Anyone who has read Michael Harding’s work or heard him speak could easily come to the conclusion that he’s a fairly open fella. And they’d be right. In his writing he explores an array of personal topics many of us routinely shy away from discussing in public. But to every yin there must be a yang.

“Sometimes you will find a person like me who will talk so openly in public that it’d raise your eyebrows, and yet, on a one-to-one level I could be the quietest person you’d ever meet. I know that people would meet me and they would think that I never open up,” says the writer.

“It’s like extremes. I like doing shows on stage, I’ll be touring now next autumn with this book and I would go on the stage and I would talk ferociously personal about my life. I also then crave solitude. I spend an awful lot of hours alone in a room. I have a studio and it’s away from the house.

“There’s a strange balance that the more you do share yourself on the outside, the more you have to go inside as well. Otherwise you just become an empty drum, bladdering away all the time.”

I just couldn’t get out of the bed, never mind the house and I was really, really black

An author, playwright, actor and newspaper columnist, Michael’s latest novel Chest Pain: A man, a stent and a campervan portrays this balance between sharing and solitude acutely. It is a memoir dealing with the months before and after Michael’s heart attack, scattered with his usual humour.

Leading up to the heart attack, in a way, Michael retreated into himself. For the first time in years he stopped writing his newspaper column and returned from a two-month break in Poland – where he was to be writing a book – without having penned a sentence. The months after, having survived the ordeal, Michael documents his journey around Donegal in campervan, gratefully celebrating life.

Michael was born and reared in Cavan, but lives in Leitrim and is speaking to Irish Country Living over the phone from his base there.

Depression

As well as discussing health, relationships and religion in his writing, Michael has also dealt with depression. His first memoir book Staring at Lakes is a meditation on his breakdown into depression in 2011 and 2012, a period he also chronicled in his newspaper column. Physically burned out, Michael ended up in hospital with colitis and went into an 18-month depression afterwards.

Michael Harding.

“I just couldn’t get out of the bed, never mind the house and I was really, really black,” reflects Michael. “It was an agonising place to be. Because I was writing my column in The Irish Times, I felt, I couldn’t hide it because I have always written these honest columns, if I started hiding my own depression, it would have been a bad thing to do as a writer.

“I decided I would keep going and I used to struggle in the bed to write the column every week at that time. It made things good, because it gave me something to do. I would talk about depression, I would talk about anything. I wouldn’t be afraid to talk about things, because we’re all human.”

Writing and religion

Michael is undoubtedly a great storyteller, but believes that it’s the writing part he has down and really, as a nation, we’re great for a scéal in general.

“I’m not analysing my own experience, I’m really telling you what I heard. I always say, ‘To be a writer the best equipment you have is your ears’. Hearing the stories is half the battle of writing the story,” he explains.

“We’re storytellers in Ireland. No matter what pub I go into, no matter what cafe, restaurant, Gala shop or petrol station from Kerry to Donegal, I can sit there and I can hear extraordinary stories. You couldn’t make them up they’re so amazing.”

When Irish Country Living speaks to Michael about his craft, it’s clear writing is a concept he ponders often.

To be a writer was to engage in some level with the mystery of life, the mystical strange otherness in existence. Prayer and poetry are the same thing to me

“I wrote poems and sent them in to the Junior Digest when I was 10 years of age. Then when I was about 15 years of age I started sending poems to the New Irish Writing, which was a famous page in the Irish Press. It was considered the real platform for serious poetry in Ireland at the time. I got poems accepted and I was so happy with myself, but I was only 15.

“I got a typewriter from my uncle Oliver and he taught me to type with my eight fingers. To me, writing was a physical thing, writing was having to type it. I didn’t play football and I wasn’t into rock and roll, but I was happy enough in a kind of solitary way. I loved writing poems all my life, I always wanted to be a writer.”

Although he always wanted to be a writer, Michael went on to enter the Catholic Church as a priest. To him, this was no different to being a writer, as he thinks prayer and poetry are inextricably linked.

“I saw the two as the same single vocation if you like. To be a writer was to engage in some level with the mystery of life, the mystical strange otherness in existence. Prayer and poetry are the same thing to me.”

In the 80s Michael retired from the priesthood but, as he says himself – he never officially left. When he first entered the priesthood, he says the Catholic Church was full of liberation theology, but then they “reversed the bus into the 19th century and that’s when I had to get off the bus. I didn’t lose my faith, I just retired from the job, that’s all I did”.

Belief

Irish Country Living enquires does Michael still believe in God so?

“I do, but probably not the God you mean when you say the word ‘God’, because you probably mean an entity and it’s too big a question. I do believe, I’m a religious being and I couldn’t exist without being religious.

“If God is the king that’s behind everything, then of course I believe in God. I don’t believe in God as some sort of fella with a beard who is male and sits in a glass room up in the sky and pushes buttons.”

Michael, true to needing balance, stops upon expressing these views and says: “I’ve said enough have I? I don’t know how you put up listening to me.”

And with that he’s gone.

Read more

Taking the Bull by the horns

Meet the speakers: Writer Michael Harding