KEEPING IT TOGETHER

Kate Kerrigan

ONCE a high-flying magazine editor in Dublin, living the classic, harried executive lifestyle, Kate Kerrigan swapped it all to be a full-time novelist and live in her idyll — the fishing village of Killala, Co. Mayo. But rather than being a sleepy existence, it’s been anything but for the 50-something mother of The Teenager (nearly 14), and The Tominator, five (oh, and there’s the artist husband Niall, too). It’s chaos, as she explains every week in her hilarious and touching column...

IHAVE until the end of April to write half a book. I’m terrified. On the plus side, it’s given me the perfect excuse to head to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annamakerrig, Co. Monaghan. This fantastic retreat is where artists and writers from all over Ireland, and all over the world, come to gather and work.

This beautiful old house, with its sweeping lawns and kitchen gardens and stunning lakeside location, is a place where we come to reflect, get our creative juices flowing, and be in the company of other artists. Aside from the big house there are artists’ studios and cottages. Every one of them is stuffed with artists, composers, theatre directors and common-or-garden writers, beavering away on our operas, novels and paintings.

Yet, even at full capacity, as it was this week, there is a quietness and serenity about the place. There is a constant flow of people through the help-yourself kitchen area all day, but while everyone is convivial and friendships-for-life are often formed here, the primary purpose for everyone is ‘no-distraction’. It is a safe and productive environment to finish and start projects or to get you over a creative hump. I am one third of the way through my new book and under this horrible deadline.

I’ve come here to push me past that crucial halfway point so that by the time I leave I can see some light at the end of the tunnel.

The thing I love about working in the Tyrone Guthrie house is the feeling of artistic comradeship you get from being around other creative people. Often, when finishing a book, I take off on my own. Usually to a hermitage in Sligo, where I lock myself away with a box of food and a hot water bottle, forbidding myself from returning home until I have written ‘the end’.

The pressure here is entirely different, but equally intense.

This morning I was sitting at my computer in my room looking out on the courtyard thinking, ‘I might just give myself a little potter on Facebook for 10 minutes…’ Then I remembered the poet I had met the night before and thought, he is probably in his room, two doors down, sweating it out over a poem. Like, HOW can I even be thinking about social media when there are people nearby writing poetry?

There are people here, too, with even scarier deadlines than me. The Belfast composer, Neil Martin, calmly informed me earlier that he was writing an opera to be performed in June. A whole opera. In JUNE! He seemed very calm about it but I felt slightly hysterical on his behalf and reached for another scone. There are scones here. A lot of scones. A variety of scones — fruit, coconut. It’s a problem.

The kitchen staff are all ‘feeders’. Basically, we pretend to be ‘starving artists’ for a week and they stuff us like literary foie gras. After talking to Neil, I ran back to my room where I wrote a colossal 5,000 words before dinner. He frightened me, then I frightened myself. Writing can be a strange process.

I had packed Agatha Christie style evening wear for dinner. Frocks.

Residents of the house are obliged to gather for dinner together each night at seven. There’s a gong. No dress code but I go for it because otherwise I would not leave off my black jersey day-wear/sleepwear uniform all week. Dinner is always sublime although it can be intimidating mixing with so many ‘clevers’. The esteemed poet Mary Dorcy is here and gorgeous Sinead Gleeson, editor of award winning The Long Gaze Back. However, it’s always a pleasant surprise for this insecure ex-hairdresser to discover that swanky literary types are usually just nice, ordinary people like the rest of us. This evening, I entered a conversation about Arnold Schoenberg with a poet and a composer. They won.

But still — Schoenberg, y’know? I was delighted with myself. His name had cropped up while I was researching a novel years ago. I threw out my only fact about him, then excused myself to go back to my room and write.

This is the only place I have ever been where you can legitimately exit a conversation mid-sentence on the grounds of ‘an idea’.

I’ll be stuck here now at my desk until I have emptied my brain, then I’ll crawl into bed for a few hours before the words take me over again at dawn. I know I am weird to work like this, but then, so is everyone else here. I’ll get this book written if it kills me. In the meantime, there will be scones.

How can I even think about social media when there are people nearby writing poetry?