{"id":519873,"date":"2026-06-26T17:46:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/519873\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T17:46:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T17:46:11","slug":"cork-author-im-renting-in-my-40s-im-lucky-to-still-be-able-to-live-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/519873\/","title":{"rendered":"Cork author: \u2018I\u2019m renting in my 40s… I\u2019m lucky to still be able to live here\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sara Baume does not have far to travel for this year\u2019s West Cork Literary Festival.<\/p>\n

Born in Lancashire, England, and brought up in East Cork, the writer and visual artist now lives near Skibbereen.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccreative non-fiction\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll of my books have kind of blurred truth and fiction,\u201d Sara acknowledges, \u201cbut there\u2019s always kind of a balance. [The story of Opening Night] is true, but I\u2019m being creative with the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n 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 \u2013 an attraction that would go on to inspire the whole book.<\/p>\n

Sara recalls: \u201cThey 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\u2019t often do this, but I ended up seeking out the painter.\u201d<\/p>\n

That painter, Mollie Douthit, was originally from North Dakota in the USA but living in West Cork, \u201cin 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,\u201d says Sara.<\/p>\n

The writer was \u201cenchanted\u201d by Mollie\u2019s way of life and work. \u201cI 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\u201d.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 colour reproductions of which are embedded in the text \u2013 that Mollie was in the process of creating for a solo exhibition, culminating in the \u2018opening night\u2019 of the title.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cromanticising the fact that Mollie was very self-contained and solitary\u201d.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cIn the course of writing, Mollie\u2019s life actually got much, much more complicated. One might even say that I am used to writing really uneventful books, so I hadn\u2019t banked on this at all! Basically, all of these things happened that I hadn\u2019t foreseen, and the book is a bit more exciting than I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Writing about a real person in real time is unusual and, as Sara discovered, unpredictable. What drew her to the form?<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe same as any writer, it\u2019s trying to get as close as you can to the truth of human experience. I\u2019ve read more and more non-fiction over the last number of years. I think there\u2019s 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.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Sara\u2019s approach to writing novels is very structured, so a project like Opening Night was something of a leap of faith.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith my novels, I know exactly what\u2019s going to happen,\u201d she says. \u201cWhereas 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

An overarching theme of the book is friendship.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe book as a whole,\u201d she says, \u201cis kind of about friendship… While I was writing it, I became very interested in how people\u2019s relationships with their friends have changed over the years, whether people were putting more or less emphasis on their friendships as they got older.\u201d<\/p>\n

An interest in life in West Cork wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Art, Sara explains, \u201cis a way to satisfy the insistence to work with my hands\u201d.<\/p>\n

She splits her time between her two crafts and says that when busy with writing, \u201c[art] is almost a way of balancing my mind\u201d.<\/p>\n

While she considers herself to be more of a writer, art is very important to Sara. \u201cI\u2019m always kind of treading the line between the two,\u201d she acknowledges. \u201cI worry that if I was more assiduously focusing on writing novels, maybe I would be doing much better.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can be a little bit critical of how gentrified the region is becoming,\u201d she notes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI\u2019m renting in my forties, and I\u2019m very lucky to still be able to live here, but there\u2019s this sadness that the community is dwindling because we just can\u2019t afford to rent or buy here because there\u2019s so many second homes and holiday homes.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Sara doesn\u2019t shy away from this criticism in Opening Night, which she describes as \u201ca little bit more political than other books I\u2019ve written\u201d. She adds: \u201cI\u2019m very attached to West Cork, but it\u2019s all the time overshadowed by this knowledge that it\u2019s not my home and I can\u2019t stay here, for financial reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018grassroots\u2019 artists living and working in West Cork are, Sara believes, essential to the region, and she was keen to represent them in her book.<\/p>\n

\u201cUltimately, it\u2019s the arts community that are making this region interesting and vibrant. And there will soon come a time when we\u2019re not here anymore… It\u2019s a problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The West Cork Literary Festival runs from Friday, July 10 to Friday, July 17, see www.westcorkliteraryfestival.ie.<\/p>\n

Mollie Douthit will present a solo exhibition of paintings in Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in summer, 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sara Baume does not have far to travel for this year\u2019s West Cork Literary Festival. Born in Lancashire,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":519874,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[288,93,61,60,221695],"class_list":["post-519873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-west-cork-literary-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=519873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/519874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=519873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=519873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=519873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}