Clear inspiration from island life

Best-selling author Anne Griffin’s latest novel The Island of Longing is based on Cape Clear. She explains how the island and its inhabitants helped her break into writing and continue to be a source of creative inspiration, writes Conor Power

THERE’S something about the tightness of community combined with the isolation that island life brings that brings out the creative best in many people and which draws so many towards them. 

West Cork’s islands have drawn their fair share of creative people, including bestselling author Anne Griffin, for whom Cape Clear has played a pivotal part in her life.

In Anne Griffin’s latest novel The Island of Longing, the fictional Roaring Bay Island is wholly based on Cape Clear Island.

For the author, Oileán Chléire is  not only central to this book but central to her life and more particularly, to her career as a writer.

‘I chose it because I’ve such connections to Cape Clear,’ says Anne, who says she never tires of talking about writing or about Cape Clear. ‘My sister lives there with her husband and family, so for thirty-odd years, I’ve been going down there. I’ve just fallen in love with the place… I just find it so beautiful. Even pulling into the harbour, looking at that really steep hill rising to your left… I just find it so aesthetically beautiful – the north and south harbour and both of them lovely to sit by and while away the time.”

Anne’s success over the last number of years has been impressive but although she has had a lifelong passion for literature, she only began writing 10 years ago at the age of 44. Bypassing the more customary route of joining a writing group first, she plunged straight into the world of novel-writing feet first when an opportunity on Cape Clear presented itself.

‘I had the opportunity to go and live on Cape Clear for four months,’ recalls Anne, ‘and I decided to write a book.’

In that four-month period, she wrote an entire novel.

‘I wrote a novel that was based on somebody coming to an island. It’s a novel that has never seen the light of day and it never will. It was just a practice novel. But I actually called that ‘practice’ novel The Island of Longing, so it’s really nice that, 10 years on, my third novel bears that title. But it’s not the novel that I was writing.

Author Anne Griffin gives her husband James Lowry a kiss at the new kissing gate on Cape Clear Island while being serenaded by Fiachra O Tóirne.

‘So Cape Clear has a huge significance for me. It has a huge place in my heart – both for its beauty and its silence and its cut-off-ness and also for my career. For my career, it’s been central to me getting started on this road of writing.

‘I just adore how island community works.  You’re sort-of in one another’s pockets but you can also be well away from people if you want to. It has that lovely kind of balance and, for an introvert like me, it works exceptionally well.’

In the last few years in preparation for The Island of Longing, Anne says that she wanted to write a novel based on an island but based on the female skipper of a ferry. Niamh Ní Dhrisceoil, who features in the new three-part RTÉ series Mealladh na Mara (Tuesdays on RTÉ1, 7pm) came to mind. 

‘Niamh Ní Dhrisceoil, who skippers the ferry there in the summer, was my inspiration for that. Watching her work all these years and being in a male-dominated world such as that one, really impressed me. She’s a bit of a power-house.

‘I wanted to capture that so, for the last couple of years, every time I’ve gone down to Cape, she’s been very kind and has spoken with me for quite a while about what it is to skipper a ferry.”

Anne also has in-laws involved in the ferry business on Cape Clear, so she had a lot of local resources on hand to ensure that in the final drafts, all terminology and descriptions of the ins and outs of island ferrying were authentic and correct.

‘There were a few bits along the way that I got wrong,’ Anne laughs. ‘There was some terminology that I didn’t have correct. People didn’t understand what I was trying to say. They’d go, “No, you don’t say it like this – you say it like that”’! It was very helpful to have people around who could set me straight.’

Before morphing into one of Ireland’s most successful authors, Anne went through a number of careers. A two-year stint with Waterstone’s Bookshop in Dublin and London was more in keeping with her lifelong love of literature, but she also spent a couple of decades as a Community Development Worker working with marginalised groups in Dublin, before re-training again and specialising in financial management with charitable organisations.

It was her long-time friend (and highly successful author) John Boyne who continually encourage her to start writing.

‘He said to me once, “Why have you never written, Anne?” because we used to spend so much time talking about books – what we were reading, why we liked them and so on. He said, “You should just try and write.” And, it was at that point that I had the opportunity to bring my son down to Cape Clear for four months to go to the school there. I just thought that if I was going to ever make this big break from my ordinary life, why not have a go at it now?”

It was an unofficial kind of ‘residency’ that was to change her life and she hit the ground running – quite literally.

“On the very first morning, after I dropped my son to school, I remember running back to the apartment and I started typing. I didn’t even know what the story was going to be … I didn’t want to write anything fantastic. I only wanted to see if I had the ability to write an entire book; to write 70,000 words, the minimum for a novel. I thought if I could hit that target and have a vaguely readable story, I’d be happy. So I manage to do that.’

John Boyne was, of course, anxious to see what his friend and protégée had produced but Anne wasn’t interested in showing her first novel to anyone; simply to know that she could do it. With that knowledge in the bag, she decided to write about ‘something different’ and that turned out to be her debut novel When All Is Said. It became a number one bestseller and went on to win the Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards in 2019.

In the meantime, Anne returned once more to college – this time to UCD where she undertook an MA in Creative Writing. It was there, she said, she found her ‘writing tribe’, most of whom were instrumental in the process of creating Anne’s debut novel by reading over it many times and giving their feedback.

The island life continues to bring out the best in Anne’s creative side.

Inspiration for artists on the isles

ANNE Griffin isn’t the only one to fall under the charms of West Cork Islands. French author and bête noire of the French literary scene Michel Houellebecq spent some creative years on Bere
Island. Writer and journalist Helen Riddell lives and works there. 

The island in Louise O’Neill’s novel After the Silence, meanwhile, is also loosely based on Cape Clear. The popularity of Eoin Warner’s RTÉ documentary Ireland’s Wild Islands has also pushed West Cork islands to the forefront of people’s imagination in recent times. 

The presenter is a Bantry native and the emotionally-charged final episode reunited him with some of the islands off the West Cork coast.