Gifted writer Olive Travers earthy tales reflect an amazing tapestry of life & living

A good throw of a pebble, well maybe a stone, will cast you from Olive Travers family home to Creevy Pier and perchance a fresh mackerel if lucky, between Ballyshannon and Rossnowlagh.
The chicks may have flown the coop, some further than others, but the busy household, just before my arrival, had been nurturing and dispatching a brood of grandchildren to school, on what was an early Halloween treat.
In days that now are but distant drums, Olive facilitated a preschool just off the Donegal Road in Ballyshannon.
A road that has taken many exciting twists and turns, with the occasional exit, in what has been a wondrous journey, one that has bridged the chasm of the totality of life on this island, from portrayal of the very worst, to the most poignant, elegant and sublime.

(ABOVE: Nets of Wonder is a wonderful collection of earthly stories, glorious illustrations and great music)

The open and spacious kitchen is as welcoming as the warm personality that greets you at the door.
Her attentive ear, which has been honed through her professional work as a now retired clinical psychologist, later resurfaced in a different genre, one that saw her words cascading like the majesty of a waterfall, as many listeners to RTÉ’s Sunday Miscellany, have been enchanted with, for over a decade.
Words chiselled with the finesse of a sculptor from a University of Life graduate, a degree ranked so much greater than those of academic spheres, of which she has a pocketful as well, but words with the added ingredient of empathy, emotion, poignancy and subtlety that resonates so successfully with audiences.
Words that still carry the earthiness of her rural Fermanagh upbringing, that simplicity of purpose, but a genuine and honest connectivity, that personalises each story to the listener and now reader, finding a new home within the complex fabric of their own lives.
Olive’s newest collaborative venture, ‘Nets of Wonder’ which will be launched at this year’s Allingham Festival - just around the corner - sees a creative coalition between her youngest son, Eamon who is an exceptionally talented musician currently based in Berlin and an old friend of the family, Barry Britton, whose credits with ink and pen illustrations are already the stuff of legendary status.
First, through the initial catalyst of Ballyshannon Folk Festival and Surf posters, but now have diversified into many other aspects of life; twelve of which have so elegantly captured Olive’s words and added new dimension and flair to her own unique ingredients.

The three amigos themselves - Eamon Travers, Olive Travers and Barry Britton at their Dublin launch in the National Print Museum 

Eamon created the music to go with the stories and in these new trendy ways, you simply scan a QR code to listen to the accompanying music.
His ability to acquaint himself with the intimacies of the works was aided by the fact that Eamon had typed up all of the manuscripts for Olive and a few observations along the way, were also gratefully acknowledged by Mum.
Olive’s decades of using a dictaphone within her professional career, has also transferred to her storytelling, and she finds it more comfortable to use than typing. That being said, she is also a fan of, what is now probably considered old fashioned - ink and paper.
Olive explained how her work for many years as a clinical psychologist coalesced quite easily with her later writings, which she veered towards after retirement.
“Looking back, part of my love for psychology was that you are working all the time with people’s stories. It is a very privileged job. I spent years and years listening to people’s stories, with great respect. You realise that if people can tell their story, no matter how bad things are, once they can turn it into a story, you are actually dealing with it on some level. They are able to stand back from it and are able to reflect on it and look at it.”

(ABOVE: Illustrator and pen ink artist Barry Britton has been a great friend to Anthony, Olive and the Travers family for many years)   

A lot of Olive’s writing when she started “turning the lens around” as she phrased it, was a look “at an in between generation”.
“I think that we are an amazing generation. I'm in my late 60s now and I think that generation has its foot in something centuries old. When I was a very young child, living on the Banks of the Erne, my father was a farmer and my mother had been a nurse in London. They met at the Harvest Fair in Ballyshannon. My father was a good bit older, so my mother gave up this very romantic life and fell for my father, he was 39, she was 25.

(Above: One of Barry Britton's amazing illustrations that make this book even more special - Return to the Fushia)

“And then there was the children, but I remember very clearly the tilly lamp, the water pump outside, a flushed toilet outside, in a separate little building. We had no telephone, we had no television and it was a battery operated radio, so I grew up in the stuff of museums, and it very quickly became the stuff of museums, My father had two work horses, he did all his work with horses, but I was probably 13 before my father got a tractor.
“Later he became a baling contractor, so he moved from two very lovely horses and all the hours that God sent him and leapfrogged into the modern era.”
Olive’s break came through education as she expanded her horizons beyond the parish of Corrakeel and the Gormley family, up the Enniskillen Road by Toura.
“I passed the eleven plus and I was the only one out of our little two teacher primary school to have to get on the bus at half seven in the morning and darkness,” she said.

(ABOVE: Olive standing near the majesty of Creevy Pier, near Ballyshannon with rainbow included for free) 

“I would go to Enniskillen and I have written about that, and I might as well have been dropped in the middle of New York. I had never been anywhere and it was a huge shock going to Enniskillen.”
Mount Lourdes in Enniskillen was a private school and had only started taking “scholarship children”.
Olive recalled, with a hearty bellicose laugh, a very snobby Principal and one of the first things that was said to them to the effect that ‘we weren't to lower the tone of the school’.
Thankfully those words did not affect her in any negative way.
“School was such a delight for me. Coming from the wee primary school and suddenly you had the big library,” she said.
Later she got to work in the sunny sixties summers of Bundoran looking after some local children, which was a delight and a chance to get to the dances in the evenings.
Thereafter Olive moved onto Belfast at 18 and still had not left the country. She originally trained as a teacher, having studied English, Psychology and Philosophy.

(ABOVE: Olive Travers signed some of 'Nets of Wonder' are the Dublin launch. The book is published by Beehive Press)

She lived most of the '70s in the Falls Road and north Belfast, where she taught A-level students for a period.
And one of her moving stories from that troubled period will form part of a new RTÉ Sunday Miscellany Anthology 2018-2023 (to be launched in Dun Laoghaire on November 10) that is just about to be published and which she was greatly honoured to be selected for - a piece on how she had been caught up in Belfast’s Bloody Friday in July of 1972.
She had just finished her A Levels and was going to work in Scotland for the summer, in a canning factory.
Olive and her husband Anthony, then in their mid twenties, eventually moved south to his native Ballyshannon and she took up a position at Cregg House near Sligo.

(ABOVE: Eamon Travers talents and contributions are downloadable through the magic of a QR code) 

Intending to upgrade her English to a Masters level, for further teaching opportunities, a fortuitous meeting with a tutor, eventually saw her rekindling her interest in psychology. This, in turn saw her take up a role, after further postgraduate study and the significant arrival of their four beloved children, with the then North Western Health Board as a psychologist.
She later became a senior clinical psychologist when it morphed into the larger HSE as well as heading up a number of national agencies and initiatives around the area of child sex abuse.
Work in that field led in 1999 to the publication of ‘Behind the Silhouettes: Exploring the Myths of Sexual Abuse’, newspaper articles, appearances on RTÉ and even the offer of expanding her occasional reviews in the Irish Times to that of a weekly columnist, but one that she passed over. Apparently, the role was then offered to a certain Michael Harding!

ABOVE: Around the table again, but this time to sign some some early copies of 'Nets of Wonder'

Later and to the delight of many listeners and readers, Olive realised that she had no capacity to write fiction.
It was only when she reached the fulsome age of retirement, that she delved into the new depths of the writing well. A first script acceptance by Sunday Miscellany was the catalyst and indeed confidence that she required.
In a world increasingly dominated by digital content, Nets of Wonder is said to rekindle the tactile pleasure of holding a book in one's hands, pivoting Olive’s psychological lens inward, mining her own memories, relationships, and life experiences for this selection of writings.
In other words, it is a damn good read and a perfect Christmas acquisition.
You can also catch Olive, Eamon and Barry at the launch of their new collaboration ‘Nets of Wonder’ and a wonderful presentation at this year’s Allingham Festival on Thursday, November 9.
Renowned artist Barry Britton will also exhibit his twelve illustrated responses to Olive scripts as part of the publishing of ‘Nets of Wonder’ by Beehive Press.
Check out www.allinghamfestival.com for the full array of amazing creativity on offer at this year's fare.