Irish Literature, 2015 - and Indiana Literature in 2023

I began reading Irish writers when I was a teenager with a guy named James Joyce, and then George Bernard Shaw and J.M. Synge. I still feel more attached to them than the Russians.

Reading The Guardian's A new Irish literary boom: the post-crash stars of fiction, I got to thinking about America and then Indiana.

So what’s happening now? “The glorious old-fashioned thing that you can’t get a job, you might as well write, has always applied in Ireland,” continues Enright, who says the current renaissance has been brewing for a couple of years. “It has something to do with the agility of the small presses and their ability to pick up talent and run with it. Things in the UK feel increasingly corporate – everybody there has amalgamated.” While the wave of Irish novelists who rose to prominence in the early 90s – Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Sebastian Barry – tended to be published from London, the current dynamism of Ireland’s publishing scene means that new authors are being picked up there first. 

My first thought is it has to be a different culture, one where writing is an acceptable calling. However, that seems to beg the question. Why should Ireland have such a culture? I have only suppositions, which are:

1. Education - not of the writers only but also of the readers. Nor am I thinking of education only in terms of attainment in degrees and diplomas, but the education that writing, especially of fiction, is relevant to the life of the readers.
2. A political history where one's culture was repressed.
3. The availability of publishers for both writers and readers. (For that should be a result of the underlying culture, it feels also a bit of synchronicity with culture and industry feeding one another)
   

 Is there not also synchronicity in the following:

As with Stinging Fly, this willingness to take the kinds of risks that corporate publishers never would is what makes the books special – but it takes money. Davis-Goff stresses the role of the Irish Arts Council in the current resurgence, whose literary branch is “extremely supportive” of new work. “There are talented writers with excellent publishing opportunities, a little bit of money to go around and a supportive media. And the readers themselves are engaged: they go to launches, they’ve book clubs, they talk to each other, they get to the literary festivals.” Meade agrees that funding is key, “both directly for writers and then also for the general literary infrastructure of festivals, publishers, resource organisations”. Cuts have been made, of course, but there is still an emphasis on funding new writers.

I do not think our National Endowment for the Arts quite compares with the Irish Arts Council.  I also do not get the same feel with the Indiana Arts Commission. This might be the bias of a would-be writer shining through.

And do check out The Stinging Fly

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