'Season of the Swamp wavers between different ideas of itself, at times seeming a loving meditation on the character of a specific place, while at others it becomes a rollicking tale of rebels in exile, men of history in the interregnum before they arise to their destinies.'
On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writers Darragh McCausland and Nicole Morris to read and discuss their essays, featured in the latest issue of The Stinging Fly magazine, Issue 51 Volume Two.
‘I suppose I’m taking the “joy” that I looked for in poetry last year to be something like little pockets of lightness or beginning. Not a turning away from the world as we know it (nor, as Rukeyser suggests, from the parts of the worlds we don’t know or understand), but a way to be in it. I found this kind of joy in several Irish poetry collections in 2024.’
‘From inside this hell, in this dazed state of terror, I write to you about my adventure yesterday, offering a testimony of defeat from a man who longs for a hot bath like the ones he used to take before the war.’
‘[N]one of us likes to think we live and have our days in a time more stupid than others we might have lived in. All previous ages were the dark ages, we like to believe, and we are the new and enlightened ones.’
'Every plainly elegant passage here is charged by shadow narratives around the book, its project, its author and its ‘author’. No matter how outlandish the image or the detail, everything scans as a mise-en-abyme—an image of the book within the book. How’s this resignification achieved so absolutely? What is this thing that you’re reading?'
‘From inside this hell, in this dazed state of terror, I write to you about my adventure yesterday, offering a testimony of defeat from a man who longs for a hot bath like the ones he used to take before the war.’
‘[N]one of us likes to think we live and have our days in a time more stupid than others we might have lived in. All previous ages were the dark ages, we like to believe, and we are the new and enlightened ones.’
For this month’s story, Nuala O’Connor takes inspiration from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1925 short story, ‘The Parrot’.
This month’s story is co-authored by Eley Williams and Nell Stevens. It’s from Duets, a new anthology of co-authored stories, published this month by Scratch Books.
A new story by Lucy Sweeney Byrne from her second collection of stories, Let’s Dance, which will be published next month by Banshee Press.
'As she flew through the sky in the white clouds, Fatma agonised over the expectations placed on her. She thought about all the cars she was expected to bring back to her village, and the promises she had made to find people jobs – as if she could create opportunities in Bahari!'
‘Liadan Ní Chuinn is a phenomenal writer, with such a striking, distinctive style. Something new and startling is happening here: fiction is being rejuvenated.’ — Danny Denton
11th February 2025
18th December 2024
30th October 2024
‘From inside this hell, in this dazed state of terror, I write to you about my adventure yesterday, offering a testimony of defeat from a man who longs for a hot bath like the ones he used to take before the war.’
‘[N]one of us likes to think we live and have our days in a time more stupid than others we might have lived in. All previous ages were the dark ages, we like to believe, and we are the new and enlightened ones.’
For this month’s story, Nuala O’Connor takes inspiration from Elizabeth Bowen’s 1925 short story, ‘The Parrot’.