Irish literary magazines: from the visually stunning to the unapologetically plain

The history of pictorial magazines is long and interesting, whether one is perusing the pages of today’s Vogue or the early 20th-century Irish Review. However, either the writing or the images are often in service to the other. Someone might illustrate a story; another person might explain the art. In Holy Show, for every contribution, artist and writer must collaborate. (Much of Holy Show is commissioned.)

Its pieces may not be as in-depth as either an art lover or a reader might crave, because the contributors have had, in working together, to compromise. However, each magazine is stunning; among all the periodicals on offer this year, with its vibrant colours and carefully selected fonts it is the belle. Moreover, this winter’s issue of Holy Show offers glimpses into the creative process. How do we make art? How do we craft a tale?

Certain pieces shine. Four Fireside Stories are of women gathered in southwest Kerry spinning yarns. Among these, Canadian Mahito Indi Henderson’s Bloody Victorian Death Doll is a terrific anecdote of a prank gone horribly wrong. In Rob Doyle and Hugh Mulhern’s Hibernofuturism, Doyle wisely gives Mulhern the centre stage with his eerie, AI-generated photographs. Another standout is Nicole Flattery and Hannah Clare de Gordon’s After My Funeral. It is genuinely funny in a year when laughter has been rare.

Flattery, on the heels of her new novel, Nothing Special, drags her “long-suffering” friend De Gordon – an artist and photographer – to book launches. Nothing Special was about two girls at the Warhol factory. Accordingly, De Gordon Warhols her accompanying images. Flattery makes it clear in her stream-of-consciousness narrative that she can be intolerable to be around, for she is ebulliently narcissistic and neurotic. “I like at writers’ festivals,” she writes, “when people are quietly competitive about things. What room was your event in? Was it in a large room like my event? Could it hold an awful lot of people like my event? No, I want to say. My event was in a very small room. It was in a tiny room. In fact, it was in the toilet.”

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In the prose and the photos, this friendship between Flattery and De Gordon is vividly conveyed. There might be eye-rolling but their mutual affection thrums throughout.

A lot of literature these days is pathos and paranoia, broken bodies and despair. Laughter is underrated; and the ability to churn out comedy is something that requires chutzpah, well-timed beats and a masterful juggling of light and bleak. The art of being funny is hard to master. It is also a trait that I have associated with the Irish.

This is why I loved Flattery in Holy Show – she was funny. I have also enjoyed Doyle’s contributions to Tolka, Holy Show and the Dublin Review. Doyle, whose latest book is Autobibliography, is a “promiscuous” writer, to borrow a word from Tolka. If he has contributed to another literary periodical than the ones I have cited, I would not be surprised. In Doyle’s closing essay of Tolka’s issue 6, GASPAR NOÉ’S ALL-CAPS CINEMA, he smoked weed and locked himself up with the films of Gasper Noé. Noé is probably best known for Irreversible, a movie about a rape told backwards. A director of gloom, Noé’s films make Ingmar Bergman look like Legally Blonde. There’s rhythmic fun in Doyle’s writing about his self-induced masochism. For instance, “Dario Argento, Gaspar’s sick f**k of a father figure, stole a stick from Hitchcock”. How can one not giggle?

[ Gaspar Noé: ‘I’m annoyed by a culture in which death is always considered something bad’ ]

Doyle’s essay The Lightning Rod for the Dublin Review is a comic triumph, one of the most uplifting things I have read. In it, Doyle attends a conference about James Joyce in Trieste. Unfortunately, he doesn’t like the guy. He writes, “I just don’t love Joyce’s rhythms, his sense of euphony, his punster’s compulsion ... And yet here I was, creaming off him for a free holiday ... Here I was, not for the first time, living on the coattails of his greatness.”

Doyle’s descriptions of the academic conference tickle. He reminds me of the academic satirist David Lodge and the essays of the late American writer David Foster Wallace, as they all frolic in absurdity and details. Like Lodge and Foster Wallace, Doyle gets away with his teasing because he is of a certain calibre, one that cannot be reeled in by political correctness. He talks about hanging out with a queer, cyberpunk academic and a 40-minute “meta-criticism” lecture that unwinds one sentence from Ulysses – “a totally gratuitous exercise”. Also, the essay rings honestly; Doyle comes down upon himself quite fiercely. If I quote more, I will spoil its magic. However, read it, as it will cause a belly laugh.

[ How a short speech by David Foster Wallace can help you through a bad day ]

The Dublin Review, even though it was founded in 2000, has established itself as the grizzled dame of Irish literary publishing. The New York Times says, “It is pickled in that’s city brine”. Among other publications, it stands out, in this image-crazed world, for its lack of illustrations. The covers are unapologetically plain, just text on a pastel background. However, as John Banville remarks, the Dublin Review is “a lightsome voice at play in a dark time”.

When one is thus lauded, one can afford to be “lightsome”. Indeed, the latest issue of the Dublin Review is often frothy about loving, being left, and money. What Do You Do? by Roisin Lehane is specific about dating on a limited bank account in New York City. “So at the restaurant nobody discussed how the bill was to be split. Because it was $17 – I cut myself another slice of pizza – it was one of those posh pizzas, it didn’t come pre-sliced.” Maggie Armstrong’s Number One is about dating an aristocrat who constantly tries to avoid paying the tab. Sisters, we have all been there.

[ WB Yeats’s Nobel banquet: The food they ate, the wine they drank, and what it said about Ireland ]

My step-great-grandmother, the 19th-century author Nora Hopper, palled around with WB Yeats, was a significant figure in London’s Irish Literary Society, sojourned in Dublin and contributed to the New Ireland Review. She also dabbled in flash fiction; her A Novel in Two Pages appeared in the Sketch. I am not sold on the term “flash fiction”. I prefer the term “minimalist fiction”, because it is an art that has been experimented with by masters such as Kafka, Joyce and Chekhov.

To create a story and stir the reader with few words is a genuine challenge. To call it “flash”, in my opinion, makes the medium sound lazy. Still, Splonk is the online Irish magazine dedicated to flash fiction. The contributions are good, but they cannot compete with Kafka’s Hunger Artist or Joyce’s Arcady. Nevertheless, I love Splonk’s conceit and the fact that the publication exists. Also, with flash fiction, much like with poetry, you can read each piece differently, depending on where you are in life. The one that currently resonates with me is Rick White’s Stargazey Pie, which is beautiful.

“Now the fish look up to the heavens, and maybe you’ll see their eyes twinkle down below. Sometimes I go missing too. I take a bottle with me and dream of sinking into the heedless memory of the sea. When I get home, I half expect you to’ve picked my lock, and be there waiting for me in my kitchen. But there is only ever the smell of fish gone bad, and eyes that no longer shine.”

[ The Aphorisms of Kafka: An invaluable guidance along this shadowy path ]

I have observed that domesticity and real estate have crept into writing since Irish house prices and supermarket bills have gone up. Personally, I have always been a fan of interiority in literature, but now that costs have soared, I myself ponder square metres, gardens and the practicalities of making dinner. Many of this year’s literary offerings are infected with the same concerns. There is so much light delineating wood floors, and food being cooked. I laughed at Kate Smyth’s It Could Be Worse in the Stinging Fly, a classic real-estate horror story. (No matter what happens, people will stay because the rent is cheap. Think Rosemary’s Baby.) Smyth’s tale is an example of real-estate horror entwined with the Irish tendency not to complain.

Banshee was established in 2014 by Laura Cassidy, Claire Hennessy and Eimear Ryan and billed as a woman-forward magazine. I was delighted at the abundance of female, trans and queer voices in this year’s literary-magazine offerings. While Banshee has nonfemale contributors, its theme for this issue is quite domestic, but not in an apron-wearing, happy-ending way. For instance, in Bob Hicok’s poem Home: “When we moved, I dug up our dead cats, put their bones in cat carriers”. Beth Kilkenny confesses in iMom that “[f]or a long time I hated being a mother” but how “being a mother online radicalized me”. Roisin Lanigan’s Not That Hungry, Actually is about eating men while craving Sainsbury tomatoes. In fact, it is a lot to digest.

The inaugural issue of the Four Faced Liar, published in Cork, is dazzling in its reach, which speaks to how writers everywhere covet being published in Irish pages. Represented are authors from Waterford, Portugal, Canada, Texas, Nigeria and the Isle of Man, to name a few. There is a new translation of a 19th-century lesbian French-English poet, Renée Vivien. There is dystopian fiction, flash fiction, meditations on the Troubles, murders and Irish funerals. What, I thought to myself, connects these writings? I realised that it is the mundane, intimate details of home.

In Dean Fee’s Ireland’s First Serial Killer, he sets the scene: “Houses sprung up from the ground, pebble-dashed or skimmed grey ... Families were moved in without so much of a curtain hung up and their lives played out under bare bulbs and the flicker of the TV.” Thea Petrou’s essay on translation and the spectre of her grandmother is called My First Garden. Arresting is Karla Hirsch’s short story The Roommate, about living with a body, a wake in the near future. As she explains, “The government’s attempts at removing the bodies have been fruitless. They reappear until left where they have decided to rest and eventually disappear without a trace.” The body appears in her bathtub with “[p]ale skin, old fashioned skirt”.

In both the Four Faced Liar and Banshee, the specificity of domesticity is grim. There are dead pets, dead parents and fruits that are metaphors for miscarriages. Maybe, as their writers suggest, home and its perimeters is the least safe place in the world. Or perhaps we can find respite, as Toby Buckley’s poem Bates – a nod to Hitchcock’s Psycho – suggests, “in a world devoid of mothers, murders, white-tiled showers/ we could be a perfect match ... We can flirt over milk and sandwiches/ and shall-I-play-mother until the jug runs dry” (Banshee).

And so, with those words, have a cosy Christmas and a merry New Year.