote A Place Apart: Ireland in the 1970s.

Reading about Dervla’s Adventures

If you want to read some of Dervla’s books, I suggest this order:

First, read Full Tilt about her famous first adventure. It’s so enjoyable and gives you a sense of her exuberant love of life. Then go on to Tibetan Foothold, which continues her adventures working in a Tibetan refugee camp in the foothills of the Himalayas, meeting the Dalai Lama, and bicycling the Himalayas in late 1963. In between, or after, read Wheels within Wheels, her autobiography, to get a sense of who this marvelous woman is and why her story is so gripping.

I could go on and on above Dervla Murphy – and I will. I’ll follow up soon with more on her further adventures and her later life.

A few years ago a video called “Who is Dervla Murphy“ was created. You can get it on Vimeo ($13). I’ll warn you that it’s difficult to understand her and there is no closed caption available, but I enjoyed seeing her and learning more about her life.

You might also enjoy this 2010 interview with Dervla.

Read my Goodreads reviews of Tibetan Foothold. 


Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive money if you buy a book from one of these links.

Filed Under: Women Adventurers Tagged With: Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt, Himalayan Mountains, Ireland

How Poetry Adds to Fiction Writing

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Chillihead – Flickr Creative Commons

I love discovering new poets. The poetry I enjoy tends to be reflective, not love poems but about life and nature and the nature of life. I want poetry to (a) heighten my emotions, and (b) make me think. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it?

Two simple ways poetry can help your fiction writing: (1) Use of poems or lines from poems in the introduction or chapter headings of your novels, and (2) Use of poems to find a title for your novels. Shakespeare’s poems – and plays are especially good for this, as is the Bible.

But the best way poetry helps fiction writers is in improving writing.

Even the simplest poems, like this one, can bring strong images to writing:

 In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

What a beautiful, haunting image this is.

I began looking at poetry as a way to write better when I realized I was writing fiction like non-fiction. For over 30 years, I’ve been writing manuals and how-to books to help people start and run small businesses.For example, from my current work-in-progress, The Thriving Writer:
Brand recognition is important and writers need that recognition as much as companies selling commercial products or services. James Patterson might be able to get away with not having a recognizable logo, but many writers have “branded” themselves in some way. As difficult as it is to come up with the perfect name, it’s even more difficult for many people to choose a logo that perfectly exemplifies their business.  I’ve seen business people muddle over pages of logos with subtle differences, attempting to find THE ONE.  Of course, like the name, the choice of a logo is one that stays with you for a very long time.  Many of the same considerations apply to logos as to business names.
Pretty dry stuff. So I started gathering up poetry books, discovering new poets, and learning how to write with more imagery and subtlety of language, to make my novels less like how-to manuals and more poetic.
Jolene Paternoster says, “Fiction writers can look to poetry for original and beautiful descriptions of everyday happenings and objects.” That’s true. That’s what I’m trying to do.
And Bob Stallworthy says, “Good fiction, just like good poetry, has a lot to do with using precisely the right word in the right place in the line. And, …when we get this right we get the image we want that makes the reader say, “Wow! I never thought of it like that before.” Isn’t that what we, as writers, want?
While I agree with Bob, I think what we fiction writers want is for the language to be unnoticed but effective, so it doesn’t overpower the story. Like a little hot sauce – but not too much – in a fantastic Ultimate Grilled Cheese sandwich.
An example of beautiful poetic fiction writing, in one of my all-time favorite books: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. The author started out in computer science (talk about dry!) and got an MFA and went on to write this extraordinary novel. (I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads, something I almost never do.)

Here’s a sample:

This will be his earliest memory.
Red light, morning light. High ceiling canted overhead. Lazy click of toenails on wood. Between the honey-colored slats of the crib a whiskery muzzle slides forward until its cheeks pull back and a row of dainty front teeth bare themselves in a ridiculous grin.
The nose quivers. The velvet snout dimples.
All the house is quiet. Be still. Stay still.
A perfect example of “show, don’t tell” in lovely language.
So, I’m reading Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Stanley Kunitz, Yeats, (notice the Irish poets, please), Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and more, as I get the chance.
Some more recent additions to my list of favorite poets:
Robinson Jeffers. Example: The Place for No Story.
Loren Eisley. All the Night Wings (book)
Theodore Roethke Night Journey
Onward and upward.
Related: How to Enjoy Poetry
A recent article in the New York Times about “Poetry – Who Needs It?”

In a Station of the Metro

by Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

– See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15421#sthash.q8yefZgi.dpuf

Filed Under: For Readers, The Writing Life Tagged With: fiction writing, Ireland, national poetry month, novel writing, poems, poety, writing tips

An Evening with Erin Hart and Paddy O’Brien

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Just by chance, I saw notice yesterday in our local bookstore (NewBo Books) that Erin Hart and her husband musician Paddy O’Brien were going to be in town. Wow! I love getting a chance to hear an author talk about her work and about writing and Erin is one of my favorites.

erin-paddy-thumb

Erin Hart writes mysteries with Ireland as a setting (which is what drew me to her in the first place) and the mystery always settles around something found in a bog or related to ancient Ireland.

She has written four books, the latest The Book of Killowen, has the added twist of being about an ancient manuscript found in a bog, in addition to a 9th century body found in a car trunk buried in a bog along with someone who went missing only a few weeks ago. By the way, all of the books are based on true happenings. The happening in Lake of Sorrows was about a finding in County Offaly. Turns out it was Paddy’s cousin who found the body!killowen-thumb

Paddy O’Brien has been called a walking encyclopedia of Irish traditional music and there was plenty of it during the evening, as he played his accordion. Paddy also read from his book The Road from Castlebarnaugh, about his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s.

Erin read from her book, while a projector showed interesting photos of Ireland.

A fun evening! If you want to attend one of their events, they have some more coming up in the Twin Cities area soon.

Paddy  is looking for funding for his third volume of songs. You can read about this at his Kickstarter page.

Filed Under: The Writing Life Tagged With: Erin Hart, Folk music of Ireland, Ireland, Kickstarter, mystery books, Paddy O'Brien

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