Ring of Salt: Finding home and hope on the Wild Coast of Ireland

(Paperback)

---

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Betsy Cornwell left home with her baby on his first birthday, checking into a hotel under a false name so her husband could not track them down. Over the long months of housing insecurity that followed, bouncing around cheap motel rooms and friend's couches, Betsy's determination to offer her son something she'd never had - a safe, stable home - took on the force of obsession.

In The Old Knitting Factory, Cornwell invites readers to join her on the path that led out of her violent marriage and into renovating a run-down house on a lake in rural Ireland, transforming a largely abandoned and abused vacation house into a family home and childcare-inclusive arts retreat space for other single parents. Along the way, she creates community and finds family wherever she goes - even when she has to build it herself, brick by brick.

Mixing Maid's gripping portrait of single motherhood's precarity with The Salt Path's wild, romantic sense of place - in this case among rural Ireland's cool mists, nubbly Aran yarns, and whispering turf fires - The Old Knitting Factory invites readers to experience the magic of found family and new beginnings.

Reviews

A stunning memoir, intimate and vast at once. Ring of Salt is a story of human interactions - nurturing, sexual, supportive and destructive, which Cornwell captures in all their complexity, intensity and inconsistency. What I love is her refusal to simplify or polarise her experience. Instead, she wrangles with the messiness of human connection, of the twin pull of an abusive relationship, the exhilaration and exhaustion of parenting, the power and abjection of motherhood. Braver still, is her insistence on looking, face-on, at our material reliance, debunking the myth of the American Dream to remind us of our dependency on one another, our interconnectedness. This is a very special book * Elske Rahill, author of Between Dog and Wolf *

Author Bio

Betsy Cornwell is a New York Times bestselling author, writing teacher, private mentor, and retreat leader. Betsy holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a BA from Smith College, and she currently teaches writing at the University of Galway, Kylemore Abbey, and online. She lives in a historic knitting factory on the west coast of Ireland, which she is working to turn into a funded, childcare-inclusive arts retreat space for single mothers and other twice-marginalised single parents. She is the story editor and a contributing writer at Parabola, and her short-form writing includes fiction, nonfiction, and literary translation and has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Zahir Tales, Luna Luna, and elsewhere. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. from Smith College.