“It was like making a mixtape,” Declan Meade explains, describing the process of putting together Dublin, Written in Our Hearts, the anthology celebrating 20 years of Dublin City Council’s One Dublin, One Book initiative. To mark the anniversary, Meade, founder of the Stinging Fly literary journal and press, was asked to curate a book of essays, poetry and novel extracts, from writers who have been exploring Dublin in the first 25 years of this century.
We meet shortly after the book was launched in City Hall, where many of the 22 writers featured in the book were gathered. And others who were not featured. “One man came up to me at the launch and told me he could have been in it,” Meade says, smiling. This being Dublin, where it’s often said you can throw a stone and hit a writer, no doubt Meade can look forward to many more conversations like that one throughout April when the citywide campaign to get people reading the book, managed by Dublin City Libraries and the Unesco City of Literature, will be in full swing.
Choosing the writers – including ones you’d expect such as Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle and newer voices such as Estelle Birdy and Réré Ukponu – was a challenge. Inevitably, some writers will be disappointed not to be included. “I’ve friends who aren’t in it,” Meade says, referring to a group that includes a significant writer we’ll come to later.
We’re sitting in a pub on the corner of Parliament Street and Dame Street. Outside, Dubliners and visitors go about their business as they do in the pages of the anthology. There’s a novel extract that is set in a flat nearby. Niamh Campbell’s We Were Young has a character describing the window in the flat as a television, looking out on tourists sitting alongside addicts on the “square of slippery paving slabs and benches, in the shadow of City Hall”.
Meade expands on the mixtape analogy: “You put a lot of thought into the selection and the ordering of it, and to what you imagine the person’s emotions are going to be but then you watch the person” as they listen or in this case read, “and you find you might have made a mistake. It’s great that I’ll have the opportunity of seeing people holding the book and reading it through the libraries and I’ll see, through some of the events planned, how people have responded to it. That’s a little bit daunting but also exciting. I will have access to more reactions to this book than many others we have done”. The book is published by his own Stinging Fly Press.
Though originally from Louth, Meade’s Dublin credentials are solid. He has lived in the capital for 30 years, arriving in his 20s during the long hot summer of 1995, to see if the city would suit him. He grew up in Ardee. “Forty miles from Dublin city centre, but it may as well have been 40,000 miles or 4 million,” he writes in the book’s short introduction.
He was one of eight children, and there were no books in his house growing up. Or, to be precise, there was one book, which he never read: My Fight for Irish Freedom by Dan Breen. At school he was encouraged to write stories by a teacher and was a regular visitor to the library. He was the first of his family to enter third-level education, studying business in Coleraine before going on a Morrison visa to the US, where he worked in a bookshop in Atlanta and got involved with socialist politics.
When he came back to give Dublin a go, he volunteered with homelessness charity Simon and joined a community employment scheme in the James Joyce Centre. He set up Stinging Fly in 1997, with his friend Aoife Kavanagh.
Kavanagh, who left the journal to pursue a teaching career, came up with the name, inspired by Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates, which describes a city that “needs the stimulation of some stinging fly”. Writers perform the job of such a fly, and Meade wanted to “bring those voices on, cause a little bit of a sting”.
He has lived all over Dublin. He lists the areas, fondly remembering a place near St Patrick’s Cathedral and a flat on Thomas Street that was torn down to make way for the Vicar Street music venue. He has lived in Fairview and in the North Strand and in Kilmainham.
In the late 1990s he was living in a convent on Basin Lane, near St James’s Hospital. The convent was being given to Focus Ireland, and the organisation wanted people to live there while it secured planning permission. He lived there rent-free with seven or eight fellow homelessness volunteers. (There were “great parties in the old chapel”.) It was there he started the Stinging Fly.
He moved again recently; packing up books to move to Cabra was useful inspiration when putting the anthology together. “My Dublin is definitely in there,” he says. In a Belinda McKeon story, For Keeps, a character lives in Kilmainham; Roisin Kiberd’s The Night Gym features North Strand.
What’s his relationship with Dublin now? “I genuinely love the city. I love the size of it. I tend to walk around it a lot. It’s the right size of a city for me and there’s plenty going on ... Obviously there are aspects of it that are of concern ... The violence, that seems to be happening more and more. We had a launch of one of our issues the same night as the riots. I love Dublin, but I am concerned about how it’s changing and the affordability of it.”
Even with that, “I don’t think there’s anywhere else I’d rather live.”
Dublin is the main character in a book full of them. In Solidarity, Paula Meehan’s moving poem, was written in memory of the late TD Tony Gregory. There are nonfiction pieces that make you want to follow the author around the city: Peter Sirr describes contested monuments around town while Karl Whitney takes readers on a tour of the hidden rivers of the Liberties.
And there are potent musings about whether a city can ever be defined. As Keith Ridgway writes in his essay Undublining, Dublin as a city “does not exist”. It’s “a synecdoche of an ever-changing collection of streets and neighbourhoods, histories and legends, literature and politics, hilarity and gossip by the sulking river Liffey as it stumbles to the gentle bay. That cannot be abstracted. There is no more a Dublin than there is a colour blue.”
This is a rich collection, one that takes readers around the many Dublins inhabited by locals, stag parties, students and people – such as Meade – originally from elsewhere. The book crosses bridges, strolls streets, visits pubs, traverses tramlines, even sits disconsolately on the boardwalk, each page revealing aspects of the ever-changing city both fair and foul. In Dublin: A Poet’s View, Felispeaks describes a city “throwing out its own children and sending them away. Dublin keeps telling all of us, I have no more space ... Dublin is making us hard.”
There is something for everyone: the steamy Dorset Street launderettes of Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms, Deirdre Madden’s voyeuristic stroll along Dame Street in Authenticity. It’s humorously controversial at points too: in Stephen James Smith’s poem Dublin You Are, he declares, “But Dublin what’s the craic with coddle? It’s shite why don’t we just admit it?”
The title of the book is inspired by James Joyce, who was famously quoted as saying “there was an English queen who said that when she died the word ‘Calais’ would be written on her heart. ‘Dublin’ will be found on mine”. Meade worried that Dublin, Written in Our Hearts, an interpretation of the Joyce quotation, “might be overly mawkish and sentimental but it felt like we could get away with it ... ”
He points out that Joyce having put Dublin “on the map” with Ulysses, staking out the city’s territory for himself, can make it “difficult, perhaps, or more of a challenge, for writers ... but the city is always changing. The book represents the Dublin of now.”
Anne Enright’s contribution is Dublin Made Me, the stirring opening essay. It’s striking that in the 20 years of One Dublin, One Book, none of the Booker winner’s novels has been chosen. The first 10 books chosen were by men, from At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien, in 2006, to the Barrytown Trilogy, by Roddy Doyle, in 2015. Since then there have been six books by women, somewhat redressing that glaring gender imbalance.
For this Dubliner, one omission from the anthology is Meade’s friend and colleague Sally Rooney. Few people have written about Dublin this century quite so poetically or with keener eyes than the Mayo writer, whether it’s her cool young characters in Conversations with Friends or the Joycean perambulations around the city of a grieving junior barrister in Intermezzo. I get the sense that Meade regrets not including her.
“In the end I didn’t pursue it, I felt so many people were reading those books already and the rights thing would have been complicated,” he says. Perhaps it also felt too close to home. Rooney is a former Stinging Fly editor and contributor. She now serves on its board.
There’s a gorgeous love poem by Rooney set on the Dart called It Is Monday, originally published in the Stinging Fly in 2015. With references to train stations in Booterstown, Grand Canal Dock and Lansdowne, it would have made a perfect addition. But, as Meade says, this is just one collection and there are “plenty more writers writing in and about the city” than the 22 selected. “We have an abundance of great writers, not a shortage.”
You’ll just have to subscribe to the Stinging Fly to read Rooney’s poem, along with its vast and compelling archive of Irish and international writing. The subscription is worth every cent, as is Meade’s energising, transporting, intriguing literary mixtape of Dublin.
Dublin, Written in Our Hearts, edited by Declan Meade, is published by the Stinging Fly
