“Just Do Your Own Work:” On the 10th Anniversary of Séamus Heaney’s Death

Photo credit: Sean O’ Connor, 2009

As a 17-year-old undergraduate student in Dublin, I was lucky enough to have Séamus Heaney as my professor and the chair of our college English Department.

It’s funny the things you remember about someone. In addition to his poetic talent and genuine kindness, Séamus Heaney was the first man I ever saw wearing western-styled cowboy boots. Also, he could tell a great, great story—mostly about rural life in Ireland.

One day, I remember him telling this long scéal about a farmer who dithered about whether he should or shouldn’t go across the fields to knock on a neighbor’s door to borrow a shovel.

As a rural kid, who felt outclassed and intimidated by that south Dublin campus, I hung on Heaney’s every word. By story’s end, I think I was the only student in that classroom laughing my head off and longing to hear more.

Now, almost 40 years later, here I sit here in America, where, on the 10th anniversary of Mr. Heaney’s death, I can still hear him reading Beowulf to us in that second-floor classroom. On that day, I was far too young and definitely too immature to appreciate my own privilege.

Writing Advice That Lives On

Long after I graduated, in two separate media interviews, Séamus Heaney gave some writer advice that resonated with me back then and, to this day, has become a kind of touchstone for my own work.

First, just before he was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, I read an interview in some magazine in which he spoke about his then-dual life as a working professor and as one of the world's greatest modern poets.

Back then and now, as a writer with a day job, I loved the part of the interview where he stated that he had always considered it his first duty to earn a living and provide for his family.

Later, in a separate interview, Heaney told the reporter that, as a writer, we shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted by—or compete with—other writers. Instead, Heaney counseled, “just do your own work.”

Speaking of work, read Heaney’s poem, “Digging” at the website of The Poetry Foundation. Earlier this summer, when I was invited to recite or read a poem for our local “Favorite Poem” event, “Digging” was my automatic choice—though, of course, I could never read it like the master poet and reader himself.

Listen to the Nobel Laureate poet recite “Digging” here.

Rest in peace, Séamus Heaney, (1939- 2013).

National Library Week and the Public Good (bonum publicum)

How public libraries might be our last true bastion of bonum publicum or public good

After I graduated from college in Dublin, I set up house in a studio flat at the top of a house in a tiny, one-street town in the Irish midlands. The town’s biggest claim to fame was that it hosted Ireland’s largest weekly cattle mart. In my memory now, it was a lonely, cow-shit-smelling place for a 20-year-old to start her working life as a teacher in a four-classroom parochial school.  

Back then, 1982, my apartment house had no residential telephone and, of course, this was way, way pre-cell phones or internet. 

However, the town's public library was open a few evenings per week, and the librarian and I had almost identical reading tastes. So when certain new books came in, she auto-reserved them for me on a hunch that I would like these titles.

Her hunches were never wrong. 

I never told my librarian friend this, but often, as I chatted across that circulation desk, the sound of my own voice startled me.  Except for those library visits and my stop at the town supermarket, I was completely alone--unless you count the seven and eight-year-olds in my rural classroom. 

Still, isolation had its perks. Without a TV or a record player, with little or no social life, there was much more time for reading. And the longer and denser the library book, the better I liked it.

What I Read Back When

Now I live three thousand miles away from that town where I tried and failed to launch my adult life.  Nowadays, as I balance work and home and writing and a trillion digital distractions, I marvel at what a 20-year-old kid like me managed to read each week.   

I devoured most of the works of Heinrich Böll, the German post-World War II novelist. I read fat biographies of Maud Gonne and Agatha Christie.   Short story collections. Novellas.  Novels galore. I  wept when I read "The Well of Loneliness," a heartbreaking and previously banned love story about an illicit and banned lesbian relationship—a topic and a lifestyle that were taboo and illegal in 1980s Ireland.  

I'm still an avid reader, but these days—at least from a financial point of view—I no longer need to borrow books that other people have read before me, where someone has left light pencil marks in the margins or cookie crumbs in the crevices. 

A Lifelong Library Patron

The Emma L. Andrews Library and Community Center — my local library where I volunteer and serve as commissioner.

Being a library patron is not about money.

It's about being part of a real, flesh-and-blood or virtual community of readers.

For me, it's about remembering the things and the people who were there for me during the lowest and loneliest times of your life.  Our public libraries might be one of our last bastions of genuine bonum publicum or public good.

So during this year's Library Week 2022, let's remember and celebrate our public libraries and how they save us.