‘Sometimes I tell myself that the words will come if I just sit here long enough.’
Donal Ryan Essay 2nd August 2023
‘In the early days, people told me my disease disgusted them. They didn’t say it in those words—they used phrases like ‘I hope this email finds you well,’ but the implications were clear enough.’
Ed Garland Fiction 19th July 2023
‘After the book I’ve been working on for three years gets rejected countless times by publishers and agents, I happen upon a bit of spare cash and say, fuck it, I’m getting a shed.’
Kevin Curran Essay 12th July 2023
A story from Mary O’Donoghue’s new collection, The Hour After Happy Hour.
Mary O’Donoghue Fiction 21st June 2023
Author and academic Tim Groenland talks to our incoming editor Lisa McInerney about reading submissions, the magazine’s editorial process, and keeping up with an ever-changing publishing landscape.
Tim Groenland Interview 18th May 2023
‘I have a habit of telling stories too fast, expecting a coherent narrative to spring up from a few words flimsily strung together on a string. The problem is words words words. The more neatly I arrange them, the more they lose their flavour.’
Cathy Sweeney Fiction 1st March 2023
‘I remember my uncle cutting his toe nails with a razor blade. I remember my father drunk from Sunday to Sunday. There has to be a monument to the failures as well.’
Michael J. Farrell Fiction 2nd February 2023
As the year ends, we asked more of our editors, writers and collaborators to write about something that has made a significant impact on them over the past while.
The Stinging Fly Blog Post 31st December 2022
‘Something always came down like a guillotine to split her life in two, so that on one side was happiness, and on the other, the present.’
Chetna Maroo Fiction 14th December 2022
‘This was in Montpellier, in 2012. He was a legionnaire from Birmingham; his reclaimed name was Roger, and he was the most intelligent murderer I have ever met.’
Oisín Fagan Fiction 9th November 2022
‘We are many selves, and often these selves have rival needs. Some kind of truce must be established, if the work is to get written.’
Kevin Power Essay 2nd November 2022
‘In the hours and days after seeing Eugene, I was particularly bad: sobbing uncontrollably, vomiting, roaring into the hell’s bells of night. I prayed for typhus, Asiatic cholera, plain old consumption, anything that would do the job for me. I had no way to impart how terrible and terrified I felt except to write it down.’
June Caldwell Fiction 5th October 2022
‘Her husband was asleep beside her, snoring gently, and she lay, breathing shallowly, planning her next move.’
Lisa Owens Fiction 7th September 2022
‘Marcello's not a guy who likes used underwear, old shoes or bare feet. He’s a perfectionist, or maybe just a hypocrite.’
Gianluca Nativo Fiction 10th August 2022
‘Rejection, back when I’d just started sending out stories, felt crushing. It sat upon me like a physical thing, squat and heavy.’
Danielle McLaughlin Essay 28th July 2022
'I got through it, not by talking, or thinking my way out, but by feeling. At one point over that painful weekend, my gut in knots, I realised: if I can feel this, I can get through anything.'
'I received detailed rejections last year from editors who had requested over ten pages of my work. I have rewritten a specific story for a journal on the editor’s advice and it was still not accepted. None of this means I am a failure, or a bad writer.'
'There were times when I loved a book and felt in my bones that I could publish it well, only to bring it to a meeting and find that my colleagues didn’t feel the same.'
‘Writers have an advantage in this process: vulnerable as we are to the judgment of the world, we are also instinctively aware of the strength of an inner place, from which our best work always comes.’
‘I am the person and writer I am because I failed at a previous incarnation of life. Like most actors, I accumulated countless rejections and humiliations, surpassing in number my accomplishments.’
A series of short essays reflecting on the experience of rejection. Contributors: Danielle McLaughlin, Jill Crawford, Neil Hegarty, Angelique Tran Van Sang, Anna Walsh, Mia Gallagher, with an introduction by Thomas Morris.
‘Over Zoom one night, a therapist tucks her dark hair behind her ears and introduces herself as Maeve. They are about the same age, in their late thirties. She doesn’t ask about Orla’s childhood, or root around for scars. She says, Tell me what’s happening.’
Roisín O’Donnell Fiction 17th June 2022
O'Hanlon's winning story, 'Diana in a lonely place' was published in our Summer 2021 issue.
The Stinging Fly News 18th May 2022
"It hurts to struggle, to reach for things that you might not yet be able to meet... When will I be enough? All I can do is keep writing, keep meeting my ideas and my words with an openness that I encourage in others and struggle to find in myself."
Olivia Fitzsimons Essay 4th May 2022
‘I couldn’t get out of bed, I couldn’t shower, I couldn’t call my friends. Everyone has had a time like this—when they look in the mirror and, sure enough, an unknown animal stares back.’
Nicole Flattery Fiction 7th April 2022
Sean O'Reilly on the reissue of Thomas Kinsella's ‘Butcher's Dozen’ to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday: “a timely reminder that the past has to be fought for and poetry is not beyond lending a hand.”
Sean O'Reilly Criticism Essay 25th January 2022
As a new year begins, we asked some of our editors, writers and contributors to write about something that has made a significant impact on them over the past while.
The Stinging Fly Blog Post 5th January 2022
"His mother had a choice between keeping the monkey or having the baby. She told the story often, in company, with a roll of her eyes and a helpless grin, as if this was the sore spot, the branching crossroads where her life had gone wrong. "
Sheila Armstrong Fiction 4th November 2021
'You talk and talk until you run out of breath and still when you get home there are things you wish you had said. Just once I would like to wake before myself and see what I am with my eyes closed.'
John Christopher Fiction 6th October 2021
‘Your mother’s on the radio,’ she said, ‘being racist.’ This had surprised me; the radio bit. My mother had an aversion to talk radio.
Danielle McLaughlin Fiction 1st September 2021
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