Chloe Michelle Howarth talks perspective, nuance and the power of queer stories
Having just released her new book, Heap Earth Upon It, Chloe Michelle Howarth sits down with Sarah Gill to discuss literary colour palates, getting into the granular of rural Ireland in the 1960s, and how there’s no such thing as an absolute truth.
When Chloe Michelle Howarth’s debut novel, Sunburn, was published in the summer of 2023, it made an immediate impression. The title was shortlisted for the 2024 Polari First Book Prize, the 2024 Book of the Year: Discover Award at the British Book Awards, and the 2023 Nero Book Award for Debut Fiction. It was also longlisted for the 2024 Diverse Book Awards, and positioned Chloe as a distinctive and important voice on the Irish literary scene.
For the few who haven’t read the novel, Sunburn is a sapphic coming-of-age story set in 1990’s Ireland. It captures the heady chaos of adolescence with a tumbling tenderness that feels fuzzy and familiar, but also details the realities of growing up in a small rural town, and how the clutch of the home house can leave scars.
“The ‘90s were a really contentious time in Ireland, with homosexuality only being decriminalised in 1993,” Chloe tells me over a cup of coffee in Cork city just hours before her book launch. Her newly released title, Heap Earth Upon It, is also poised in the past, in the 1960s. The story follows the orphaned O’Leary siblings—Tom, Jack, Anna and Peggy—as they arrive in the village of Ballycrea, tight-lipped about their troubled past and desperate for a fresh start.
Before becoming a published author, Chloe wrote the beginnings of her debut under the impression that her words would never be read by anyone. It was a hobby, something just for herself, so I wonder how the approach differed this time around, armed with the knowledge that there were many fans of her work hungry for more.
“I had to put myself into a mindset that no one’s going to read it,” Chloe says. “I had to decide to believe that, and that mindset freed me up to explore the darker side of the story.” While the mindset remained rigid, Chloe approached the story itself envisioning a polar opposite aesthetic. “Where Sunburn was drenched in summer sunshine, Heap Earth Upon It is much more bleak, winter, quiet. In terms of colour palates, they’re seasonal opposites. I wanted to write something different.”
In Sunburn, Chloe honed in on the protagonist of Lucy, and fed us the story from her perspective entirely. The new book marks another departure in stylistic approach by bringing four different perspectives into play, adding layers and depth to the story that make the reading all the more propulsive.
“Any conversation you’re having, there are multiple different people experiencing it from their own perspective, so there really are multiple conversations happening at once,” Chloe says. “I was interested in capturing moments from varying perspectives after staying so tunnel visioned in Sunburn with Lucy’s narration, and there really is no such thing as an absolute truth when we all have our own version of it. I wanted to dig into that.”
On the face of it, these books are seasons, generations, miles apart, but certain themes present themselves in each. A sense of familial obligation, that tender longing that verges on obsession, the claustrophobia of rural Ireland, and the comfort both Lucy and Anna take in girlhood and female companionship are just some. Each of these two characters feel on the periphery, cast out of the sanctuary of what everyone else is feeling and experiencing as “normal”, likely due to their feelings of queerness, but incapacity to fully identify with it.
“The challenge for me with this book, in setting it in the ‘60s, was to try to write a character without the usual language of self-understanding,” Chloe tells me. “I love to get into the granular of the time between realising you’re queer, and coming out to the world. The context and the timeframe and place and its people change—and hopefully evolve—but the heart and its feelings are the same at their core.”
Chloe was born in West Cork in 1996, and is a woman with no first-hand experience of the Irish countryside that existed three decades before her birth, but you wouldn’t know that from reading Heap Earth Upon It. Riding into town on a horse and trap, pulling a calf, mass in Latin — the village of Ballycrea feels so real and textured and true to life. I wonder how she got herself inside that period so completely while writing this story in her home in Brighton.
“I spent a lot of time on the RTÉ Archive — I actually rinsed it! I watched all the news broadcasts, I watched The Riordans, and so many documentaries on YouTube to build this picture in my head, to understand what people would be wearing, what they’d be talking about. I wanted to understand the period as a whole and then pull the human aspect out of it,” Chloe recalls. “I grew up in Ireland, around Irish people, so that perspective comes with me into everything I write. There’s definitely a West Cork way of seeing things, and I have whatever that is. It comes naturally to me and it’s what makes sense to me.”
Though the story itself turns towards the more Gothic, the more dark and unyielding, Howarth’s signature tenderness ekes through in the glimmers of sweetness and soft edges. Lines like “hot coffee in my cup and a seat saved for me” draw you in and hold you close as you traverse the pages towards the high octane ending. Of this canny ability to pull from simplicity and make it spectacular, Chloe says: “I get a lot from the way people choose to phrase things, the little nuances in simple interactions.”
This book would not have been possible without the backing of an Arts Council grant, which Chloe very nearly failed to apply for. “I had the attitude that I would never get it, so why bother applying for it? It was only when my mum and my older brother kept saying, ‘Why not try? What harm in applying?’ that I put my hat in the ring,”Chloe recalls. “I couldn’t believe it when I got it. It has absolutely changed my life and my ability to work and see myself as a writer. One of the stipulations of it is that you have to leave full time employment, and I would never have had the nerve to do that without this push and opportunity to explore my life as a full time author and feel validated in that. This book wouldn’t be here without it.”
In addition to the new novel, Chloe also has a story published in a new anthology collection, Queerphoria, and the television rights for Sunburn have been sold and are in the process of being brought to life. I ask Chloe if she can envisage any actors embodying these well-hewn characters, and though Lucy and Susannah evade her, she can see Siobhán McSweeney bringing her signature formidability to the role of Lucy’s mother. God willing.
By ways of closing remarks, and a theme to which our conversation returned many times over the course of our coffee: queer stories aren’t just for queer people. These are stories for everyone to get something from and see themselves within.
Heap Earth Upon It by Chloe Michelle Howarth (Verve Books) is on sale now.
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