Land of the Ever Young: Highlighting working-class people’s writing

Land of the Ever Young: An Anthology of Working People’s Writing for Children from Contemporary Ireland

Author: Edited by Jenny Farrell, with illustrations by Karen Dietrich

ISBN-13: 978-1-912710-43-0

Publisher: Culture Matters

Guideline Price: €12

This anthology of writing for young readers is the final instalment in Culture Matter’s publishing project, which is dedicated to showcasing “working people’s writing from contemporary Ireland”.

In her introduction, editor Jenny Farrell establishes “the right of the working class to express the wealth of their culture, articulate their experience of life”, and the importance that recognition plays for young readers, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, where poverty and limited opportunities can make it “more difficult [for them] to realise their full emotional, educational, social and economic potential”. Literature and art that reflect their life experience, that give them confidence in themselves, she writes, are crucial for inspiring them in both art and life.

Contemporary lives

Land of the Ever Young is organised by age range, with work for readers from four to 14 represented. There are poems as well as prose pieces, contemporary realist adventures and modern retellings of fairytales. This latter material from Ross Walsh seems just as important as anything original, illustrating how we can find in classic stories themes that resonate with our contemporary lives, no matter how fanciful or distant the setting may be.

Some of the work has a political reach (see Frank Murphy’s Dickensian satire A New Deal). Other pieces use phonetic speech to achieve an intimate authenticity (Karl Parkinson’s Blockhood). The multicultural reality of Irish childhood is also foregrounded in many of the pieces, and especially effectively in Owen Gallagher’s This is Our Home!

Identity and culture

More traditional versions of Irish identity and culture are reflected too, in The Fairy Fort by Anne Mac Darby-Beck, for example, and the inclusion of several Irish-language pieces. Bold black-and-white illustrations from Karen Dietrich add visual interest.

“When we look back at historic events, we very rarely hear or read of the experiences of children, especially children from working-class areas,” Farrell concludes in her introduction. This anthology hopes to provide some evidence of life right now for today’s Irish children and for historians of the future.