Visitors to West Cork Literary Festival were treated to an eclectic mix of poetry, prose, advice from experts and, indeed, one rainbow pony, determined to come into the world. So what did we learn?
"Get up in the morning before your self-censor is awake and write down the first words that come to you. Oh, all right. You can have a cup of tea first. If you must . . ."
THE POET AND novelist Dermot Healy has some advice for aspiring poets on the first morning of his week-long workshop at West Cork Literary Festival.
He begins by passing around a book of poems and getting everyone to read a verse aloud. It’s unnervingly like being back at school – which, indeed we are, in the light-filled classrooms of Bantry’s gaelscoil, Coláiste Pobail Bheanntraí – but by the time the book makes its second round people have stopped worrying and started to listen to each other.
The poet’s ear is as important as the eye, Healy says. “Get the feel of the words on your tongue.” The conversation ranges from etymology through ancient Egyptian rituals to more personal topics: how he came by the titles of his books, and his Canute-like struggles with the sea, which is threatening to engulf his Ballyconnell home.
All that and more before we even get to the first coffee break.
"Nothing personal, but there are no film stars in this room"
JIM CRACE, the author of 11 novels, including the Whitbread winners Quarantine and Continent, makes us all feel good as he reads from his unpublished novel Harvest at Bantry Library. Good looks aren’t important, he says. What’s important is energy. And truth.
What makes it extraordinary to be sitting here, as a reader, is that Crace has already decided this will be his last novel. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me,” he says. “It’s not as if I’m being sent off to a writer’s suicide clinic in Switzerland.” He’s just tired of himself.
What is Harvest about? “It’s another bourgeois book full of landscape and beauty and struggling communities and all those things that my 17-year-old would despise.”
"I didn’t think much about plot . . . I always hope it will conjure itself up somehow"
DRAFTED IN AS last-minute replacements for the absent Maureen Gaffney, the mother-and-daughter novelists Anita and Kiran Desai talk about being not quite being Indian writers but not part of the Indian diaspora, either; about the need to fight their corner with cover designers – “we always get stamped with cliches: a beautiful fabric, a carpet, an elephant,” says Anita; “or the Taj Mahal”, adds Kiran – about what it’s like to be two women writing in the same house. (Pretty civilised, it seems.)
Houses, observes the festival’s artistic director, Denyse Woods, feature strongly in their work; often, especially in Anita’s early books, almost as prisons for women. “I really didn’t know a world outside,” she agrees. “I had never stepped outside.”
Her speaking voice is so soft that we have to lean forward to listen. As she speaks about her own mother, who settled in India and never returned to her native Germany, and about the similarities and differences between her books and those of her daughter – “Kiran seems to me so passionate and so open: my writing has always been so secretive and so closed” – she weaves a spell so gently gracious that nobody wants to break it by getting up to leave.
"If you’re thinking of sailing the south Atlantic, it’s best not to do it in winter"
THE CORK POET Theo Dorgan packs out the upstairs room at the Mariner Pub for the first of a series of events with a maritime flavour sponsored by Bantry Bay Harbour Commission, spinning hair-raising tales of his “late vocation” adventures on the high seas and reading from his books Sailing for Home and Time on the Ocean.
His poems, anecdotes, character sketches of fellow sailors and off-the-cuff remarks have the audience – a good number of whom, to judge by their tans, are sailors themselves – in the palm of his hand. Finally, the organisers call time from the back of the room.
“I’ll stop,” says Dorgan.
“No!” shouts the audience.
“All right. I’ll read another poem.”
"Superheroes can be supervillains as well"
AT A WORKSHOP in Bantry Library a dozen youngsters are raring to get going on their very own superhero comics, with tips and encouragement from the comic-book author Alan Nolan.
The way kids sit on chairs is a workshop in itself. They bounce and sway. They sit on their knees with legs bent beneath them, or with one leg crossed over the other knee.
Nolan produces three black plastic buckets. “Who wants to pick some names from the Random Superhero Generator?” he asks. Everyone does. Characters and superpowers take shape with surprising swiftness. Disaster Lad. Mole Boy. Rocket Geezer. Then it’s a question of creating a look for each superhero. “His teeth could be flames,” suggests Marco. “Good thinking,” says Nolan. “And don’t forget superheroes can be supervillains as well.”
Mutant insects do battle with zombies that can breathe underwater. There will be blood on the page – probably blue or green – by the time this is over.
There’s just one dissenting voice. A tiny girl named Grace, dressed in a flowery top and turquoise leggings, is having no truck with all this violence. “I just want to draw a rainbow pony,” she insists. And she does.
"It’s just not the kind of book I’d want to read. I don’t care about her misery"
THE LITERARY AGENT Marianne Gunn O’Connor gives her verdict on the opening page of a putative first novel. She, along with publishing director Suzanne Baboneau of Simon Schuster and the bestselling novelist Anita Shreve, has drawn a large crowd to the Maritime Hotel for Writer Idol, a literary X Factor in which samples of new writing are read aloud.
When members of the panel have had enough they raise their hand. When two hands go up the reading stops – perhaps as early as one or two sentences in – and the criticism begins. “Never, ever, start a story or a novel with a character waking up. Just don’t do it,” says Shreve after what seems like a couple of words of one entry.
When Kate Thompson makes it to the end of reading her piece, Shreve initiates a round of applause for the unknown author. So it’s not all negative.
But as the pages fall like ninepins the list of no-nos grows. No ice-blue eyes. No smooth skin or designer stubble. No cold sweats. And definitely no pounding hearts. At the end of the session Gunn O’Connor says that, with one exception, she hasn’t heard anything particularly original or gripping. She sends people off to study the first page of The Butcher Boy and Love in the Time of Cholera. She also urges them to keep writing. But the lesson is clear: it’s a tough old game, the writing business.
"He was banging on about oil all the time . . . When you’re nine years old, sulking in the back of the car, you just don’t want to know"
NOO SARO-WIWO recalls childhood travels in Nigeria with her father, Ken. It’s a tricky emotional combination, this. A book, The Transwonderland Amusement Park, that is promoting Nigeria as a tourist destination – “We have chimps, we have gorillas, we have music, we have birdwatching on beautiful lakes” – and a parent who was executed by a psychotic dictator. But Saro-Wiwo, whose work as a subeditor on the New Scientist’s website funds her travel-writing career, pulls it off with verve and humour. The informal, cafe-style setting of the session helps.
As we sit around drinking coffee in the tearooms of Bantry House she answers questions about her father’s environmental activism, discusses the problems of contemporary Nigeria and produces family memories that silence us – or have us laughing. “He put us on a train to visit our cousins in the north. There were no toilets, and we had nothing to eat except rice, which went sour on the second day.” Her affection and exasperation ring so true that we come out smiling. And the sun, for once, is shining on Bantry Bay.
We might not wish to rush off to Nigeria on holiday, but we want to read her book. It’s what literary festivals are all about.
