Yeats is dead. Joyce hasn’t written anything of note in the last while. Even Kavanagh has given up on spitting verse at the swans of the Grand Canal. So can we stop talking about them as if they’re the only writers this country has ever produced?
It’s perfectly fine to love Yeats, Joyce, Kavanagh, Bowen, Beckett, the stalwarts of Irish letters but if Ireland is to remain the home of beautifully accomplished verbal artists then we need to start reading and celebrating the living, breathing, still writing writers. The present produces the past, not the other way around.
The following writers are the future of Irish literature and it would seem we are in good hands. As long as writers such as these are writing in this country then Ireland will continue to be the home of first-rate literature.
Anna Walsh
Anna Walsh (24) is from Mullingar, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCD. She has been published in the Bohemyth, Belleville Park Pages, and Headstuff, amongst others. She co-runs The Gremlin.
“The past two years in writing have been marked for me by two things. Firstly, the ability to take seriously the secret part of me that has been overthinking since I was able to, and recognise it as valid and allowed to exist. Secondly, and most importantly, what that part produces.”
Anna feels the MA sparked this and lent a confidence, both academic and creative, “to an underdeveloped thing that was pulsing and growing, in lumps and bumps. Outwardly, but not in a linear fashion. We are marked by the things we want to do, and when I was shown how to stop clanging and clattering in my writing these bumps began to smooth out, and I became more capable, more ready. It is important to sound out what you are trying to say first, and I feel that I have finally finished sounding out words and am ready to speak them.”
Anna expresses some excitement about what is happening in Dublin right now.
“It can be too easy to become tired of what has been before, and it is tiring to encounter tired people…but through the MA, my first publication in The Bohemyth, and readings at Cave Writings I have come across individuals refusing to be tired, and actively, almost furiously engaging with the world we live in right now. This is reflected in their work in a way that is entirely fresh and scared and fractured, and informs my own work in a huge way.”
Anna is currently working on her first collection of poetry. She also runs The Gremlin site, which, she describes as “a space to make attempts and get weird with it [writing}.”
She feels that “sometimes people are afraid to take the risk of saying the real thing. For that reason, the work suffers. I think that this has been one of my biggest obstacles in writing, and stems from that fear of looking like you try too hard, or try in the wrong way. I am too well versed in the language of beating down people who try, and I think the most important thing to say to other people who are creating is to never entertain the notion that you can’t do exactly whatever the f**k you want in whatever way you want.”
Niall McCabe
Originally from Derry, Niall McCabe (36) studies Drama and English at Trinity College Dublin. Influenced particularly by Rumi, Christopher Smart, Gertrude Stein and CA Conrad, his work is characterised by its linguistic energy and vibrant imagery.
Panoramic in spirit, McCabe’s poems follow rhythmically unpredictable paths into worlds whose edges are unknowable. His poetry shifts in a series of paradoxes, juxtaposing images playful and bleak, violent and tender, transient and immutable, yet always delineated through an acute awareness of the mystery of life, its joy and its pain.
He states, “The mind is a cemetery of myriad pasts, which I attempt to exhume in order to poeticise a particular present and make factual a fable of the future.” Niall McCabe’s writing has featured in various publications, including Abridged, The Attic, The Belleville Park Pages, The Bohemyth, The Columbia Review, Icarus, and Trinity Journal of Literary Translation.
James Bennett
James Bennett (23) originally from Wexford Town now lives and works in Barcelona. He studied French and Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin. He has had poetry and prose published in Crannóg, Icarus, Berfrois, Belleville Park Pages and The Bohemyth.
“I've been writing since I was a child, but I didn't publish anything until 2013. Crannóg accepted a short prose poem of mine about not being able to sleep. The piece that I currently have in The Bohemyth has the same setup, but goes off in a completely different and more intense direction, which is interesting because I feel like that early stage of my writing has come full circle and is now over.”
“In the last six months I feel like I've grown alot as a writer. I take myself more seriously now. Recently I've been moving out of poetry and into prose. It feels like a more natural way to engage with the world that I live in, or at least the main components of my external world, such as the city and the internet. I still don't feel completely at home in prose though. I think the next thing I write will try to straddle the two forms somehow.”
Jim has recently tried his hand at literary translation and is currently working on translating the poetry of a young Mexican poet called Augusto Sonrics.
“I hope to publish a tranlsated extract from his latest work Seroquel Dreams.”
He plans to pursue a master's in literary translation at the University of East Anglia next year. “They have a great literary community over there.”
Alongside translation Jim is working on putting together a small zine. “It will be very DIY: a small print run on domestic A4 paper, with poetry, prose and visual art from about seven young people out of the current Dublin scene. I see it as a kind of energetic punk gesture that will hopefully act as a foil to the languidness of a lot of artistic activity in our culture.
"There are a lot of highly educated middle-class people going around creating things that are very aesthetically and intellectually complex, but have no humanity. They're steeped in the avant-garde aesthetic but don't have that crackling energy that all great avant-garde stuff should have.
"It's not a matter of choosing, either. Passion and reason can coexist. I think a lot of people get seduced by the prevailing faux-post-modernist attitude, and end up sneering at their own animal nature. This is pure cynicism arising from fear and laziness, and it makes for very boring reading.”
Jim admits though, “there's a lot of great stuff coming out of Dublin right now. It's a great place to cut your teeth, to emerge from. I remember this rush of enthusiasm in 2014 when Rob Doyle published Here Are The Young Men and I first read Anna Walsh in The Bohemyth and Cave Writings got started. There was just so much going on. It really felt like something was happening in Dublin. The size of the city is great for building commuity. And it's true that your elders are less likely to pull the ladder up after themselves than they would be in London or New York.” For Jim right now though, “my main priority is to improve my writing. Community is very important, but I think we have to strive not to lose sight of the work.”
D Joyce Ahearne:
D Joyce-Ahearne (22) is a final year English student at Trinity College Dublin. He is the chair of Trinity Publications and formerly one of the organisers of Cave Writings. His short fiction has appeared in The Bohemyth, berfrois, the Belleville Park Pages and gorse.
“I’ve always been writing but only began to identify with the idea of being a writer when I started college in September 2012.”
D. had two poems published in his first term at college, one in the Irish language journal Comhar and one in The Attic, Trinity Lit Soc’s publication. “I began to write short fiction more seriously towards the end of first year and also wrote a play.”
Over the last three years D. has concentrated on short fiction. “I think my main concern as a writer until very recently was the idea of sincerity: what that means and how we convey it today. Overrun as our society is with cynicism and irony, the idea of sincerity has come to be seen as an almost naive concern. I’ve found it very difficult to convey what I understand real life to be in the face of the loss of the real that has come with our continued migration online. There seems to be less and less emphasis placed on the actuality of experience and on the value of human contact.”
However in the last few months He has found himself moving away from this and towards what he feels is a truer voice, “one I feel speaks more for me and my experience and less of the general conditions I find myself existing under. I’m currently working on various short fictions that explore this new idiom as well as an essay for the Honest Ulsterman on young Irish poets.”
“My experience of the literary scene in Dublin has been primarily through Cave Writings, a reading night I ran with two friends [Andrew Kavanagh and Fionn Rogan]. We found actual human interaction to be lacking among young writers and the Cave was an answer to this: a space for people to meet and talk rather than interacting solely online.
Through my involvement with the Cave I’ve met a lot of talented young people and I’ve found it hugely beneficial to know other artists who are crafting beautiful and important things from our shared environment…I think if you’re serious about being a writer you can’t write in isolation. You need to be sending work for edits to people whose opinion and work you respect.”
Social media is beginning to play a much larger role in creative scenes across the globe however D believes, “the importance of meeting other artists in real life is huge. Not just as a writer but as a person it’s becoming more and more important to go outside, suck up your social anxiety and be a f*****g human. If you’re going to develop as a writer, as a person, you need to engage with the world and meet people and, as is often the case, awkward it out until you become comfortable in someone else’s company. There’s no substitute for the substance in an artistic relationship, or any, friendship that came about through hours of drunken conversations over art and everything else. And sometimes you meet very talented young arseholes but at least it’s an actual experience and not a f*****g twitter fight.”
D’s main concern at the moment “is the importance of the lived experience: understanding what that means and creating work that gets across how sincerely I believe in it. And if that’s the subject and voice you want to engage as a writer you need to be living it first, so I believe a vibrant scene of people knowing, meeting and sharing work with each other is fundamentally important to my project.”
