TERRY PRONE is a communications expert who has worked with Ireland’s most powerful people. She tells SOPHIE GRENHAM about her home in a MARTELLO TOWER, the books that inspire her and HER LOVE OF SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA …
Terry Prone has worked with some of Ireland’s most powerful people. Politicians and businesses alike seek her guidance because if anyone understands the impact of words, it’s the queen of communications.
By day, Terry is a director of Dublin’s prestigious Communications Clinic. The rest of the time, she writes.
Terry is the author of many bestselling books including Racing the Moon (Coronet, 1999), Running Before Daybreak (Coronet, 2001) and Blood Brothers, Soul Sisters (Poolbeg, 1994), for which she won the Francis MacManus Short Story award.
Terry has published several popular practical guides such as Write and Get Paid for It (Londubh, revised 2010) and Coach (Londubh, 2013). She also contributes a weekly column to The Irish Examiner.
Her latest book Baa Baa Pink Sheep (Londubh, 2015) is a must-read for those who are intrigued by words and the humour found in their layers of meaning.
Terry lives in Portrane with her husband Tom Savage and their two cats.
On home
Home base is the Martello Tower in Portrane, where we’ve lived for the past eight years. I’ve always been nuts about Martellos, God alone knows why, because they’re squat, ugly and leak like sieves, but I’m nuts about ours. Pulling it apart and getting it into habitable shape was the best fun in the world. Arguably also the most costly fun in the world.
Tower number 7 North is its official name. It sits on a promontory and has a climate all to itself. A tiny gate leads to a smuggler’s cove which in summer is filled with picnickers and redolent of barbecues and in winter gets overwhelmed with huge foaming waves that sometimes break over the wall of the grounds.
It has the most fantastic gardens – where daffodils came up this year for Christmas. My next door neighbour, Mary Lynders, A.K.A. Mother Nature, really owns the gardens and the name of every plant and bulb in them. Got lucky there. Best neighbour in the world, she is.
On creative space
An ad agency recently shot an ad in the tower and I was quite surprised at the room they picked: our office. One side belonging to Tom, one side to me, and neither of us ever uses it, although the cats do because it’s where the cat flap is. The ad agency fell in love with the view through the big picture window.
I work by the stove in the central ground floor room of the tower, where I can see the first floor because we have an atrium. The two circular rooms are ringed, floor to ceiling, with books. All in sections, with the fiction ordered aphabetically by author’s name. Nothing as comforting as to be surrounded by 15,000 books, each of them an old friend for a different reason. We do have some paintings by Tom and Stephen Cullen and a still life by Freida Finlay, but they get bullied by the books.
On bookshops
I fell in love with Books Unlimited in Coolock decades ago. I went to the checkout, laid down my purchases and caught the two people at the desk exchanging a glance. “We bought this book,” the owner said, tapping the top volume, “because we were sure either you or one other customer would buy it.” That was Mary White, who later became a Green Minister and her husband. They just love books and writers.
On novels
One of the great moments of my life was when my husband brought all his belongings to our first house – tons of books in tea chests. As I was going through them, I discovered a battered paperback of Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. I sat on my hunkers, rifling through the yellowed pages and finding all of my favourite lines underlined by Tom. He had never mentioned it to me, nor me to him. I still adore that play.
The thing about coming from a family addicted to reading is that some books come clothed in memories. The Trusting and the Maimed, the collection of short stories by James Plunkett, the man who wrote Strumpet City, sits on my shelf, autographed to my father by the author. They were friends and trade unionists together. Similarly, when I discovered The Springs of Affection, by Maeve Brennan, and realised she must have been around my mother’s age, I asked my mother, then in her eighties, about Brennan. They’d both gone to Louise Gavan Duffy’s school. My mother loathed Brennan. It never stopped me adoring everything she ever wrote.
On her favourite writing medium
The discipline, the delicate precision required by short stories is quite different to the scope and scale of a novel. Next to short stories, ghost writing is the most enjoyable. To be hidden behind another’s identity and to write in their voice is a delight.
On where she gets away from it all
Sanibel Island, Florida. Sanibel and Captiva, which are joined by a bridge, are on the Gulf Coast and known as the Paradise Islands. Snow-white beaches, cycle lanes everywhere, wonderful restaurants and a quality of light I’ve never encountered anywhere else. Three great bookshops, too. A political cartoonist named James “Ding” Darling bought huge swatches of Sanibel in the forties and fifties. Darling was a passionate environmentalist long before environmentalism was cool, because, paradoxically, like many American environmentalists, he was a hunter. He left the land to the state of Florida as a nature reserve and to walk through it at dawn or sunset is to be stilled by the whispering beauty of the place. The happiest times in my life, and some of the best friendships, have been made in Sanibel.
Baa Baa Pink Sheep (€14.99) is available nationwide.
Terry was photographed in the impressive library of her Martello tower home.
Image by Eoin Rafferty
Sophie Grenham
This article appeared in a previous issue, for more features like this, don’t miss our March issue, out Saturday March 5.
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