Photo by Kenneth O’Halloran.

I spoke to Sara Baume via Zoom during my lunch break on a Friday in mid February. It was the first sunny day in a while and just mild enough for the air to have that still, sort of expectant feeling that comes before Spring. I was under-prepared for the conversation — pleased, but scatty, with irrelevant papers spread over my desk. My questions were ready, but I hadn’t had the time to mull them over, and I didn’t know how to speak to a writer, or how to respond and move between ideas.

I think it was the weather that we first discussed, or the lightshade that was hanging behind me — a tacky, plastic half-bloomed flower that Sara thought was appealing with the distance. Fragments like these defined our conversation, and discussions of literature moved consistently to the world around us. We talked about what life felt like after the pandemic, about Sara’s impending trip to Dublin, and what it meant to forget the war in Ukraine. Our thoughts often came back to making sense of everyday life and the events around it, to orienting the small within the great.

Like when we discussed the respective values of isolation and community for writing – 

S: – Striking a balance is hard. I still haven’t done it yet. I’m not in the habit of social things anymore since the pandemic. Things I used to do naturally, like a trip to Dublin, seem huge to me now. Or to London. I went to London twice at the end of last year and it was – laughs – almost psychologically damaging. It’s a big deal for me now.

C: It’s sometimes a bit unnerving how – I don’t know – the city just churns people in and out all the time. It’s like there’s no sense of anyone’s existence even though everyone’s there. 

S: Yeah, I can’t get over that. Where I live now is a very small, rural place. You know everyone. When the farmer passes down the road, you see him, you wave. Even in Dublin, when I go tomorrow, I’ll be shocked by how many people there are. Should I not say hello to them? 

The movement between world and writing is important to Sara’s work, for she understands her first three novels to constitute attempts at processing particular phases in her life. Not, not fiction, but certainly bound to experiences close to her. Seven Steeples, her most recent book, tells of a couple’s withdrawal from the city to an isolated cottage by the sea, similar to the experience of Sara and her partner as they moved from Dublin to the Irish West Coast eleven years ago. Bell and Sigh, Seven Steeples’ protagonists, live their days through rituals and small moments, immersed in nature and the seasons around them.

S: But I feel I’ve written enough periods of my life. It’s not that interesting anymore… Those early books were all trying to make sense of the meaning of things –

C:  – I think you can keep making sense of your life through literature, if that’s what you want. I’m sure there’s interesting things. 

Sara’s next work will take a different angle, but this earlier practice remains important for defining her past three successes. Her first book, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, for example – the exact connection of which to her life Sara didn’t explain, and for which she noted to have lost her initial passion for today – still has ‘heart’ woven into it, and Seven Steeples was born from the observations made during her morning dog-walk; the hope to explore a particular set of circumstances in careful detail, capturing motions, images, and changing situations. It was through this intimacy that the book became more.

In some ways, this practice speaks to Sara’s beginnings as a writer; perhaps unconventional, rooted in material. Her first ambition was to become a visual artist, and she studied Sculpture at Dún Laoghaire College. After this, short of materials and space, Sara wrote for the old ‘Event Guide’ at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, interviewing other artists and writing reviews and articles. It was an unusual position – it’s rare to be published as a brand-new graduate – and suggested to Sara that she try writing fiction. This brought her to the MPhil in Creative Writing at Trinity, but she is careful to describe her getting into the course — she was only accepted when someone else dropped out. 

S: I was used to needing materials and tools and studio space. But with writing, all I needed was my laptop. I could submit a year’s worth of work in a small file. It seemed miraculous to me, back then, as a visual artist – yet almost practical too. 

Today, Sara’s process combines dedicated writing hours with the space to dream and procrastinate. It is her morning commitment to sitting at her desk that gets the work finished, but the time away from it that vivifies the piece. She told me about how she texts herself with new notes whilst on walks — ideas, descriptions, and little observations. The strongest material develops this way, either as a new thought or an important re-angling. Thinking of my own distractions, I asked Sara what she thought about her mobile phone and technology, and about what they meant for writing and the possibility of sustained attention –

S: – I do sometimes wonder whether you lose the focus of something if you’re able to produce it more quickly and efficiently – our generations and those beyond certainly won’t write like Virginia Woolf, say, producing long manuscripts and then plunking over and over on typewriters. But I still think there’s a lot to be said for the phones. Anything that’s any good comes to my head when I’m not at the desk. It’s my phone captures that. 

Through its beginning in the routine of Sara’s dog walk, Seven Steeples bespeaks this process; its roots in self-texted observations. Formally her most experimental work, the novel attempts to build from very little. Allegorical in style, and written as a kind of prose-poetry, Sara described the book to me as an exercise in intense specificity, lacing the narrative with repetitions and motifs whilst driving towards a sense of pace within patterns. As the book bloomed and grew from its observational beginnings, it became about Bell and Sigh’s solitary relationship, and how they navigate the small world that surrounds them. 

At the same time, there is the mystery of the mountain — a spectacular ascent that the couple promise to but never climb — and, despite its minuteness, the story comprises gestures to modern life and its changing cultures. Bell and Sigh find a small figurine that they enshrine like a spiritual figure, for example. This turns out to be a rendering of Elrond from Lord of the Rings, and to Sara, represents the modern mixing of religion with popular culture. So too, despite being written before the pandemic, the novel is strangely prescient of its disruption. The narrative makes reference to a magnificently-catastrophic-yet-undefined global event that further exacerbates Bell and Sigh’s isolation. For Sara, this constitutes another, less conscious connection between the novel and her own existence. When writing Seven Steeples, she turned up the dial on the solitariness of her life in rural Cork, but the pandemic, coming just after, brought it into closer alignment with her work. Perhaps it’s one of the strange truths of fiction to manifest intuition and prefigure real change. 

Seven Steeples is the first of Sara’s three novels to be long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize:

S: It does. It means a huge amount. The Dylan Thomas is a prize I’ve applied for with every novel. My publishers have submitted every one of my books. The cut-off age for writers is forty, and I won’t have another book out before I hit that, so I feel as though this one was my last chance… Even if I go no further than the long-list, I feel I’ve finally hit that milestone.

Not yet forty, Sara has received an impressive string of award nominations. She sees these as important regardless of their outcomes, and as a source of courage to continue writing.

S: Because you never really get that confidence, you know. To know that someone thinks I’m good at this is a reason to continue…

I first mentioned how Sara and I’s conversation consistently moved back to the world around us. Literature often became a conduit to other things, with Sara’s personal concerns embedded in her work. One of the threads that runs throughout her three novels orients on the relationship between people and the natural world. Spill Simmer Falter Wither, her first book, explores the friendship between an old man and an outcast dog, whilst A Line Made By Walking, her second work, explores the trickiness of an isolated character, Frankie’s, relationship with nature and dead animals. I asked Sara about this, citing ideas about human-critter entanglement and the process of evolving with other life. She was careful in her response, reluctant to make claims, but clear about the themes’ relevance to her work. 

S: Handiwork, my non-fiction book, touches on these points in a soft way, exploring bird migration, the loss of territories…. I have an uneasy relationship with art-making, though; taking materials out of the world and making more material out of the material. Books are printed and printed and printed and disseminated across the world, so I’m always wary about making a stand. I’m not above reproach but at the same time these concerns are present in all of my work, the worry about the planet dying and the attempt to preserve it in writing…

Soon, we were onto nuclear war, and the precarity of navigating life and writing amidst this potential – far, it seems, on a day-to-day basis, yet upon reflection, so uncomfortably close. Sara and I shared the experience of awakening to this fear with the onset of war in Ukraine. She recalled checking the news in the morning, and I, obsessing over the weapons’ magnitude. Yet this urgency muted with time, as thicker skins grew and we returned to our habits. This process of forgetting, we agreed, must be common to everyone, especially amidst a world of such vastness and rapid change. Like with Covid-19, Sara noted; once so present, and now diminishing. From a life of isolation, we’ve moved back to proliferation — to shared drinks and trips to cities, to crowded trains and unmasked events.  

One of my final questions to Sara concerned what literature could do, or mean, amidst life today and situations like Covid-19, the climate crisis, and the uncertainty of war. I had just previously asked for advice for young writers, to which she’d urged the pursuit of projects with love. Even if you’re not completely pleased with the work, she explained, the key is to write what you’re compelled to, and to believe in your thoughts when others don’t. This, in the best work, is what shines through. When defining literature’s importance in the modern world, however, Sara was slower, and at first, more reluctant. But she spoke with feeling about its centrality to her own life, and was hopeful for its endurance amidst digitisation and cultural shifts:

S: It’s something that I struggle with… what is the point of this? But I suppose I don’t think about it too much when I’m writing my own books. But when I’m reading books I do.

C: And what comes to mind?

S: How much solace I get from them, I suppose. My life is small, but when I’m reading a book, I’m in that world for a certain amount of time – days, hours, weeks, however long. It’s a form of escape. You go into the book and you’re in the book world, and everything’s self-contained and makes sense.  

C: What about all the digital media and art? Do you think books will lose their grip?

 S: Some people didn’t used to read and will never read. And some people did read and will always read. And I use social media and the internet and that kind of thing, and I still read a lot. I think we can balance those things. We’re an intelligent species. 

 Books are as important as ever. I can’t say whether mine are or not. But I feel the need of books. They occupy a space that nothing else comes close to. 

C: And tomorrow?

S: When I’m on the train I’ll still be reading. It’s never occurred to do anything else.