Queer, Irish, and Soaked in the Sun: A Guest Post by Chloe Michelle Howarth
This coming-of-age queer love story bursts with incredibly poetic language. A young girl grapples with a deep secret infatuation and the intolerance of small-town Ireland in the 90’s. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Chloe Michelle Howarth on writing Sunburn.
Paperback $19.99
Sunburn
Sunburn
In Stock Online
Paperback $19.99
For fans of Normal People, a queer, coming-of-age debut of impossible first love, first loss, and first heartbreak…
For fans of Normal People, a queer, coming-of-age debut of impossible first love, first loss, and first heartbreak…
I first had the idea for Sunburn on my way home from a New Year’s Eve party in January, 2020. It was a freezing cold morning, and I was daydreaming about summer. I opened up my notes app and started tapping out some ideas – that’s when I decided I wanted to write something that was decidedly queer, Irish, and soaked in sun. When I made that choice, the story opened up before me.
People often comment on the claustrophobia they feel in Sunburn. Looking back, I’m sure that atmosphere was enhanced by my writing the novel during lockdown. I had just moved home to the countryside after living away at college for four years. Suddenly being back in Cork, I was seeing my surroundings with fresh eyes. This meant that I was never too stuck for what to write next. I’d take myself on a walk and make notes about what was in front of me. The rule in Ireland during lockdown was that you couldn’t travel further than a 5km radius outside your home. I was so lucky, because my 5km radius really was the most beautiful place–all the colour of the changing weather, the noises of the hedges, the smell of the sea. As the seasons changed from winter through to summer, I was struck by what remained unchanged. The stone walls dividing the fields. The trees, bare or in bloom. The same forks in the same roads, everyday. It really reinforced the idea of permanency, and how the queerness in Sunburn is not temporary, or a phase. The little thoughts and sentences I wrote on those walks would become paragraphs, which eventually became the chapters of Sunburn.
I made the choice to set the novel in the 1990’s for two reasons. The first being that it felt like the very end of an era of disconnection. Without access to mobile phones, the characters communicate through love letters. This was a way for me to write in the most excessive prose possible, which I really couldn’t have done if they communicated by texting! The other reason was that homosexuality was only decriminalised in Ireland in 1993, which made the notion of queerness more contentious, and the threat of being caught more palpable.
One thing that I’ve taken with me from the experience of creating Sunburn is to write without an audience in mind. I never thought anybody would read Sunburn, and that kept me really free and uninhibited while writing. Especially with a debut novel, I know I would have been mortified at the thoughts of anybody reading what I was writing, and I would have edited all the life out of it! These days, I try to stay in that mindset where I’m just writing for myself.
