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The Penny Dreadful

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Issue 5

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Poetry

4 Introduction

Fiction

John Boyne

Eimear Ryan

Dylan Brennan

Jessica Traynor

Armel Dagorn

David J. Costello

Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Dean Browne

Sarah Clancy

Victoria Kennefick

Alan McMonagle

Susan Connolly

Sharlene Teo

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh / Billy Ramsell

46 Victoria Kennefick 47

Laryssa Wirstiuk

Fabian Sweeney

Patrick Cotter

Graham Allen on Dave Lordan

Dean Browne on Paul Muldoon

Contributors

Contents

The Introduction is dead: Why we should all get used to it. Much like the aperitif before a plate of Tournedos Rossini, it was once seen integral that the introduction was consumed first. The great masters of the form delighted in easing you into the fecund literature, stout with iron, with a gentle push of information that helped you further appreciate your meal. No more: in the cut and thrust digital age short pithy intros are going the way of the novel and short story which themselves are, sadly, going the way of the dodo: viz being hunted down and eaten by Portuguese sailors owing to their small and useless wings. At the Penny Dreadful we are saddened that to pronounce the Introduction as utterly dead, like the famous butter substitute but having nothing at all, whatsoever, to do with butter. We blame Charles Darwin and his dark sorcery, but that is just one of our many theories. By “many theories” we, of course, mean one. And by “one” we, of course, mean none. ‘What stuff’, you may say, ‘think to history’s great introductions! Why there’s... Well... It’s not like it’s an art form or nothin’. ‘Have you ever noticed’, I say ‘that you get more low-brow the longer you speak? Who asked you your opinion anyway? We’re glad you’ve stopped dragging your knuckles and sat down to some honest reading, so resume furrowing your brow and stop butting in. This is our only soap box and we intend to use it.’ To wit, the first literary introduction is believed to have originated in 1102 BC when an unknown Greek slave ran ahead to the people of Euboea to let everyone know his master, Homer, was coming and had a really long limerick to tell them. From there, the Introduction has a fine lineage: Joyce, Austen, Bronte,

INTRODUCTION

Yeats, Plath, Akutagawa, Shelly: all writers who got their start briefly describing their own work at the beginning of their Penguin Classics, placing the work in context. Even humble, honest literary magazines got in on the act. New Graiguenamanagh Review (1923) used 39 of its 41 pages dedicated to prefacing a single poem, later issues dispensed with actually publishing any writing at all and focused solely on introducing. But the introduction now lies in disrepute. Where once it was helpful and informative, it now has become reliant on obscure humour and meretricious gimmicks. It’s like the Emperor’s new clothes. Except, instead of discovering that he’s naked and being ashamed of his nakedness, he discovers that he has no skin and that everyone can see his wretched blackened spleen and dicky-ticker. The empty modernist conceit of having the reader “understand” an author’s work by “prefacing” it with “words” that “explain” to “a” certain “degree” what “you” are “about” to “read”, as it were, is now nothing more than a fatted calf apt for sacrifice, to be ripped apart by Amis-ian coke heads searching for shiny, shiny diamonds in its bloated belly on the deck of a Panamanian schooner drifting listlessly in some gulf or another. It is a diseased organ (musical, not otherwise), incoherent to the point of utter irrelevance. Introductions add nothing to the work you’re about to read. They read now like elaborate page fillers that editors make up a few hours before going to press because they can’t bear to cut the cord and dispense with the useless and simply get on with it and finish. ‘Why continue’, you may well ask, with their jokes falling flat, bizarre hyperbolic comparisons and limited, at best, grasp of parody? The sad answer, and it is sad, is that they can’t stop! Thus the intro has

become a rite, a pagan ceremony trotted out before any concourse of literature for reasons unknown, unfathomable and unun-able. It is no wonder today’s contumacious reader skips to the beginning of the narrative. (The magazine starts on page 8, go on, do it, we don’t care anymore, this doesn’t get any better, actually, it goes downhill pretty quickly. Sticking around? Prepare to be underwhelmed.) What is to be done? Perhaps we must look to the past. Oscar Wilde once opined in his foreword to the now lost Wilkie Collins novel The Woman Was Suspicious that “We are all in the gutter, but some of us read the introduction and already know the end to this one... So yeah... How about that fog?” We can never be quite sure what he meant by this rambling nonsense, but we are confident it would have played well at parties. On that note, we abandon you to the informative, functional hell of the contents page. Which is the kind of thing you like, isn’t it... Comrade. Maybe a stint in that purgatory will gild the halcyon days now past and generate a periodic resurgence, with much fanfare, usually around March each year, probably written by Will Self. We can call it “The Year of the Introduction” or something, and then it will promptly die.

Submission Guidelines Currently accepting submissions for

issue six Poetry

Up to six poems, unless you are writing long heroic epics. We won’t accept six of those.

Fiction We will accept up to two stories of no more than 3,000 words. We accept all known forms of creative writing, and several that are sadly, as of yet, unknown to all but our editorial staff. We want you. Yes, even you, as wretched and forlorn as you may well be. We want you to submit to us anything that you may happen to have written that you feel is of a certain quality and standard to appear in the esteemed pages of The Penny Dreadful.

To submit, please follow the online process at www.thepennydreadful.org

Beneath the Earth / John Boyne

It was no easy task to dig the child’s grave. The ground down here grows firm in the wintertime, the loam forming a solid shell above the subsoil and bedrock that pack together like hibernating animals in fear of a seasonal predator. As a child, I took an interest in the land and wanted to grow peppers and sweet potatoes in the small corner of the farm that had been designated as my own but my father said the earth wasn’t for wasting and I should plant crops that could put up a fight against the unremitting cold. ‘Cabbage,’ he said. ‘Leeks. Broccoli.’ All manner of green vegetables that I hated. ‘You said this was my land,’ I told him. ‘To plant whatever I wanted.’ ‘Cabbage,’ he repeated. ‘Leeks. Broccoli. Maybe a little spinach if you want to try something different.’ I pressed my foot down on the shoulder of the spade, forcing the blade into the obstinate soil and knew that I had a job of work ahead of me. Circling the burial ground, the desiccated trees formed a tribal boundary, their stripped branches rustling in the breeze as they whispered tales of the crime they were witnessing. My father was long dead, of course, and the land was mine now. I could do with it what I liked. I could bury whatever I pleased inside it. Much further away, a corner of the north field housed the grave where I buried my wife two years before. Flynn, the priest, refused to consecrate the ground at first, saying that Niamh should be laid to rest in the church cemetery with her family but I told him that I was her family, that Emer was her family, and that we wanted her nearby. ‘Do you not think you isolated her enough during her lifetime,’ he asked me, ‘without abandoning her to such a solitary resting place?’ ‘What’s that now?’ I asked, stepping closer to him but he didn’t dare to repeat the slur. I have reason to believe that Niamh sought his counsel over the years, speaking to him of matters private to the two of us, a brazen act on her part that no man could excuse. I went to the bishop on that occasion, an older man who had been a friend of my father’s, and told him what I wanted. ‘It’s a most unusual request,’ he said. ‘If it’s a matter of money—’ ‘This has nothing to do with money, he snapped, picking a scrap of something green from between his teeth and examining it between his fingernails before flicking it to the floor. ‘We don’t sell favours in this diocese. On another subject entirely, however, you may have seen the sign outside requesting contributions for the renovation of the Episcopal house. I wonder whether you might be able to help us out with that?’ I wrote him a cheque there and then. The next day, Flynn came over with a scowl on his face and drizzled holy oil over the plot of land I had designated for the girl he tried to persuade away from me. He said a prayer at each of 10

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The Year of the Jumper / Eimear Ryan

September: That was the year they put wire mesh around the balconies on the top floor of the library, caging everyone in like on the roof of a skyscraper. It was a beautiful library—big atrium, rich earth tones, wide staircases. The wire looked harsh and alien. Renovations was the official excuse, but everyone knew it was in case of copycats. Aoife worked in the library, and collected rumours about the jumper. This much was true: the girl was a fresher from down the country, doing Communications. Then take your pick: she got pregnant and couldn’t face her devout mother; she was heavily in debt because of online gambling; she’d been dumped by her lover for her best friend; she’d overdosed on Nietzsche. Aoife’s boss, Mags, even circulated a photocopy of the jumper’s recent borrowings, suggesting in her fussy way that future requests for these books should be flagged. Mental health pamphlets were distributed, vigils held; everyone scurrying, trying to be useful. The jumper’s name was Lucy. A happy-sounding name, Aoife said to Mags, feeling instantly foolish—but it was. A Disney name. A summer holidays name. Mags kept telling Aoife to take some time off if she needed it. It can’t have been easy, witnessing that. Aoife answered firmly each time I’m fine, and busied herself straightening the papers on her desk. ~ October: A broad-shouldered boy left a photo of Lucy at the wire. Aoife spotted him trudging to the top floor and followed him. She’d been warned—they all had—to be vigilant. Something about his mournful gait made her think he was about to scope out a spot to jump, despite the wire. But he just tucked the photo into the mesh and left. A small collection of mementoes began to build, steadily. Like a shrine, Aoife thought, but then felt bad, because a shrine was what a stalker built in his wardrobe—candles and surreptitious photos and locks of hair. This was a memorial, a tender thing. The photo was a heartbreaking selfie in which Lucy angled herself and pouted. She was striking, with a great tangle of almost-afro hair, pale lips, and heavily-lined eyes. Aoife began to remember that face around the library. The girl who’d checked out the whole of The Wire on DVD over a two-week period, that had been Lucy. The couple she’d found kissing in the 24-hour section—that had been Lucy and the broad-shouldered boy. The memories came so regularly, stirring her like déjà vu, that she began to hope at least one of them was real. ~ November: Every week, Aoife gave tours to groups of Leaving Cert students. There was always an emo kid who wanted to know the spot on the floor where the jumper landed, what it sounded like (a thud), was there blood (a little, later amended to no). There was once a loudmouth who The Penny Dreadful

Silver or Lead / Sarah Clancy

That Autumn a horrible miasma held the smog down tight over the city and things had reached their gruesome zenith. The dead, or rather their corpses which were hanging from bridges, or quartered and decapitated on Metro stairwells were no longer decked out with threatening messages. There was nothing those guys could threaten that they hadn’t already done. Those they needed to buy had long since been bought, well and truly bought, and anyone who’d had the balls or the stupidity to try to stand up to them was decomposing in some fly paradise of a wasteland. On my way to work this morning I came across my first corpse of the day. It was down on the pavement beside one of those big slabs of white-ish ice that get delivered around the city just before daylight. Corpse No. 1 was severed at the waist; rendered into two separate pieces. The leg part was clad in those complicated low-slung jeans that have all sorts of seams and pockets on them. You could see that the owner of this particular pair had worn them gangsta style; low down with a couple of inches of his butt cheeks showing above the waist band. His slim upper body was face-up. Someone, maybe or maybe not the person who had carried out the killing, had taken the time and care to insert a piece of Corriboard, cut in the shape of a speech bubble between his teeth. It protruded upwards and on both sides of it, the words ‘Luis was here’ were written in a very careful and clear hand. Whoever had written it had outlined the letters first and then carefully coloured in the innards so that no white showed through. Murder as street art, as graffiti, I thought, imagining the great headlines that this scene could spawn. Two rubbish collectors wheeled a hand cart with metal rubbish bins on it past me. Hombres, I called to them, if you see the cops around will you tell them about this kid? The two stopped the cart and turned to look at me; ‘The police? Oh yea, mister’, one of them said mockingly, ‘let’s call the police, they’ll fix it, give him the kiss of life maybe, the Santa Muerte can only help him now man.’ The two went on down the street towards the central district with their cart rattling along with their laughter. I turned back to the corpse. There was very little blood around, except on the young man’s t-shirt where it had dried into a hard black crust that propped the cloth up in ridges above his navel. I need a coffee, I thought. Splintered white bone protruded from the rough butchered flesh of the youth’s torso. Working only on instinct I pulled my notebook out and wrote; – Severed at midriff, – Hachette/Chainsaw? – Approx 1 cm bone sticking out. Then I stowed the notebook in my back pocket and walked on towards Starbucks. My note-taking was nothing but a reflex. I knew I wouldn’t be writing about this or any other murder for my newspaper. When I said that those who they needed were bought, I was speaking from personal experience; I could fucking sing it. 12

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Jerome / Alan McMonagle

My mother hadn’t said a word since the child went missing. A little girl, not quite three years old, taken from her bedroom while the adults barbequed and prattled together on the patio of the holiday compound. Like my mother, the news channels couldn’t get enough of the story. Two reporters in particular, a studio and at-the-scene pairing, looked and spoke as though the tragedy was precisely what they had been waiting for to light up their non-eventful careers. You just knew that as soon as they went off-air all they talked about were basement dungeons and ankle chains and as many body parts that could be stuffed into the missing suitcase they kept banging on about. I went to my room and thought about Fidelma Masterson’s mouth and hair and eyes and see-through pink skirt. I tossed and turned in my bed while picturing Fidelma in her loose singlet and her peculiar walk that somehow made both cheeks of her backside rotate in unison. Round and round they both went until I was cockeyed and dizzy. Then I concentrated on her strawberry lips; and on the way she tilted her head when she passed me on her way to the courts, the way her eyelashes flicked upwards, as though to say, Come and get me, Big Boy. There was no escaping Fidelma these summer nights and that suited me just fine. So I tossed and turned until I had nothing more to give. Then I lay there and tried to figure out what might be a good thing to say to Fidelma Masterson when I took it upon myself to finally speak to her. I didn’t get very far. Stones started landing against my bedroom window and when I stood out of bed and opened the window, Heff, who else, was standing in our back yard. ‘Get down here,’ he said, his voice contained more than its usual urgency. ‘I’m wrecked, Heff. Can’t it wait.’ ‘No it can’t. Get down here.’ I didn’t believe him. Heff always had something going; a scheme; a ruse, and whatever he had stirring tonight I was sure could wait. I was ready to press home the point by the time I had joined him outside. Typically he beat me to the draw. ‘Look at this,’ he said and straightaway he dropped his trousers and underpants. Instinctively I jerked my head to one side, and was grateful for the darkness. ‘Well, can you see?’ ‘Heff, please tell me you didn’t drag me out of bed to look at your chopper.’ ‘Look at it,’ he said, and he gripped himself and thrust his pelvis in my direction. ‘This is what happens when you chase girls from Connolly Crescent.’ ‘If it’s all the same I’d rather not look,’ I said, taking a further step back. ‘You can explain to me if you like. That might work.’ ‘I have a disease,’ he said to that and once again he grabbed himself while tossing his other hand uselessly into the air as though to alert one and all to his magnificent affliction. ‘Which one?’ ‘I don’t know. Herpes. Or syphilis. It might be gonorrhoea.’ ‘Yikes,’ I said. The Penny Dreadful

Home / Sharlene Teo

In this country all the seasons are the same but for the sake of time I will call the last part of the year winter. This winter I get so weak that I am leaking everywhere. My nose runs and runs. I get nosebleeds, and further down, menstrual blood seeps through my underwear and stains the plastic seats. You can’t get any cushioned seats around here, and thank God, the shame I would experience trying to transport the soiled cushion to the washing machine. I cannot contain myself. I am a faulty ballpoint pen. There are four of us in the room. Me, Slinky, Mouse and Rooster. ‘You can’t control your body,’ Slinky says. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, in a tank top and a pair of jeggings. She’s sixteen, and unfriendly, and she might as well not be wearing anything. ‘Goat, you’re such a baby,’ Rooster chimes in, and I look away, because I cannot bear him staring at me. ‘Leaky-leaky, lemon squeaky,’ Slinky sways from side to side. I grit my teeth. Outside the grilled windows it is hot and muggy and the sky is plain, stark, unblinking. The sun is being harsh from a distance. Today we will be separated. We have all found new homes, after our period of grieving, our extended abandonment. We have been fed and cleaned and nodded at by kindly therapists, with their round cheeks and broad, dry palms. Now we are ready to face the real world. The real world is loving families, solid units. Dinner on the table like clockwork. Everyone say grace before eating. I look at the clock: 11:55. At 13:00 three vehicles will arrive. I hope that Mouse and I get bundled away in a lorry. How did they advertise us? Two abandoned sisters. Ages: 14, 10. Birthplace: Pasir Ris. Names: Goat, Mouse. Allergies: None. Unusual habits: Refer to detailed case report. Two-for-one! Cute things! When we have nothing to say in the Social Room we adjourn to our dorms and I see that Mouse has packed everything into her pink, beat-up wheelie case, except for the Mickey Mouse alarm clock that we had kept on the small table between our beds. It’s one of those cheap Taiwanese imitations, made of peeling tin, a Disney knock-off. Mickey’s nose is a little too long, his gloved hands slightly out of proportion. Tick, tock. ‘Why are you leaving that for? You love that clock,’ ‘I know, but it’ll make me sad to see it,’ Mouse slumps down on the bed beside her suitcase and the mattress jumps and she is airborne for a quarter of a second. ‘I don’t want to leave.’ ‘But we have to.’ ‘I want to stay here.’ ‘Tough luck.’ 14

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No Black Rats (OR: Of an Island Where Human Corpses Exposed to The Atmosphere do not Suffer Decay) / Dylan Brennan Nosferatu—Herzog propped them all up against a wall and filmed them slowly one by one. The mummies of Guanajuato look like they died screaming but all it is is this—the jaws slacken when we die, our mouths fall open. We’ll all expose our fillings to a lens. The gales, the salts of the sea and the ashen sands of the shore preserve the corpses of our kinsmen. Look—that man’s father and his father recognise themselves among the strewn bodies of Inis Gluaire—sun-tanned leatherfaces like shipwrecked Spaniards. Spectral arcs of colour through the constant drizzle. Go and kneel down there on the damp earth. We’ll join them soonish on the lazybeds. On this small island there are no black rats.

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Dave Lordan Lost Tribe of the Wicklow Mountains Clare. Salmon Press, 2014. ISBN. 978-1-908836-37-3. 65pp. p.bk. €12.00 Review by Graham Allen

The lost tribe of the Wicklow Mountains is ‘lost’ in the sense of not yet realised. It is, in its collective exile, representative of an Ireland that is still to come, or could yet possibly still arrive. ‘I believe in them, so they do exist,’ states the speaker of the title poem emphatically. The purpose of Dave Lordan’s third Salmon collection is not so much to fill in the details of the possible place that tribe might return to and in its turn create, as to signify in a number of unique circumstances the very existence of that possibility. Which is to say, more simply, and in positive disagreement with Aibhe Darcy’s earlier review in Burning Bush 2, that Lordan’s variously situated and variously tuned subject is hope. I hear, for example, a subtle ambiguity in the first line of the poem called ‘Hope’: ‘Hope, ya ould mutt, I hear yer in bits’. Such a perspective on ‘hope’ leaves Lordan a poet of what Keats once called negative capability: …this tribe has no pattern. It fits no descriptions. Nothing about it – beyond its certain existence – translates: No reason, no theses, no customs, no goal. The tribe is my credo. That’s all.

Review The Penny Dreadful

Lordan’s collection presents us with a poet ready to register the persistence of a future and a form of unity and equality not entirely obliterated by civil systems and civil wars, hidden hierarchies and bizarre bank bailouts. In particular, this is a poetry which registers the survival, despite a crassly commercial and class-driven environment, of human dignity, as when a father and a six

Paul Muldoon One Thousand Things Worth Knowing London, Faber & Faber, 2015 ISBN: 978-0-374227-12-8 128 pages. h.b. € 15.00 Review by Dean Browne

Review

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing is Paul Muldoon’s twelfth and latest collection of poems, the first since Seamus Heaney’s death in 2013, the experience of which haunts this remarkably inclusive book in interesting ways. Indeed, it will not be to sentimentalize Muldoon’s achievement to say that Heaney’s death figures hugely in it. But more than a simply dutiful response, these poems seem constantly in quest of symbolic co-ordinates, of befitting emblems to illuminate the poet’s inner crises, whether they be of real adversity or the first prompt of a poem itself—a word, a phrase, a likeness, a tale. Neither has Muldoon’s winningly playful streak deserted him, as poem by poem delights in its capacity to generate puns and veer off in strange and unforeseen directions. Much like the guide in Robert Frost’s ‘Directive’ (a poet he admires) Muldoon is a guide who ‘has at heart [our] getting lost’, if only so that we may arrive equal to the complexity and contradiction of being ourselves. All of the usual critical blurbs and superlatives apply here—a roguish wit, a gift for renewal in his tilting of ordinary clichés into a new light, a Metaphysical knack for articulating in one the alien and familiar—and then some. Readers will be aware of this from the outset with the exhilarating ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’ (‘exhilarate’ from the Latin hilaris, ‘cheerful’: a forked root also giving us ‘hilarity’) in which Heaney is less bleakly than obliquely elegized. The poem is almost a gentle check to those who would insist on a direct mournful response, and if readers overcome their first baffled glance into the knot of Norse, Celtic and early monastic ‘factoids’ and etymologies, they will discover a poem of greater emotional depth—because emotionally honest—than meets the eye: a poem, as it were,

the debut poetry collection by

Available at thepennydreadfull.org and selected bookshops. The Penny Dreadful

Graham Allen is a Professor in The School of English, UCC. His books include Harold Bloom: A Poetics of Conflict (1994), Intertextuality (2nd Ed. 2010) and Mary Shelley (2008). His collection, The One That Got Away (2014), and his epoem Holes are published by New Binary Press. He has published poetry in numerous journals. He won the Listowel Single Poetry Prize in 2010 and has been shortlisted in a number of competitions, including The Crashaw Prize (2013) and the Fool for Poetry Prize (2014). John Boyne is the author of 9 novels for adults and 4 for young readers, including The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, The Absolutist and most recently A History of Loneliness. He won the the Short Story of the Year award at the 2014 Irish Book Awards. Beneath The Earth is the title story from his first collection, which will be published later in 2015. His novels are published in over 45 languages. Dylan Brennan poetry, essays and memoirs have been published in a range of international journals, in English and Spanish. His debut poetry collection, Blood Oranges, for which he received the runnerup prize in the Patrick Kavanagh Award, is available now from The Dreadful Press and has featured in festivals in Mexico City, Zacatecas and Granada, Nicaragua. Dean Browne was born in 1994. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The SHop, Crannóg, Southword and elsewhere. A poem, ‘Words for Samuel Beckett’, was published by the New Eyes on the Great Book project. He is a student of English and Philosophy at UCC and lives in Cork. Sarah Clancy has been shortlisted for several poetry prizes including the Listowel Collection of Poetry Competition and the Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her most recent book The Truth & Other Stories was published by the Doire Press in 2014. In 2015 she won the inagural Irish People’s Poetry Prize. Susan Connolly’s first collection of poetry, For the Stranger, was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. She was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Her second collection Forest Music was published by Shearsman Books in 2009. Shearsman published her chapbook The Sun-Artist: a book of pattern poems in June 2013. She lives in Drogheda, Co. Louth. David J. Costello lives in Wallasey, Merseyside, England. He is a member of Chester Poets and North West Poets. David has been widely published on-line and in print including Prole, The Lake, Magma and Envoi. His poem “Solitary Missus” was selected for inclusion in Dylan Thomas 100th Anniversary anthology “The Colour of Saying”. David won the 2011 Welsh Poetry Competition. His debut pamphlet, Human Engineering, was published by Thynks Publishing Ltd in October 2013. A second pamphlet will appear in September 2016 from Red Squirrel Press. Patrick Cotter has published a verse novella and two collections of poetry Perplexed Skin (Arlen House 2008) and Making Music (Three Spires 2009). He is widely anthologised and has received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages and volumes of his work have appeared or are about to appear in China, Macedonia and Sweden. Nuala Ní Chonchúir was born in Dublin in 1970; she lives in East Galway. Her fourth short story collection Mother America was published by New Island in 2012. Her third poetry collection The Juno Charm was published by Salmon Poetry in 2011 and Nuala’s critically acclaimed second novel The Closet of Savage Mementos appeared April 2014 from New Island. Under the name Nuala O’Connor, Penguin USA, Penguin Canada and Sandstone (UK) will publish Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid, in summer 2015.

Biographies 20

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Armel Dagorn is now back in France after living in Cork for years. His writing appears in magazines such as The Rialto, Tin House online, The Stinging Fly and The SHOp. He’s working towards a first collection. Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh has read at festivals in New York, Paris, Montréal, Berlin and Ballyferriter. In 2012 she won the O’Neill Poetry Prize and her poem ‘Filleadh ar an gCathair’ was chosen as Ireland’s EU Presidency poem in 2013. Her first collection, Péacadh, was published in 2008 and she is currently working on a new book. Ciarraíoch í Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh. Tá a cuid filíochta léite aici i bPáras, i Nua Eabhrac, i Montréal agus ar an mBuailtín. Bhuaigh sí Corn Uí Néill i 2012 agus roghnaíodh ‘Filleadh ar an gCathair’ mar Dhán Uachtarántacht an Aontais Eorpaigh i 2013. Foilsíodh Péacadh i 2008 agus tá sí ag obair ar an dara chnuasach faoi láthair. Victoria Kennefick’s first pamphlet, White Whale, won the Munster Literature Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2014. In 2013 she was the winner of the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize. She has been shortlisted for the Bridport, Melita Hume and Gregory O’Donoghue Poetry Prizes. Her poetry appears in Southword, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, The Irish Examiner, Malpaís Review and elsewhere. Born in Shanagarry Co. Cork, she now lives and writes in Kerry. Alan McMonagle lives in Galway. He has published two collections of stories, Liar Liar, (Wordsonthestreet, 2008) and Psychotic Episodes,(Arlen House, 2013). Last year, his radio play, Oscar Night, was produced and broadcast as part of RTE’s Drama on One season. He is currently going out of his mind writing his first novel Billy Ramsell was awarded the chair of Ireland poetry bursary for 2013. His second collection, The Architect’s Dream of Winter, was recently published by the Defalus Press. Eimear Ryan was born in 1986 in Co Tipperary. Her short stories have appeared New Irish Writing, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, The Dublin Review, and the Faber anthology Town & Country. She also has work in the forthcoming New Island anthology Young Irelanders. Her awards include a Hennessy Award and an Arts Council bursary. She lives in Cork and is currently writing a novel. Fabian Sweeney is a scientist and pharmacist originally from Omagh in county Tyrone, who has since moved to London after an extensive time in Cork. Sharlene Teo is the recipient of David TK Wong and Sozopol Fiction Seminars creative writing fellowships. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Esquire, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Magma Poetry and Eunoia Rev Jessica Traynor is a poet, creative writing teacher and dramaturg who works as Literary Reader for the Abbey Theatre. Her first poetry collection, Liffey Swim was published by Dedalus Press in 2014. She is a recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary and of the Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year Award. Laryssa Wirstiuk is a writer and writing instructor based in the New York City metro area. She teaches writing and digital media at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her collection of short stories The Prescribed Burn won Honorable Mention in the 21st Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. Her writing has been published in IthacaLit, Hamilton Stone Review, and The Stockholm Review of Literature and is forthcoming in Barely South Review.

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