By Liam Harrison
The Dublin Review is a quarterly magazine of essays, memoir, reportage and fiction. Founded and edited by Brendan Barrington in 2000, The Dublin Review has a wonderful twenty-three year history, celebrated by the recent anthology of essays Show Your Work (2022), with earlier pieces collected in The Dublin Review Reader (2007). While the journal has published many great short stories over the years, its most remarkable intervention is the way it has championed the essay form, coinciding with and precipitating a new wave of Irish non-fiction.
Brendan Barrington is also an editorial director at the publisher Sandycove, an imprint of Penguin Random House. This interview was conducted over email in early 2023.
Liam Harrison (LH): Could you tell us a bit about The Dublin Review. When was it set up, what sort of writing does it publish?
Brendan Barrington (BB): I started The Dublin Review way back in 2000, and it has appeared quarterly ever since. At first we published fiction, essays and poetry. I quickly came to feel we had more to offer with prose than with poetry, so we dropped the poetry. We publish work of all shapes and sizes, including pieces of many thousands of words. To my mind, our openness to longer stories and essays feels entirely normal and right, but it seems to be a bit unusual.
LH: The Dublin Review’s openness to various lengths and styles is still strangely unusual! I think there’s an entrenched publishing assumption that people want uniformity rather than variety and a diversity of forms. It also reminds me of those wheels that show you how much of an online article you have read – as if reading is only about completion and self-optimization.
What type of writing excites you most as an editor? Are you seeing any more or less of it in the current cultural climate?
BB: I think literary people are naturally inclined to complain about the general drift of literary culture (or culture generally), and I’ve definitely been known to do that myself. But over the past number of years I’ve had the pleasant experience of watching the literary culture evolve in ways that I could only have dreamed of back in the 2000s. Back then, there were a handful of Irish writers who had proven chops as essayists. And there were others who saw what The Dublin Review was doing, recognized a kindred sensibility, and sent me brilliant essays. But for the most part I had to approach writers I admired and ask them to turn their hand to non-fiction (sometimes for the first time ever). And when I looked in the in-box, the sad fact was that early-career Irish writers simply weren’t peppering me with essays: it was almost 100% short stories. This struck me as odd. Were there no young writers out there who worshipped Baldwin and Didion, none who believed that the very best writing in the world could be done in the zone where self-scrutiny meets political and cultural scrutiny?
That’s the sort of fretting I used to do until, fairly suddenly, there was a big change. I can’t explain why it happened; various theories have been tossed around, but I don’t find any of them entirely convincing. In any event, the most ambitious and thoughtful young writers who turn up in the in-box are now as likely to come bearing an essay as a short story. Meanwhile, and happily, there are far more serious journals on the go in Ireland now than there were when we started in 2000, and most of them view the essay as part of their mission.
LH: In the introduction to your recent anthology, Show Your Work, you touch on that big change in the world of Irish essays and non-fiction. You suggest that issue 49 of The Dublin Review offers a snapshot of this shifting cultural environment. The issue includes a prescient essay by Kevin Barry about the ubiquity of the internet, Mark O’Connell writing about the phenomenon of unboxing videos on YouTube, and Caelainn Hogan reporting on the Syrian civil war. These writers, in your words, ‘instinctively take the long view even when trying to capture the essence of a moment’; the essays are ‘rooted in an awareness and ownership of one’s subjectivity and, at the same time, a commitment to getting as close to the truth as possible, in a world where truth is usually stranger than fiction’. You’ve said that you don’t find any of the theories about this fundamental change in recent Irish fiction and non-fiction convincing. But is there any kind of generic term or category that captures these developments – along the lines of “hysterical realism”, “new journalism”, “new sincerity”, “autofiction”, etc.?
BB: I find descriptive categories occasionally useful as a way of helping us to recognise patterns of badness in writing. The ‘lyric essay’ for example: of course there is good writing that can plausibly be put in this category, but I find most lyric essays to be exercises in evasion: instead of trying to connect the dots and go deep on ideas and experiences, they try to create a phoney aura of literary seriousness through lyrical language and a kind of contrived fragmentation. The good stuff, by contrast, doesn’t need a special label: it is just the essay being pushed to the limits of its possibilities, doing the sorts of things I talked about in that introduction to Show Your Work.
LH: That’s a very interesting thought – that labels are useful for identifying weaknesses but crumble when trying to qualify strengths. “Contrived fragmentation” is a good case in point! The word “just” in “just the essay being pushed to the limits of its possibilities” is doing a lot of work! But it makes sense when reading the essays published in The Dublin Review. From the conversations I’ve had with Dublin Review contributors, it also speaks to your attentiveness as an editor.
Julie Bates recently argued in The New Irish Studies (2020) that: ‘[t]he most exciting new writing in Ireland is happening in the field of nonfiction’. Would you agree?
BB: Yes, 100 per cent – and for me this crucially also encompasses the salutary influence of non-fiction on some of the best recent fiction.
LH: I want to ask what makes a Dublin Review piece. But clearly there is a diversity of creative paths being explored in the journal. Writers like Rob Doyle and Doireann Ní Ghríofa, and many others, often blur the lines between fact and fiction in their work, or probe the formal limits of non-fiction. Other writers are testing these limits of non-fiction in different directions – Brian Dillon’s essayism, Mark O’Connell’s reportage, Tim MacGabhann’s trilogy of addiction, and Roisin Kiberd’s taxonomies of the internet. Rather than there being one kind of Dublin Review style of writing, is the journal a celebration of “being various”?
BB: I’m glad the diversity is visible to you, because I sometimes wonder if my strong views about what makes an essay good are maybe a little too strong. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a great example of a writer who, though strongly inclined towards lyricism in her prose, also has a very healthy understanding of the differences between what makes poetry work and what make prose work. She grasps this in a way that lyrically-inclined prose writers who are not poets generally don’t, and so she knows how to use lyricism in prose without abdicating her responsibility to supply the other kinds of connective tissue that prose requires. This is rare and wonderful. She also has a great sense of humour and of irony – qualities that the lyric essay tends to lack. Another thing I should say here is that each of the writers you name in your question has a very distinctive prose style that transcends form and content – and that in some ways dictates form. So I could drone on about the brilliant qualities they have in common, but I think most readers will be more aware of their amazing individuality.
LH: How does your work as an editor at Sandycove overlap with your work at The Dublin Review?
BB: Some days I get to work with brilliant teams of colleagues in Dublin and London, and some days I get to work on this tiny thing I started myself: it’s a nice combination. (I’m also very lucky in my Dublin Review deputies, Aingeala Flannery and Deanna Ortiz.) Sometimes Dublin Review pieces turn into books, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to publish those books with Sandycove – it’s always pleasant when that happens. In both jobs, the primary task is the same: to find great new writers and to help writers achieve their full potential. Because there are always far more stories, essays and books written than can be published, editors tend to be viewed as gatekeepers: people often focus on the fact that we say no most of the time. But every editor exists in a state of mild desperation to find the next good thing. We don’t think of ourselves as gatekeepers. We’re more like birdwatchers hoping to spot some rare species. This is something that I encourage unpublished writers to bear in mind if they feel the system is constructed to keep them out: editors want to love your work.
LH: The idea of editors as birdwatchers is very nice (I’m definitely stealing that!).
In what ways can literary journals change and develop the way a writer works? Do literary journals provide “launchpads” for new and emerging writers? (I’m especially thinking here about Sally Rooney’s ‘Even if you Beat Me’!).
BB: Part of me wants to agree with the premise that one of a journal’s jobs is to be a launchpad. But writers aren’t rockets! And editors aren’t rocket scientists. The whole process is more amorphous, and it’s risky to speak of cause and effect. The moderately intelligent thing I did vis-à-vis Sally Rooney was to ask her about writing something after Mark O’Connell (who had taught her) told me how gifted she was. It was obvious from that first essay that she was a big talent – anyone could have seen that – but I had no idea of where that talent would lead her next. And even if it’s true that that essay helped her get an agent, I somehow doubt that she’d have floundered in obscurity if I’d never approached her. It’s easy to imagine any number of alternative early pathways for her, or indeed for any writer who ends up doing well. So – I’m trying to figure out a metaphor that feels more precise than ‘launchpad’. Particle accelerator? Soft-play area?
LH: I think it comes back to the insufficiency of labels! And how these creative processes resist being reduced to neat categories and formulas…
I didn’t know Mark taught Sally – that’s really interesting. I’ve just finished reading his new book, A Thread of Violence, which is out later this year (and it is incredible, as I’m sure you know if you’ve read it!). There’s a million things I could say about it, but I noticed in the acknowledgements that he thanks Sally for her help as a reader for the book’s development. I love tracing the friendships and communities in acknowledgements pages, and how they show the constellation of people that help make a book happen, beyond the author’s name on the cover. Maybe that’s a better way of thinking about literary journals – instead of “launchpads” – as constellations and communities of writers, editors and readers. That’s been my impression of journals like The Dublin Review, gorse, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, The Tangerine etc., as well as with the newer journals too.
What do you see as the greatest challenges facing emerging writers in Ireland today?
BB: This is hardly an original answer, but anyone who wants to devote time and effort to creativity in Ireland has to wrestle with the appalling cost of actually living here. The Arts Council does great work funding writers and journals, and that makes a huge difference. But the housing crisis – which feels like a permanent crisis – makes life so much harder.
LH: Are there any kind of submissions you would like to see a lot more of as an editor? (e.g., writing from outside Ireland, underrepresented writers, translations, prose poetry, historical fiction, genre fiction etc.)
BB: It can sometimes seem as though literary confidence is horrifically maldistributed: the most talented early-career writers are often the most subject to self-doubt, whereas the untalented can seem strangely immune. I think this is less true than it used to be – I’m not sure why – but it remains a worrying phenomenon. And it is of course likely to be exacerbated by various forms of inequality. So it may be especially important to say to writers from communities that are underrepresented in literature: we really, really want to hear from you.
LH: With the number of submissions you receive, I imagine that there is not enough time to individually discuss work that doesn’t make it into an issue. Is there any general advice you would like to give to writers who have had their work rejected?
BB: I tell writers not to draw dire conclusions from a form rejection. That is the fate of most submissions, and it does not mean the submission was terrible. It doesn’t even mean it wasn’t great! It’s important to bear in mind that editors are fallible humans with idiosyncratic tastes. We do our best, but reading and making decisions about manuscripts is an unscientific process. If you do get feedback about a piece, it’s worth taking very seriously, even if it runs against your own sense of the work. Having said that, it’s also true that some feedback is foolish, or just a bad fit – because, again, we are fallible. I find that most of the feedback I give tends to relate to form. If your prose isn’t very good, or you have nothing much to say, there’s probably not much I can say that will help you improve. But if you write strong sentences and have a good story to tell but have not found the right form for your piece – as is often the case – then I may have something useful to say to you.
It is consistently surprising to me how many talented and intelligent writers seem to give little or no thought to form. Sometimes, they will tell me that they hadn’t even been aware of certain formal choices they made in a piece of writing. To be clear, I’m usually not talking about super-subtle matters of form; I’m talking about basic stuff like first person or third, past tense or present. For me, the form of a piece – its mode of address – is its foundation, and I encourage writers to scrutinize the formal choices they’ve made (consciously or otherwise) before sending something out.
The latest Dublin Review, Issue 90 | Spring 2023, features new work by John Butler, Laura Morris, Ella Gaynor, Rivkah McKinley, Gavin McCrea and Ian Sansom. You can order it, or subscribe to The Dublin Review, here.
Liam Harrison is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of the West of England. He recently completed a PhD researching late style and modernist legacies in twenty-first century British and Irish fiction at the University of Birmingham. He is a founding editor of the non-fiction literary journal Tolka, and a founding member of the Contemporary Irish Literature Research Network.
Contemporary Irish Literature 