I pick up a stick and scratch my name in the dirt. I flick open a knife and carve my name into the picnic table. I piss my name in the snow. I toe my name in the sand. I am here and I made this. See? Look at it. This proves it. I was…

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.” — Jane Austen on Emma + “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade — demons placed there merely to…

“The story, in the first draft, has put on rough but adequate clothes, it is ‘finished’ and might be thought to need no more than a lot of technical adjustments… It’s then, in fact, that the story is in the greatest danger of losing its life, of appearing so hopelessly misbegotten that my only relief…

“The artist secretes nostalgia round life, as worms plaster their tunnels, as caterpillars spin their cocoons or as sea-swallows masticate their nests.” —Cyril Connolly + “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any…

It is February 5th and I have come to the residency late because (apologies) I have been promoting a novel—an activity that includes explaining my motives, naming my influences, answering questions about family, and trying to look plucky as I stand before a photographer with a parrot on my shoulder. Should I use this residency…

I’m a late starter in terms of writing fiction. I began to learn the art of the short story only in 2005 when I attended some workshops with Claire Keegan in University College, Cork. Claire is a brilliant writer and an inspirational teacher. Meeting her was hugely significant for me. Her second collection of short…

I wrote this story several years ago for an short-short speculative fiction contest. I have always liked the basic concept in this piece. The plan of taking a reader’s implied expectations (that skeletons want to come back to life, which so many horror movies seem to assume) and reversing it (really, all they want is…

When Steve asked me to find an early story for the January issue, this was the first one I thought of. I couldn’t remember the title, or what it was about, or any words or phrases from it, or exactly when I’d written it, though I thought I knew where it was stored. But it…


“The Peach” represents one of my first forays into literary fiction. I wrote the piece approximately twelve years ago after giving up trying to write science fiction. The story shows my early influences: Paul Bowles, Ernest Hemingway, and Raymond Carver and certainly attempts to follow their minimalist example. Like Bowles and Hemingway, I chose an…

I wrote this story/essay in 2003, during a semester abroad in Australia. The Iraq War was in its early stages, and the rest of the world was still trying to figure out what to think about the U.S.‘s reaction to 9/11. When I thought about contributing to this series, there were other pieces that embarrassed…