A New LifeJohn McKenna gave up the good life for for a better life and became the artisan publisher of the Bridgestone Guides, writes Elaine Edwards
John McKenna uses the word lucky a lot. Like many who have achieved happiness and success through hard work, but also through sheer love of what they do, the writer and publisher puts much of it down to being in the right place at the right time.
The success of the Bridgestone Guides published by John and his wife Sally from their home in Durrus, west Cork, is most certainly not all down to luck, however.
He's a fluid, engaging talker and, even on the phone, his total passion for food, for the artisan produce of which he has been champion - and indeed his passion for the life he leads - is evident.
It was through serendipity, he says, that he and Sally hit upon a subterranean artisan food culture - growers, cheesemakers, fish-smokers - on their travels around Ireland in 1989 in a beaten-up Renault 4L bought for €100. Then, and a couple of years later when they published their second book, they hadn't a bean. They had borrowed €3,000 from the bank and all their possessions fit in a van.
Travelling "on the cheap" and the contact they had with this artisan culture, made McKenna realise he had been brought up in what he describes as "a sort of petit bourgeois way, where getting a professional career was the zenith of one's life".
This year, he and Sally will publish five books, but McKenna still considers himself an "artisan publisher". He can, at this stage "assuage the overdraft" doing work he loves based in a location he loves.
The McKennas live an hour-and-a-half from Cork city, a region a friend of his calls "the Llevant of Ireland". It is, for them, the "centre of the universe". But some friends threw up their hands in horror when the McKennas moved to the remote location 12 years ago.
"It was a leap in the dark. But I sometimes think leaps in the dark are maybe not such bad things," he says.
"As I have seen Ireland changing over the last 12 years since we moved. We have become more capitalistic and we've become more comfortable and as a result, because these things go hand in hand, we have become more conservative as a people."
He thinks this will change - he is already beginning to see a new "diaspora" of skilled people moving away from the pressures of the "bourgeois life".
The three McKenna children - Connie (11), Sam (9) and PJ (6) - attend the local national school, which has just 26 pupils and two teachers and is five minutes away. He and Sally work "in relays", one of them making the children's dinner or helping with homework while the other works in the office. Researching the books involves some travel, but they are also lucky to be able to spend a lot of time at home, he says.
Cyberspace has been "an extraordinary blessing", allowing them to research and publish their books from West Cork even though their editors, designer, illustrator and distributor live variously in Dublin, Northern Ireland and New York.
"Having an office at home and not having any downtime in terms of commuting, you can be quite efficient."
But he's adamant he is not a workaholic "by any means" and loves to get out into the garden, where he grows vegetables with varying degrees of success. He is also chairman of the local chamber music festival. Literally, he eats and drinks his work. But it's not about "stuffing my face".
"People often think that food is about status - it's not, it's about nurturing. When you're in that moment that something comes together and you cook something that comes together.
"The fundamental purpose of great cooking is to have a table where people come and share and talk."
The late food writer Richard Olney, whom McKenna once met in Provence, said to him: "If you're interested in food and wine, you believe in magic."
"And I believe in magic - that's what food can give you."
Food culture in Ireland, he says, is now being driven by the second-generation artisans and by this new diaspora of people with different skills to bring to food.
Even when he and Sally began to "pull together a bit of a living" from writing about food and liking it, people would tell him he should go back to the Bar, "shin up the bourgeois tree", as he describes it.
As a barrister, before he took the life-changing sabbatical to travel around Ireland in 1989, he says he "elevated failure to dizzy new heights".
He was one of those barristers who polishes the seats of the Law Library with "the arse of a cheap suit".
Some still tell him he could make a fortune out of it.
"People say: 'You could be making 10 grand a week.' Well, yeah, I could be, but I don't want to. Ten grand a week isn't enough to look into Liam Lawlor's bank accounts."
The McKennas won't be returning to the bourgeois life any day soon.