It was often assumed in ancient times that the Latin word for Ireland, Hibernia, referred to the “Land of Winter” because of its proximity to “hībernus”, the word for winter. The name, in fact, was a calque on the Greek word, Iouerniā – derived ultimately from Ériu – which had nothing to do with winter. But the confusion remained. For the Romans, anyone living so far north must have been wretchedly cold. It is a wry tribute to earlier misunderstandings that an annual anthology of the arts in Ireland should continue to reference winter.
This handsome volume, now in its 10th issue, published by Curlew Editions in Sligo, is ambitious in its scope, covering fiction, photography, visual art, music, film, poetry and nonfiction. Winter Papers includes artistic practitioners from all over the island and is refreshingly free of the metropolitan bias that can dog cultural commentary in Ireland, where Dublin and Belfast hoover up all the available space for public attention. In the age of the first person singular, many of the contributions lean into the subjective and the autobiographical but there is, in most instances, an ironic self-awareness that undermines the pretensions of monotonous self-regard.
The anthology provides, among other pleasures, a useful snapshot of the creative scene on the island. What is striking, for example, in Helen Meany’s and Jim Carroll’s interviews with actors and writers Clare Dunne and Peter McGann, respectively, is the sheer range of McGann’s and Dunne’s activities across film, music, theatre and comedy, the sense of imaginative and expressive possibility that is present in their work, where they are not made prisoners of genre or precedent.
The feeling of unrepentant adventurousness is also at play in Peter Murphy’s discussion with veteran Northern Irish documentary filmmaker John T Davis – whose films include Shellshock Rock (1979), Power in the Blood (1989) and Hobo (1992) – and who marries an encyclopedic knowledge of popular music with a deep respect for his subjects’ integrity.
The conditions that make art possible – or in many instances, impossible – are variously addressed in contributions to this anthology. Darran Anderson, in the Dead Letter Office, offers the reader both a pen portrait of the formation of the young writer and a withering depiction of the “conservative, risk-averse” publishing industry: “Their first question is often, ‘What recent success is your book like?’ – which is a problem if, as Toni Morrison pointed out, you write the books you’d like to have read but couldn’t find.”
Aingeala Flannery, in a beautifully wrought piece, The Rabbit, describes what happens when the money runs out: you have to eat, as does your dependent child, and no art piece, however treasured, is immune to the call of the pawnshop or the auction room.
Kevin Barry in Down at the Central Hotel offers a warm memoir of what was then a relatively inexpensive hotel on Exchequer Street in the early Noughties, demonstrating how affordability is the lifeblood of a viable artistic culture and a vibrant city. Barry is unforgiving in his account of how real-estate greed and the cloning of chain stores on Dublin’s main thoroughfares are leaching the creative life from the capital.
If much of the anthology is given over to storytelling in its various forms, there are welcome reminders not only of the power of speaking but also of the importance of listening. Sonya Gildea’s inventive and arresting The Hum of Things tracks classic hits in the sounds of everyday objects. In To Give Off Heat and Light, Sarah Maria Griffin – co-host of the podcast Juvenalia – journeys through the universe of podcasts, fandom and gender, concluding that “good sound is a reprieve. I have felt it, the relief”. The sound artist Natalia Beylis, in an interview with Siobhán Kane, argues that “listening is a very particular thing that most people don’t do”, and she details how careful attention to the sounds surrounding her home in Co Leitrim gives her access to myriad different worlds.
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Winter Papers listens out for not only the tales from home but the news from abroad. Oliver Parry in Périph writes about the much unloved boulevard périphérique, the ring road that separates Paris city from its suburbs. Moving between Bucharest, Berlin, Poznan and Warsaw, Philip Ó Ceallaigh reads Saul Bellow and reflects on the writing life, while Alice Lyons in Kraków navigates between the different poetic offerings of Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Zymborska.
Of the stories from home, Lucy Caldwell’s A Family Christmas, Danielle McLaughlin’s Cast On, Cast Off and Alicia McAuley’s The Heatwave are especially memorable.
Visual artists and photographers are among those invited to the winter gathering. Austin Ivers’s captivating photographs, influenced by a strong cold war aesthetic, are noteworthy, as are Bríd Moynihan’s visual takes on girlhood, friendship and that terror of the classroom and playground: the show-off.
Winter may be a time for hibernation but Winter Papers has lost none of the wakeful, creative energy it so abundantly puts on display.
Michael Cronin is Professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
