It would be difficult to imagine Cleo Watson, poet, artist and nurse, living a "normal or humdrum" life. Both in manner and dress, she is striking. She bubbles and seethes with a spontaneous energy, so one isn't even slightly surprised at her overnight decision in 1994 to join Refugee Trust and go to war-torn Rwanda. There, her nursing skills often extended to building walls and packing spuds. And no better woman - it's immediately obvious Cleo Watson loves challenge.
Dickens's Big House on the Curraun Penninsula, Co Mayo, has recently become a venue for residential creative writing weekends. Once the home of a Mr Charles Spencer Scrace Dickens, reputedly a relative of a certain well-known scribe, it is nowadays home for Cleo Watson. When the Atlantic is your front garden, and Croagh Patrick, Clare Island and the uninhabited Achill Beg your natural shelter-belt, poetic inspiration must come easy.
Dickens's Big House exudes atmosphere. A former inhabitant, Dr Robert Gallagher, recalls as a young boy playing with the many weapons that were kept in the house, which was used during the 1940s as an armoury store for the Local Defence Force. Gallagher "fondly remembers the beautiful walled gardens. They were referred to as Curraun's Japanese Gardens in the Shell Guide of the time."
Cleo Watson intends to restore these, but in the meantime is busy preparing her 2001 programme for creative writing weekends. Encouraged by the great success of the first workshop, which was facilitated by poet Macdara Woods, Watson has already scheduled two residential workshops for next March.
"The highlight of the weekend was of course the Saturday night," says Macdara Woods, whose long association with the annual Scoil Acla makes him an adopted citizen of the area.
"There was such positive support from locals who attended the formal poetry reading, by participants and myself in the long-room, and then we retired shiosstaighre, to the George (the house's public bar), for a saroiche of music, craic, song and poetry, under the magnanimous direction of John Mhikey Gallagher . . ."a theangach, of course.".
The George was named by locals when there were more Curraun people, through forced emigration, frequenting pubs in England than back home.
Further information on the Curraun Creative Writers' Weekend: Phone: 09845997/email wcleo@eircom.net.
