This November I undertook, voluntarily and for pay (as David Foster Wallace once put it), to read as many Irish literary journals as I possibly could, and to write a report on the state of operations in this particular corner of the culture industry. A supposedly fun thing. Will I ever do it again?
The stacked mags made a foot-high pile on my desk. It was imposing. It was downright frightening. The titles, assembled, made an attractive word salad, or perhaps a short experimental poem: Tolka, Ragaire, Banshee, Southword, Sonder, Splonk…
Herewith, my lit-mag vibe check, in two parts. Part One (this week) will focus on the nonfiction stuff. Part Two (next week) will be all about fiction and poetry. The lit mag scene being what it is, there will be a certain amount of bleed-through between these categories, the blurring of forms and genres often being what a good contemporary lit mag is all about. Caveat lector.
So, what did I read, on my journey through the stack? I read a lot of not-great poetry. Some of this not-great poetry was sort of identity-politics-based, by which I mean that I read a lot of poems about people’s grandmothers making ethnically significant food. Here’s my rule about poetry: the sort of thing that you might want to write a poem about is the sort of thing that you must never write a poem about (your grandmother, your feelings, the winter solstice).
I read a lot of psychoanalytic material, imperfectly transformed into fiction. I read about a lot of bad relationships. I read a lot of stories and essays that didn’t quite make it clear where and when their key events were taking place; the effect was confusing. I also read a lot of surprising and original work by surprising and original minds. Would I do it again? You betcha.
So: the nonfiction journals. Brace yourselves. I’ll start with Holy Show, edited by Brendan McEvilly and Peter McNamara, which appears annually and is the most visually sophisticated (ie attractive) of current Irish lit mags. Its concerns are “Contemporary Irish Life and Art” and it knows that you can’t, or shouldn’t, have one without the other. Therefore it publishes prose pieces alongside art or photographs that speak to them, or vice versa. There is no fiction; criticism is criticism of visual or plastic art.
The current issue, number 6, begins with an essay by Caelainn Hogan (author of Republic of Shame) about Mega Dreoilin, “a 16-bit game about Ireland’s housing crisis” made by the artists Han Hogan and Dónal Fullam and exhibited at Pallas Projects/Studios in the Liberties. No mere review this, but engage journalism: personal, passionate. Hogan and Fullam are deeply concerned about the housing crisis, which, they point out, has been artificially generated by vulture funds and landlords operating in cahoots; Hogan takes us to squats and evictions, to parts of Dublin where “Locals [don’t] feel any protection from authorities” where, “with State policy offering little protection,” people “are always one step away from homelessness”.
It’s difficult to imagine such an uncategorisable piece of political-journalism-slash-art-criticism about Irish social issues appearing anywhere but in a small literary journal; indeed, pieces like this are one big reason why we should have small literary journals in the first place. This might be as good a time as any to note that almost every lit mag in Ireland is funded, in whole or in part, by the Arts Council. A good reason to pay taxes, if you ask me.
The online-only “journal of ideas” Dublin Review of Books (drb.ie) has been a going concern since 2007; edited by Maurice Earls and Enda O’Doherty, and linked osmotically to Books Upstairs on Westmoreland Street, it publishes “long-form essays and shorter pieces, in both cases usually tied to recently published books” and it does so in a new issue thrice yearly. There is no point in me pretending to objectivity about the DRB, since about 60 per cent of my most recently published book is made up of stuff I wrote for the site. But perhaps if I say that I write for the DRB so much because the DRB a dream to write for – catholic in its range, hospitable in its editing – then this will suffice as its own comment.
DRB contributors tend to be academics or experts, writing on highbrow subjects for a general audience. The current issue (October 2024) is indicative. It features Anthony Roche reviewing Brian Friel: Beginnings by Kelly Matthews – an essay that doubles as a lucid and compassionate mini-biography of the playwright; Sam Enright on a lecture delivered at UCD by John Maynard Keynes in 1933, touching on “the predicament of how newly independent nations should develop”; and a long, deeply informed review by Kevin Stevens of Percival Everett’s Booker-shortlisted novel James. All of these pieces will repay your time and study. As someone once remarked of the DRB’s older American cousin, the New York Review of Books, reading any given issue is like taking a term of courses at a good university.
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Like its cousin, the DRB hardly cleaves to literary or historical topics. It is one of a tiny handful of places in Ireland where you can publish, and read, longform considered reflections on issues of urgent national import. In the current issue is Toy Story, an essay by David Blake Knox. This is ostensibly about the lack of oversight, and the sheer managerial hubris, that resulted in RTÉ losing €2.3 million on Toy Show: The Musical. But really, and most subtly, it’s about how a certain section of Irish society thinks about itself, and how it thinks about Ireland.
In telling this particular story in tones of calm sanity and with a forensic eye for detail, Blake Knox, a former RTÉ producer and one of the few people to actually see Toy Show: The Musical when it ran to empty stalls in the Dublin Convention Centre in 2022, does something important: he shows us that one of the traps lurking in Irish public life in the 2020s is a sense of smugness, of self-regarding complacency (aren’t we great, altogether? Sure why would we change?) It has to do with money, of course, this feeling; the thing that made us fall in love with ourselves, when it first landed in our bank accounts back in the late 1990s.
Blake Knox shows us that the RTÉ scandals of last year have been misunderstood, and that instead of eating popcorn while we watched poor Ryan Tubridy sweat, we might have done better to see these events as a general warning about how some serious defects in our national self-understanding. In publishing pieces like this one, the DRB is performing a real public service. The editors know this, of course. The tag for Blake Knox’s essay is “Public Service Broadcasting”.
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Tolka’s mission statement commits it to “formally promiscuous nonfiction” which more or less puts it bang in the mainstream of highbrow writing in the 2020s (almost everyone with an MFA, these days, is writing formally promiscuous nonfiction, often about being informally promiscuous). Physically, each issue of Tolka is a gorgeous object; lined up together on a shelf, the white spines are satisfyingly uniform, linked by a little black wave pattern suggesting the Dublin river after which the journal is named.
Tolka’s contents, thank goodness, are not at all uniform. Issue 8 kicks off with And No Animal is Without Enemy, a viscerally disturbing personal essay by Megan Nolan (author of Acts of Desperation and Ordinary Human Failings). “Don’t be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me,” this essay begins, but it is not about attention-seeking; it is about self-mutilation, both physical and psychological, and it hinges on a casual hook-up with a lawyer in Hampstead arranged via “a popular fetish site”. It appears to be an excerpt from something longer – a memoir, perhaps?
Issue 8 of Tolka also contains Quietly the World Shifts, an essay by Noreen Masud about her involvement in the Fossil Free Books movement’s campaign to get Baillie Gifford, corporate sponsor of book prizes and festivals, to “divest up to £5 billion from fossil fuel companies and from companies profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide in Palestine”. Masud’s question is, “How do we act rightly when there is no reward, neither in the present nor in an imagined future?” Her piece – hopeful, angry – offers one answer.
A mention for Declan Toohey’s Bombs Away: Blitzkrieg Notes on Gravity’s Rainbow, also in Tolka Issue 8; this is literary criticism (in this case a response to Thomas Pynchon’s paranoid 1973 masterpiece) as kamikaze warfare – not quite a self-destroying essay, not quite a hallucinatory short story, not quite a transcribed fever dream; formally promiscuous, indeed.
Back when I was starting out as a writer, 20-odd years ago, there were only two big lit mag games in Dublin. There was the hospitable and spunky The Stinging Fly, then in its larval stage, and there was The Dublin Review, which seemed too scarily austere to submit to (and still does). Edited, since 2000, by the redoubtable Brendan Barrington, The Dublin Review now looks like an Irish institution. But this is only because it consistently delivers the goods, if by “the goods” you mean superb work by writers old and new. Literary agents who know what’s good for them read The Dublin Review; austere it may seem, but it’s also, no gainsaying it, the place to be.
The Dublin Review’s preferred mode is the personal essay, though it also publishes short stories: the current issue, number 96, contains good ones by Sorcha Hamilton and Fiachra Kelleher. The standout piece, however, is a personal essay by William Keohane. It’s called The Assessments, meaning the assessments undergone by Keohane as he sought to begin the process of gender transition, and it’s a masterful piece: clinical, observant, coldly passionate; and speaking clearly to an audience larger than the writer himself, as too many personal essays are not.
That’s your nonfiction lot, lit-mag fans. Stay tuned – next week, it’s fiction and (non-grandmother-based) poetry.
Kevin Power is an assistant professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. His books include Bad Day in Blackrock, White City and The Written World: Essays and Reviews
