1 Stories come from the strangest places
What inspires Danielle McLaughlin to write a short story? A character? A situation? At a free lunchtime reading in Bantry library, she explains that the title story from her forthcoming collection, due from Stinging Fly Press in October, began when her youngest child asked her the magical question: “Are there dinosaurs on other planets?” That was only the start of it. “Then my husband and kids went for a walk in a nearby forest and came home with a skull,” McLaughlin says. Roll on October. We want more of these stories.
2 Books change minds, bring down governments and give you diarrhoea
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That last one is only if you eat them, of course. Alongside the main programme, the West Cork Literary Festival runs a popular children's festival. This year has workshops with Judy Curtin and Sarah Webb, as well as a storytelling caravan in the centre of town. Shane Hegarty, author of Darkmouth and one-time arts editor of this newspaper, delights his young audience with a presentation that contains just the right amount of toilet jokes, off-the-cuff one- liners and interactive carry-on.
Hegarty, whose second novel, Darkmouth: Worlds Explode, is due from HarperCollins in autumn, is clearly happy in the company of his youthful readers. He isn't fazed when, having shown a slide of the German cover of his book and asked if anyone knew any German words, one child helpfully responds with a fully fledged Hitler salute. Children and animals, eh?
3 Festivals are a bit of a fistful
You think you’ll get to everything but you never do. I couldn’t make it to Irene O’Mara’s session, which gave writers tips for reading aloud. Or the talk by my colleague Martyn Turner about the life of a political cartoonist. And I can’t get into Kate Kirwan’s Harper Lee gig because the tiny room at the back of the Bantry Bookshop is crammed. We try to listen in. Honest. But the books on the shelves are just too beguiling; and the sun is shining on the water and . . .
4 If you make a balls of a short story, it’s not a big deal
Such is Christine Dwyer Hickey's advice to new writers. Start with a story, just in case. As the author of a first-rate collection of stories as well as some of the best novels written in Ireland this century, Dwyer Hickey ought to know. But we do seem to be in the midst of a golden age of the short story, and Fish Anthology 2015, launched at Bantry, contains a brace of new names we'll soon be reading more of. The winner of the short-story competition, Chris Weldon, hails from the UK; second-placed Keren Heenan is Australian; and third-placed Kara Moskowitz is from New York.
5 So that’s what a chairman does
Amid all the book talk and backchat, one of the most striking presences at Bantry is that of Francis Humphrys, chief executive of West Cork Music, who is to be found checking tickets, smoothing out minor hiccups and, on at least one over-subscribed occasion, carrying in extra chairs. The apparently tireless Humphrys is now chasing a purpose-built venue for the chamber music festival, which would mean additional venues for the literary festival as well.
“This is something we’ve been dreaming about for 15 years,” he tells me. “But it’s not going to be built out of donations from people living in Bantry or people coming to the festival. We need government support to make it happen.”
The merry sound of box office records smashing this year – at both the chamber music and the literary festival, whose new artistic director, Eimear O’Herlihy, plays a blinder with a superbly balanced programme – has been music to Humphrys’s ears. “It’s exciting. It means people have faith in what you’re doing. They keep coming back, and they come from all over the world.”
6 Writers shouldn’t go to the gym
Everyone wants to hear Mary Costello talk about the Irish Book of the Year for 2014, Academy Street, which she does with the same contained, quiet elegance that characterises her fiction. "It's all about the expansion of consciousness," she says of the life of her heroine, Tess. "Nothing is wasted. Everything enlarges the heart."
Costello vividly describes the sort of sustained energy that is needed to write a good novel; to write anything good, in fact. At one point, she says, concerned that she is getting no exercise and having no contact with the outside world, she joins a gym. “And then I was afraid to go on the treadmill in case that energy would all dissipate into the gym equipment instead of going into the book.”
Now that’s the best excuse we’ve ever heard for letting a membership lapse.
7 Islands really are out of this world
One of the best book-related events you’ll ever experience, anywhere, is the one where everyone crams on to the ferry and heaves to for Whiddy Island in the middle of Bantry Bay. It’s just a 15-minute journey, so you would think the island wouldn’t be all that different to the mainland, right?
Wrong. Whiddy truly is a place apart. This year the readers are the poet Mick Delap, whose new collection, Opening Time, features a sequence of poems that re-imagine the history of the bay, complete with violent skirmishes, French landings, scientific mapping and Joanna MacGregor playing Beethoven at Bantry House. Delap, a former sound engineer at the BBC, has orchestrated an eerily atmospheric soundtrack to accompany the poems.
Also reading is Cormac James, whose novel The Surfacing features a ship trapped in Arctic ice. As James reads, wind roars across the roof of the marquee, setting its frame squeaking and cracking so that it feels like we are marooned in some dark corner of the Northwest Passage.
Best of all, though, is when Katharine Norbury is reading from her memoir The Fish Ladder. During her retelling of a Welsh folk legend – at the very moment when the hero has morphed into a grain of wheat to escape from a wicked witch, who has morphed into a chicken in order to eat him – into the tent, bold as brass, strolls a chicken. Norbury doesn't miss a beat. "I said a black chicken," she informs the rust-coloured fowl. The bird isn't bothered.
8 Graham Norton is writing a novel
He's holed up for the summer at his holiday home near Ahakista on the Sheep's Head Peninsula. So it is almost kosher for Norton to star in Bantry's prime Friday-night slot; although, as he says himself, "me appearing at a literary festival must be one of the signs of the Apocalypse". His interviewer is the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, Paul Colton. Cue a thoroughly good-humoured and enjoyable evening with riffs on dogs, the mammy, the same-sex marriage referendum and the Ahakista regatta. Norton appears to be genuinely happy, genuinely sane and – dammit – genuinely nice. No wonder west Cork loves him; he fits right in.
9 Writers get angry too
We think of literary festivals as mild-mannered occasions, and writers as mild individuals, but they get riled sometimes. The novelist John Boyne is still angry at the treatment he received from priests when he was a kid. The journalist Nick Davies fulminates about unscrupulous tabloid hacks. And poet Ruth Padel is furious about the state of affairs in the Middle East. Who, though, gets really, really mad about habitat destruction and the loss of biodiversity? Pitifully few. So Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground, a luminous nature book about a piece of waste ground, is like a breath of fresh air. He quotes Yeats and Auden, and waxes lyrical about swifts. Then he works himself into a lather over the UK's badger cull, which saw the government run roughshod over scientific advice for its own nefarious purposes. "If we're not listening to logic, then what are we listening to? Who are we listening to? And why? What kind of species are we?" Go Rob Cowen.
10 The meaning of life is . . . books
It's bliss to be in Bantry during this week-long celebration of reading and writing, and to see people tucking into coffee, cake and a book in the wonderful Organico cafe, discussing an event they've just attended, or planning what they might do next. But it is left to John Boyne, during an absorbing two-hander with fellow novelist Paul Murray, to spell it out for us. "The reason all of you are here," Boyne declares, "is that you read books as children." And he's right.
