Cork author: ‘I’m renting in my 40s... I’m lucky to still be able to live here’

Sara Baume does not have far to travel for this year’s West Cork Literary Festival.

Born in Lancashire, England, and brought up in East Cork, the writer and visual artist now lives near Skibbereen.

Sara will be at the festival to introduce her new book, Opening Night. The author of three novels and one non-fiction book, she describes Opening Night as a work of “creative non-fiction”.

“All of my books have kind of blurred truth and fiction,” Sara acknowledges, “but there’s always kind of a balance. [The story of Opening Night] is true, but I’m being creative with the truth.”

Opening Night begins at the closing party of an artist-led group exhibition in West Cork that Sara attended shortly after the covid pandemic. She found herself drawn to two paintings in particular – an attraction that would go on to inspire the whole book.

Sara recalls: “They were very small and figurative scenes of rooms, a bathroom and a bedroom, kind of from peculiar angles. I was just really intrigued by these two paintings. And I don’t often do this, but I ended up seeking out the painter.”

That painter, Mollie Douthit, was originally from North Dakota in the USA but living in West Cork, “in a little log cabin at the end of a twisting laneway... We just instantly seemed to click in the way you do with some people and became good friends,” says Sara.

The writer was “enchanted” by Mollie’s way of life and work. “I was intrigued by her paintings and her process. Everything happened inside the walls of her little cabin, and there was this lovely blurring of art and life”.

Before she knew it, Sara was writing about Mollie. The intention was that the narrative arc of the book would span a series of paintings – colour reproductions of which are embedded in the text – that Mollie was in the process of creating for a solo exhibition, culminating in the ‘opening night’ of the title.

In many ways, Mollie sounds like a Sara Baume character come to life. Her novels, including the multiple award-winning Spill Simmer Falter Wither, feature protagonists who live their lives in varying degrees of isolation, often by choice. In initially writing Opening Night, Sara was, as she notes, “romanticising the fact that Mollie was very self-contained and solitary”.

The book, however, took a different turn when Mollie unexpectedly found herself going through a period of tumultuous change in her personal life. Sara explains: “In the course of writing, Mollie’s life actually got much, much more complicated. One might even say that I am used to writing really uneventful books, so I hadn’t banked on this at all! Basically, all of these things happened that I hadn’t foreseen, and the book is a bit more exciting than I expected.”

Writing about a real person in real time is unusual and, as Sara discovered, unpredictable. What drew her to the form?

“The same as any writer, it’s trying to get as close as you can to the truth of human experience. I’ve read more and more non-fiction over the last number of years. I think there’s some really interesting writers doing great things with the essay or the memoir, making it more literary or just kind of form-bending. So, I feel like there was a precedent there for me to follow.”

Sara’s approach to writing novels is very structured, so a project like Opening Night was something of a leap of faith.

“With my novels, I know exactly what’s going to happen,” she says. “Whereas with this one, from the beginning I knew that I was working through this series of paintings to the opening night of the exhibition, but other than that, it completely went away from me. I just had to surrender to what was happening.”

An overarching theme of the book is friendship.

“The book as a whole,” she says, “is kind of about friendship... While I was writing it, I became very interested in how people’s relationships with their friends have changed over the years, whether people were putting more or less emphasis on their friendships as they got older.”

An interest in life in West Cork wasn’t the only thing that Sara and Mollie had in common. Sara herself is a visual artist, a practice that she examines in detail in her non-fiction book, handiwork.

Art, Sara explains, “is a way to satisfy the insistence to work with my hands”.

She splits her time between her two crafts and says that when busy with writing, “[art] is almost a way of balancing my mind”.

While she considers herself to be more of a writer, art is very important to Sara. “I’m always kind of treading the line between the two,” she acknowledges. “I worry that if I was more assiduously focusing on writing novels, maybe I would be doing much better.”

Sara is one of many creative people to call West Cork home. As events like the West Cork Literary Festival showcase, the region is a haven for the arts and literature. Sara, however, fears for the future of the artistic community.

“I can be a little bit critical of how gentrified the region is becoming,” she notes. 

“I’m renting in my forties, and I’m very lucky to still be able to live here, but there’s this sadness that the community is dwindling because we just can’t afford to rent or buy here because there’s so many second homes and holiday homes.”

Sara doesn’t shy away from this criticism in Opening Night, which she describes as “a little bit more political than other books I’ve written”. She adds: “I’m very attached to West Cork, but it’s all the time overshadowed by this knowledge that it’s not my home and I can’t stay here, for financial reasons.”

The ‘grassroots’ artists living and working in West Cork are, Sara believes, essential to the region, and she was keen to represent them in her book.

“Ultimately, it’s the arts community that are making this region interesting and vibrant. And there will soon come a time when we’re not here anymore... It’s a problem.”

Sara Baume will be at the West Cork Literary Festival on Thursday, July 16, at noon in Future Forests along with Marion Coutts. Both are visual artists as well as writers, and the power of art and nature to heal runs through both of their books.

The West Cork Literary Festival runs from Friday, July 10 to Friday, July 17, see www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie.

Mollie Douthit will present a solo exhibition of paintings in Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in summer, 2027.