Irish literary magazine scene: Brilliant writing and blurred boundaries

The year 2023 has been one of blurred boundaries and becoming. Specifically, as it plays out in autobiographical fiction, first-person fiction, and memoir, these lines can be hazy. AI, which writers remembered last Christmas as a clumsy bot, has learned our language nuances and developed humour. We are engaging with trans voices. Finally, becoming, or transformation, continues to play out in myth and fairytales. It is a lot to swallow, and the literary magazines this year, in reflecting this, have mostly been excellent. Warning: not all of the stories end well.

“God,” says Plato, imagining Socrates in his last moments in Apology, “has specially appointed me to this city, so as though it were a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly.” This year, Stinging Fly celebrates 25 years of being a magazine of new writing, and by doing so, has sought to prick, irritate and arouse. Its winter issue is exquisite in its organisation. The table of contents spells out whether entries are fiction, poetry, essay or memoir, which, in this age of hazy distinctions, is helpful. However, the magazine itself is not grouped into these categories; instead the various works are juxtaposed, and the magazine unfolds like an onion, with echoes.

Appropriately, there are many uncomfortable animals or beings seeking to break out of their skin in the winter’s issue. I liked Rose Keating’s Squirm immensely. It is a familiar situation: a woman cares for her aging parent. Except, in this case, the father is a four-foot earthworm, his skin “tacky as split, spoiled pears”. It is Kafka in Kilkenny, as Dad hangs out in a bathtub of compost, watching television. Much like Metamorphosis, we do not know why Dad was turned into an earthworm, just that he misses having a cock and eating steak in restaurants. It is harrowing, hilarious and gruesome. In Stinging Fly, there will also be sheep and odes to invertebrates. A boy channels a formaldehyde-pickled shark in Emma Devlin’s The Gift, a parable about class tensions. Human-eating catfish writhe in the Mister Slow of Joondalup’s River of Fire, a story about the lethal absurdities in China’s Cultural Revolution.

Not all of Tolka is perfect, but therein lies its charm. Truth is flawed and we engage with it differently at specific points of our lives

Also addressed in Stinging Fly is the multiplicity of language and translation. Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire haunts JT Bogenschneider’s Osta Nulla, comprised of footnotes about a writer who vanished into the sea. Also Nabokov’s multilingual spirit is woven in Billy Ramsell’s poems written by an imagined Catalan, and Daniel Syrvoy’s essay about the practical problems of translating Joyce’s Ulysses into German. Ramsell’s The Fisherman was intoxicating. “Then I’ll press my hands – rope-bitten, ready - /against the coral interface of dawn./ Then I’ll speak only in salt,/ only in the oscillating dialects of water.”

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[ What makes the Irish literary magazine scene tick? ]

Syrvoy, who is obsessively precise, makes the point that Ulysses, while anchored in Dublin, is “contained in the language and the verbal texture”. So, to translate it into Austrian-German, “the Irish capital is transformed, bit by bit, into something else. In our case, a kind of Vienna.” Who knew that this Dublin masterpiece could be thus transposed?

Stinging Fly loops around the themes of change. John McLeod’s Blacking In is a darkly hilarious recollection of him running the Los Angeles marathon as an alcoholic. Sasha de Buyl’s essay Fashioning is a giddy tribute to cosmetics in a gender-blurred world. Emi Babikwa’s Our Extraordinary Lives is a futuristic tale about trans courtesans in Uganda, tough in femme-fatale, noir style. “A friend of ours,” the narrator muses, “who disappeared a year ago was called Pumice… I do not know any other person who would name themselves after a foot scrubbing rock.”

Given the strength of the trans-themed contributions and trans authors in this volume, Una Mullally’s essay on transphobia, The Discourse, is disappointing. I have admired Mullally’s writing in the past for her directness. However, in this essay, she adapts academic argot to make her case. For instance:

“This is the broad coalition trans-exclusionary feminists now find themselves aligned with: the ethno-nationalist fascists political parties and their ecosystem of radicalised individuals and conspiracy theorists, right-wing grifters, and those who scream about the disintegration of society yet whose political and cultural visions seek to bulldoze civil rights and freedoms.”

[ Michael Magee wins 2023 Rooney Prize for Irish Fiction ]

Huh? Mullally later equates transphobia with racism, which is reductive. What is more, she uses the trans platform to talk about herself, a white, middle-class cis-female lesbian – her childhood, her grief losing a trans friend to suicide. She cites exactly one trans author, Torrey Peters, and that is only to reference Peters quoting the cis black writer Toni Morrison. She speaks of trans rights, but does not give trans people a voice. She reminds me of the hetero boys at university who were women’s studies’ majors. One could call it cis-splaining.

The Pig’s Back

I moved to Ireland from Manhattan because it was a literary cradle, enthralled by Wilde, Shaw and Yeats. However, I have observed a nationalist Irish rah-rah, especially around food and sports, engendered from insecurity. (Really, how many people fantasise about Irish food?) This is not the case with Irish literary publishing, as it has been immersed in over a century of prestige, with authors who have been globally celebrated. Irish literary magazines do not necessarily need to represent their country. They attract writers from all walks of life and the world.

The Pig’s Back was established in Donegal by Dublin author Dean Fee. Donegal is the blustery, beautiful northern ass of nowhere, flanked by the sea. It is also a vat of lyrical ferment, having bred poets like Seumus Macmanus and Madge Herron, and its name in Irish, Dún nan Gall, means Fort of Foreigners. Appropriately, Pig’s Back is international while being pure Irish in its cachet and – at least in this issue – Donegal in its sadness. This year, there were almost 1,000 submissions, which were winnowed into six stories saturated with heartache.

The stories are connected by the theme of family, but they could not be more different in voice. Set in the Irish northwest, New York city, Galway and Dubrovnik, they are tales to mull over in twilight. As Alicia McNauley’s title, Among Bones, suggests, hers is a haunted story, of an archaeologist who spends her dig with the ghost of her recently deceased mother. There is an old-fashioned loveliness to McNauley’s language, as when she is trying to pitch her tent, which “springs wildly into shape” before the wind takes it “tumbling away like a dandelion seed”. Her dead mother percolates coffee and holds her in the night.

Syrvoy, who is obsessively precise, makes the point that Ulysses, while anchored in Dublin, is ‘contained in the language and the verbal texture’

The brevity of these stories means that much is left unsaid; brilliance lies in conveying what lurks between the lines. Robert Coakley’s The Fox in the Marran basks in the lushness of its sparse prose. A man helps his sister-in-law renovate the cottage she owned with his dead brother. The story is as condensed as poetry, words wondrously juxtaposed. As Frank, the protagonist, stumbles upon a dying gannet bird, “He pressed lightly on the delicate breast, the wonderful shawl of black seaweed, and still, no cry in the beak.” His sister-in-law “sucked the rich wine from her teeth”.

Thankfully, there is also levity. I chuckled at Megan Nolan’s Geido, Flatbush Avenue, where an awful first date, and also the heroine’s loneliness, are alleviated by New York city’s geographical specificity. As the heroine explains, place names make everything sweeter. “I am ambiently suicidal in a basement on Fulton Street.” That she has to haul herself to Brooklyn enhances, comically, the dreadfulness of the date. Direct Message by Grace Banks is a chronicle of the obsessive fury of a woman in a break-up, much of it via text. She sleeps with her roommate, stalks her ex and alienates her best friend. It is pure bitchy bliss.

Tolka

Readers might think that the stories in Tolka are make-believe. In fact, Tolka is the one magazine in Ireland committed to “formally promiscuous non-fiction”. To dip into Tolka’s pages is to experience various truths, inventively told. Tolka is where in-depth reading, autobiography and the creative voice melt and intersect.

Seán Hewitt mourns his father and confronts his sexuality through Gerard Manley Hopkins. A forgotten black jewel thief and queer black writer are brought to life by Shola Von Reinhold with camp aplomb, “Florid and aglitter with the scintillation of a thousand pink panther diamonds.” Nikita Minkin’s Tukwila Gold and Pawn, about working for a dodgy pharmaceutical supplier, juggles gallows humour (“I open a message from TusconSteve86. Subject line: KILL YOURSELF.”) with sentences of unrelenting beauty (”He chopsticks the cigarette with two uncut nails – they’re yellow – and crushes it into the rest of its fallen comrades.”) Auto-fiction Italian writer Walter Siti is blunt about trawling the San Francisco streets for sex. “Okay,” he writes, “a pathetic and drooling old man, with a low-income and so sex-crazed as to lose any good taste – but there I am!”

[ Surprises, collisions and juxtapositions in Ireland’s thriving literary magazine scene ]

Not all of Tolka is perfect, but therein lies its charm. Truth is flawed and we engage with it differently at specific points of our lives. Tolka is a buffet, with something for everyone’s tastes. You may come back and relish something that you have skipped over before. While reading Tolka in the damp cold, hearing helicopters monitor the riots outside, I preferred issue 5 (spring) to issue 6 (winter). Issue 5 was more uplifting.

However, I finished with Joanna Walsh. “Autobiology,” Walsh declares about her newest book, “is kind of a joke about the ‘authenticity’ of personal writing… If a lot of this ‘personal’ writing can be produced quickly by machine, how should it be read, criticised, published, and paid for?” Walsh engages with the bot by feeding it with her own prose.

The brevity of these stories means that much is left unsaid; brilliance lies in conveying what lurks between the lines

“These hidden workings included stuff about gender and labour… Then later you cursed yourself for not working it: how you wrote your first books between washing the clothes and feeding the children and working the gig economy with no job security or pension or sick pay or holiday.”

Those are Walsh’s bot’s words, which make any writer want to cower underneath the covers.

In the shadow of Walsh, what hope is there? I found solace in Paper Lanterns, a teen and young adult literary journal. Take Kylie Wang’s The Sky is Blue Today. “Notice how his voice still echoes in your head/But how it undulates, mixing/ With others, like your friends/ When you visited them today.” Mae O’Connor’s Eat or We Both Starve is a speculative fiction that is a metaphor for mothers, daughters and anorexia. Emily Buffin’s poem Onions is taut, reminiscent of Seamus Heaney with an O Henry twist. “Do kids,” a friend wondered to me, “even read these days?” While reading Paper Lanterns, I wondered if I cared. Maybe young authors do not struggle with an anxiety of influence. Perhaps because of that, their voices are fresh and burn with promise.

Mei Chin reviews more Irish literary magazines next Saturday