Now in its eighth annual edition, Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith’s arts anthology is as sumptuous as ever. Designed by John Foley, the apple green cloth-bound volume, embossed in gold with an owl’s piercing gaze, contains “a whole range of different stuff inside,” as Smith has put it: 22 entries including essays, short stories, poems and interviews. The multimedia aspect continues, with black & white photographs and drawings illuminating the text and vice versa.
In a year in which novels have been disappointing, on the whole, Winter Papers 8 offers some outstanding short stories. Caoilinn Hughes’s Waikumete, about the father of a deaf girl struggling with the separation from his wife, made me both cry and laugh out loud. “In the dream, he was in bed and his wife was in it, back home in England,” Hughes writes. “They were gorging on tenderloin filets and one another, even though they were vegan and British.”
Some years are notable for recurring themes in the entries; others are more eclectic. “We did find this year that there was quite a sombre note, and quite a searching note, to be heard in a lot of the submissions,” Barry told me [over email]. “I think it’s an effect of the pandemic, part of its legacy. It feels like for a lot of writers and artists, the concerns of the before-time can seem quite frivolous in our stark new era.”
This winter of discontent gives rise to a palpable nostalgia. “Oh, but we were all plans back then,” writes Christine Dwyer Hickey in Rat, a story about a woman awaiting a doctor to call with a diagnosis. In Rosaleen McDonagh’s Sundays with Sam, a man smiles remembering his male lover in a time before marriage equality. This year’s nonfiction entries also evoke longing. In an interview by Ian Maleney, the composer Jane Deasy reminisces about 1990s holidays and discovering the magic of tape recording. Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s essay, about travelling in Ukraine in the footsteps of Isaac Babel, opens on a train with “the dreamlike scrolling of the landscape past the window”.
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Even Thatcherite England takes on sepia tones. Recalling living in London in the 1980s, it “was a hell of a lot more atmospheric than it is now”, the musician Cathal Coughlan tells Siobhán Kane in an interview. “Thatcher was not as bad as these people now — there was a managerial spine to it, at least.” Their conversation, which opens Winter Papers, is particularly poignant, as it took place in Camden just before Coughlan’s death in May. “Say hello to home from me,” he says as they part, squeezing Kane’s arm. “Safe travels.”
Another recurring motif is the contributors’ self-reflection about art. Brian Leyden walks the north Sligo coastline to “window shop the district for ideas” in the volume’s closing entry, The Heron and the Hare. He wonders if there will still be a readership interested in his writing after the “unmatched upheaval” of the pandemic. In the essay The Burial of the Whales, Peter Murphy weaves together various threads to reflect on his relationship with his mother. “Perhaps there’s no sense to be found,” he offers, “only the ache of a thing that can’t be explained”. Introducing his illustrations of Belfast in a piece tilted Melancholia? the multidisciplinary artist Jonathan Brennan deliberates on his impetus to draw. In the face of melancholy, he concludes, what can we do but keep trying to capture the feeling through art?
Unlike many anthologies that reprint works seen elsewhere, Barry and Smith only accept previously unpublished submissions. Their consistent production of such a stellar collection is a testament to what Tara McEvoy, in her essay on parks, refers to as “the miracle of perseverance, slow and deliberate”. Smith admits that “the rising cost of paper, card and cloth is definitely an issue for us and will probably continue to be”. But despite inflation and supply chain issues, Winter Papers is printed on exquisite Munken Pure paper and its price remained unchanged this year. A labour of love that will someday come to a natural end, “the project will definitely continue for the foreseeable”, Barry reassures me. “There is incredible work being produced in [Ireland] and this gives the project a sense of urgency.”
My only — admittedly minor — gripe with Winter Papers 8 is that for the fourth year running there is no editorial introduction to the volume. (We do get a story from Barry, Lighthouse Diary, accompanied by photographs by Louise Manifold, about a lightkeeper’s crush.) Missing intro note notwithstanding, this literary Christmas annual makes for a handsome addition to the bookshelf and will spark delight in any holiday gift recipient.
