A Trail of Accidental Legacies #36 #cong24 #legacy

Reading Time in Minutes

5

1. Legacy projects find you but it’s up to you to follow through.
2. You can’t set out to build a legacy project, you start something and it happens and only afterwards you realise it’ll outlive you.
3. You never know where the journey will take you but it’s one hell of a ride
4. Forget about assets, showing you cared for humanity is a legacy worth leaving.

Joy Redmond is a Multidisciplinary Artist from Gorey. She writes fiction, essays and drama and has recently taken up printmaking to tell visual stories. Joy has received Literature and Visual Arts awards from the Arts Council and was mentored by Eilis Ni Dhuibne under The National Mentoring Programme. Joy works part time helping young people change the world. Previously, Joy worked in marketing, research, design and technology roles since the early days of the Internet and mentors widely.

You can connect with Joy via email, check out her projects on Joy Redmond , her art or Instagram profiles.

By Joy Redmond

I’ve been on the no-plan plan, tripping and stumbling through careers, courses, and callings. My submissions to Congregation over the last 12 years demonstrate this horizontal trajectory from essays on marketing, design, technology, the arts, community activism and for God’s sake I can’t remember half of them. I never worried what my CV looked like [frankly not good] and allowed myself the time and opportunity to try whatever took my fancy. It has been interesting and as it happens, I’ve stumbled into a few legacy projects.

During the first few days of the pandemic, when out walking in my local woods, I had an epiphany thinking we need to record this moment in time. I mooted it in a WhatsApp group with some fellow writers and we decided to start an online forum to publish any writing in response to Covid_19. We hoped to document the Irish experience but were blown away by the submissions from all over the world. The entire Pendemic.ie collection is now preserved in UCD Special Collections for future generations to visit. Tick.

Then a few years ago, some friends asked if their son could do his TY work placement with me. Being paralysed from the neck down and on a ventilator with an entourage of nurse and PA, he wasn’t exactly an attractive candidate for work experience. We decided to do a project around wheelchair access to our local beaches and it escalated into a full blown campaign and I’m happy to say that our local beach, Ballymoney, is now wheelchair accessible. We even have an accessible toilet, and the entire community benefited from a trendy outdoor shower and a bench that was built into the new wall – HQ for the local swim community to gather for our morning tea. Tick. The shocking thing about this project was that it was quite easy – a bit of a website, an online petition, a few press releases and in fairness to my protégé, a lot of lobbying but it was done. Maybe it was easy for me because I have a background in marketing and web development but it got me thinking that if two of us could achieve so much with so little then what about scaling it up so I’ve since joined Young Social Innovators and I’m helping hundreds of young people to make the world a better place. Rewarding.

So I’ve done the cultural and the local legacy project, I’m doing my bit with the youths but what about the personal? What can I pass on to my sons apart from this house and my blind optimism, my curiosity, and a love affair with nature and water, travel, food and the arts?

I got the idea to write a book of letters to my adult sons when I was at the John Hewitt International Summer School back in 2019 but shelved it to work on other projects. Then I signed up for a Creative Non Fiction course as part of a local Arts Festival in 2022 and the facilitator urged me to complete it after working with me on two chapters. I’m so happy to have heeded her advice because now it’s done.

Each letter is a story from my past and the postscript is some form of learning. Often, our children don’t realise we have had a life or continue to have full lives beyond their perception of us as parents. The letters vary from love, loss, work, travel to general observations on life. Some are funny while others deal with difficult topics such as grief, separation, and feeling lost. It is not intended for me to sound cool or to whinge but to simply impart what I have learned over the past 50 years. Ultimately, it’s a love letter to them.

Both my sons have read ‘Do not swim with strangers and other letters to my sons’ and the eldest said it would be something they would treasure for ever. His little brother said it was interesting but ‘an editor would pick out the finer details of grammar, punctuation and syntax.’ Of course the final chapter cannot be written because it doesn’t have an ending yet. I’m a devil for writing books and plays and doing nothing with them so this final chapter is a tale of triumph over adversity, grit, determination, tenacity, whatever you want to call it but I’m at the trying to get published stage. Maeve Binchy once said she could wall paper her house with the volume of rejections. I certainly have enough for at least one wall in my home studio. A few of my letters are about various endurance sports I’ve done over the years but they no longer impress me. So what if I rowed to Wales, all I had to do was train harder, sleep and eat well better, smoke less or not at all and my body did the rest. Creative pursuits are a whole new ball game. To keep going when you’ve no control over the outcome, to invest so much time and energy when the return is so small even if you get published, the maths don’t add up but I’m going to persevere because that’s another lesson for my sons to just keep going. So the picture I’ve posted is of a handful of us who marched down the centre of our town’s main street last week to mark the anniversary of the war in Gaza – the red banner we’re carrying symbolises a river of blood. I showed my sons the photo at the weekend and my son joked that he was sure Netanyahu was quaking in his boots. I know those 20 minutes won’t change or save lives in Gaza but perhaps in twenty year’s time, when my grandchildren are doing some history homework and ask their dear old Gran what it was like to see this serialised across the media, I won’t answer saying something like, oh yes that but that was the year we were getting the extension and we had a nightmare with the architect. Wasn’t it Maya Angelou who said something like, people will forget what you said and did but not how you made them feel? Showing we cared or even thought about anything beyond ourselves is a legacy worth leaving.