My father is Irish, my mother is American. I grew up in New York and lived in the United States until I was 22 so I consider myself American and Irish. I went to a liberal arts college, Wesleyan University, and my major was political science. I thought I wanted to be a political journalist and so I went to Washington and had a job as a reporter. But within a few months, I realised I wasn’t a natural journalist – I’m not nosy enough and I wasn’t great at grilling people – and Washington wasn’t where I wanted to spend my life.
I moved to Dublin in 1995. I had a kind of romantic idea of the place, as Americans generally do. But I felt comfortable almost immediately – I got an internship at Lilliput, a small publishing house, and I was doing a master’s in Anglo-Irish literature at UCD, which was my respectable excuse for coming to Ireland.
I had read Ulysses twice by the time I moved here. At that time in my life, it was my idea of a fun read. So that influenced my sense of Dublin. The Dublin of Ulysses is not a shiny tourist paradise; it’s a mixture of things. I felt the literary history of the place strongly. So that first year in Dublin, between working for a publisher and doing a master’s, I was reading a lot and getting an education.
Doing literary stuff in Dublin, within the first year, I’d met Colm Tóibín, I’d met Anne Enright, I’d been in Colm’s home in Stoneybatter, which was around the corner from Lilliput. To be interacting with serious writers, I thought it was brilliant. Meanwhile, the economy was improving. So in my first year or two here, when I would tell people I’d moved here from the States, they would give me strange looks or say, ‘Why? What were you thinking?’ Within a few years, people stopped asking that because the sense of Ireland as a place you might move to rather than from had become so much stronger.
‘I had read Ulysses twice by the time I moved here. It was my idea of a fun read’
Hector Ó hEochagáin: ‘I’m a hippie. That’s why we live in Galway. It attracts bohemians’
Jarlath Regan: I worked my tail off to bring my son home to experience school in Ireland
Miss Universe Ireland: ‘Irish people are so laid back and carefree. That can also be a con’
While working at Lilliput, I’d go into Books Upstairs, the old Books Upstairs in College Green, which had the best selection of literary periodicals in the city. I would look around for literary journals, and there were some, but not on the scale that I thought was equal to the strength of the general literary culture. Around that same time, because of the improving economy, the Arts Council’s funding was going up dramatically. So I went to the Arts Council and proposed their support to start the Dublin Review. I’m eternally grateful they backed it even though I was still a fairly young, not vastly experienced editor. But I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do.
The Dublin Review is a home for world-class fiction and non-fiction: short stories, non-fiction, essays, reportage and long-form criticism. We’re a quarterly journal and we publish long pieces – sometimes they’re 10,000 words. The first issue featured Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright. I approached them – I felt if they could see the point of the Dublin Review, others would follow and we’d have a chance. The early years involved a lot of me approaching writers whose work I admired, and asking them to think about writing non-fiction, critical pieces or personal essays. We published Sally Rooney’s first piece of prose to appear in print. That came about through [author and Irish Times columnist] Mark O’Connell. Mark said that he had this brilliant student in Trinity called Sally Rooney and he encouraged me to get in touch with her, and I did.
The Dublin Review is aimed at people who just want to read the best writing. A lot of the most interesting writing being done at the moment is either fiction that has a really strong sense of reality to it, and a brilliant essay can sometimes read a little bit like fiction. It feels great to be on the hundredth issue, 25 years in. It was Colm Tóibín’s agent, Peter Strauss, who realised the 100th issue was coming up, and suggested to Colm and me that a story Colm was working on could feature. It’s a tremendous story.
Did I edit it much? All our contributors get the same level of editorial attention, which is to say, a lot. So that can mean different things with different pieces. Some pieces only really need one meaty editorial pass. Others might need five. It’s not that the one that requires five is a weaker piece than the one that requires one. Sometimes the most ambitious, intricate, challenging pieces need more attention because they’re doing things with a high degree of difficulty.
[ What makes the Irish literary magazine scene tick?Opens in new window ]
I work two days on the Dublin Review and three days a week at Penguin; Penguin’s Irish operation started in 2003. I acquire books and edit and publish books. The two jobs are complementary – I feel extraordinarily lucky to have two amazing jobs doing the sort of work I love.
How difficult is the climate for authors right now? Most first novels sell very few copies. It is extremely difficult to afford a mortgage or to pay rent in this country, and that is poisonous to literature and other forms of creativity. The fact that there are still so many people in Ireland surviving as writers feels kind of miraculous, because the odds are against them.
In conversation with Nadine O’Regan. See thedublinreview.com. This interview is part of a series about well-known people’s lives and relationship with Ireland.
