Irish Literature Month at The Town Crier
The Great Men of Irish LiteratureThis month, The Town Crier investigates contemporary Irish Literature. Curated by Aoife Walsh, it will feature award-winning and emerging Irish poets, short story writers, novelists, and publishers, speaking about the elements of Irish literature that mean the most to them right now. When you think about literature from Ireland, who are the writers you think of? Our four Nobel Laureates for literature, WB Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney? Do you think of James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Patrick Kavanagh, JM Synge, or Jonathan Swift? How about Roddy Doyle, William Trevor, John McGahern, Colm Tóibín (pronounced toe-been), Martin McDonagh or John Boyne, all award-winning writers and all writers whose work has been adapted for the screen. Do the Great Men of Irish Letters spring to your mind sooner than the Great Women? How about, then, the grandmothers of Irish literature, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Augusta Gregory, Kate O’Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Maeve Brennan? Or the granddaughters, Anne Enright, Jennifer Johnston, Edna O’Brien, Claire Kilroy, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Claire Keegan, Christine Dwyer-Hickey, Eimear McBride (pronounced ee-mer), Deirdre Madden, Nuala O’Connor, and Mary Costello? And then there are our major prize-winners like those who have taken home the Booker since its inception in 1969: JG Farrell, Iris Murdoch, Roddy Doyle, John Banville, and Anne Enright (also the first Irish Laureate for Fiction). And what of those, though they’ve wandered away: Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill, Belinda McKeon, and Emma Donoghue? And that astonishing generation of male poets, Heaney amongst them: Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Michael Hartnett, John Montague, and Anthony Cronin? I’ve left out so many!
Great Women of Irish Literature, like Anne EnrightWhile I’m enjoying myself just listing these names, whether they mean anything to you or not, I’m also a little fatigued by that oh-so-Irish impulse to remind you of the internationally renowned writers who just happen to come from my country. Can’t we just get over ourselves? Why do we sing “She’s Irish!” like it’s a catchphrase that’ll win us money? I think it’s because this impulse to point is also the goading question to the answer that so often follows comments about Irish writers: “They punch way, way, way above their weight.”Irish writers have been doing this for decades, so this series of essays on and by Irish writers in 2015 (some emerging, some award-winning, some destined for the canon) will seek to do away with this adolescent aspiration, this underdog banner, this apology for coming. Bear in mind, though, that it will not tell you everything; it will be just a snapshot. Dear Canada, the rest you must do yourself.Ireland Literature Exchange
In 2010, Ireland Literature Exchange (ILE), the national agency for the worldwide promotion of literature from Ireland, asked the novelist Claire Kilroy to write an essay about the Irish literary tradition and the wealth of literature produced by Irish writers today, which would be published in booklet form and distributed to an international publishing industry. I was working with ILE at the time, had been for two years at that stage. The Irish Literary Tradition and the Contemporary Irish Novel was just one of several projects I worked on which not only branded our top-tier writers as Irish but also reminded the world of our vast, varied, and astounding literary legacy.In her essay, Claire Kilroy opened with remarks on a well-known poster of Irish writers, which has graced the walls of schoolrooms, libraries, and some homes in Ireland for a couple of generations. It shows what are by now the usual suspects—Joyce, Yeats, Wilde, Shaw, and Beckett – among other famous, male writers. Kilroy notes: “Joyce and Beckett are the progenitors of the modern Irish prose. They laid the foundation stone for a literary tradition on which future generations could build.” Kilroy goes on to say that Ulysses not only changed the history of the Irish writer; “it changed the future of the Irish writer,” too.In compiling this blog series on literature from Ireland, I was reminded of those moments, during my time with ILE,when it seemed so vital and yet so unfair to only promote our writers as Irish. Vital because Kevin Barry writes funny and captures the special cadence of Irish dialogue and syntax that I hear in my peers as well as his characters, but unfair, too, because Kevin’s influences are not only on that poster of Irish writers. He brings to his writing a globalized education in film, music, graphic novels, and television, as well as a love for the work of Flann O’Brien. So too do Paul Murray, Keith Ridgway, Celine Kiernan, and Alan Glynn.
The Irish Literary Tradition & The Contemporary Irish NovelNevertheless, we pursued our rebranding exercises at book fairs around the world. The Irish Literary Tradition and the Contemporary Irish Novel was published in English and in Chinese, and we sent 10,000 copies to the 2010 Shanghai Book Fair. The response to this gift was overwhelmingly positive. Then, in 2011, at the height of debilitating funding cuts, emigration, and job losses, we released a postcard project, Postcards from the Edge, featuring eight of Ireland’s top-tier writers (John Banville, Sebastian Barry, John Boyne, Marina Carr, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Claire Kilroy, and Colm Tóibín), all of whom were still choosing to live and work in Ireland. For this project, we asked Richard Gilligan, himself an emerging, bright star of a photographer, to shoot these writers in their place of work. The results were more than we’d planned for but exactly as we had hoped: Sebastian Barry at his home in Wicklow; Colm Tóibín sitting in front of his beautifully chaotic desk; Anne Enright in her thinking chair, and so on. Again, we sent thousands of packs of these postcards around the world during the following years. From the project’s launch party, it is Anne Enright’s words I’d like to rehash for you here. She spoke of the moment—way back in the ’90s, half-way between Dublin and Moscow, during a magical, boozy literary train tour, organized by who can remember now—when the younger writers on the bill witnessed the professionalization of Irish writing. Nursing hangovers and searching for the stage door to that night’s venue, they watched as an older Irish writer arrived in a blacked-out car, and was escorted, no less, to his chair for the evening’s performance. He was sober, on time, and he was ready for his cue. The younger members of the troupe, Anne Enright included, realized there and then that the belligerent, slightly bewildered, but always a good sport Irish writer persona no longer held the charm it once gave off.So with this sobriety in mind, over the month of August 2015, The Town Crier will bring you a series of posts on Irish writers engaging with Irish literature. Mary Costello will speak to you of her favourite Alice Munro character, Juliet. Ailbhe Darcy will present three Irish poets living away from Ireland. Michael Naghten Shanks will describe how he came to edit The Bohemyth and how the community he met along the way was welcoming, savvy, and vital to his growth as a writer. Jennifer Ryan, the woman behind The Lady Loves Books blog, will show how reviewing brought her into the sphere of one of Ireland’s great twentieth-century novelists, Jennifer Johnston. I will speak to previous contributors to The South Circular (the digital magazine I edit), Danielle McLaughlin, EM Reapy, Andrew Meehan, and Adrian Duncan, about their processes and their major influences, including Canadian writers whom they love. Publisher Sarah Davis-Goff of Tramp Press will tell you why now is an exciting time to be publishing Irish writers, an excitement she calls The Movement. Caitriona Lally, the debut author of Eggshells, will explore the Oddball Narrator in recent Irish recession-lit. E Martin Nolan will tackle what it actually means to be Irish-American in literature. Finally, Michael Longley, recipient of the 2015 Griffin International Prize for Poetry, will respond to my questions about war, myth, language, and family.International Ireland
Postcards from the EdgeThe current generation of Irish writers is professional to a T. They’re still a good sport, always ready for more of everything, and will insist on stoking stories long into the night, but their focus on the job at hand—telling stories and representing their country—has been encouraged and probably largely made possible by the opening of Ireland’s borders during the Celtic Tiger (1994–2008). This involved the movement of different nationalities and ethnicities into Ireland, as they came for jobs, education, and the craic. Simultaneously, this is a generation of writers who, by and large, grew up on the Internet and they are incredibly aware of themselves in a global context. In fact, they make it their business to know what’s going on in Canada, the UK, and the US. Of course, they’re Europeans, too, members of that bastion of civilization which from way over here in Toronto is looking more insane by the week. As a result, we can and do send our writers everywhere, to the IFOA, to Guadalajara, to Paris, to New York, to Ljubljana, to Zagreb. Gone are the days of shyness or cuteness. They’re right here and they’re all ready for you.While I’ll always think of literature from Ireland as that party way out in the rye, with home-made hooch and a smile to get in, I also hope the following essays on literature from Ireland in 2015 will go some way to further shedding light on its unique and warm embrace, its maturity, and its world-class pedigree.
