essay

For most people, mention of Thomas the Tank Engine conjures images from childhood of brightly coloured, moon-faced locomotives happily chugging along under guardianship of the Fat Controller. It sparks a memory of the honky-tonk theme tune…

I first became aware of International Women's Day in 2010. I had friends in a theatre group and heard through the grapevine that they were putting on a play they had performed before: Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Some of their…

In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver states that entering a poem is like, “stepping into a rowboat, with a stranger at the oars.” Liz Quirke’s debut collection, The Road, Slowly, brought me into a new and fruitful land. One where the female…

I’m a young adult writer, mostly. Which means that whenever anyone asks what I write, they get . . . this Look. (And a bit of a head tilt.) And then they ask, ‘have you ever thought about writing . . .  a real book?’ And then they might…

Driving through the 99 tunnel, a road that stretches through Seattle, if you pay attention you will notice on your left-hand side of the tunnel’s concrete walls graffiti which reads “Fuck Bezos”. This graffiti refers to multi-billionaire…

A form of literary autobiography, the personal essay allows us to ruminate on truths from our own life experiences. Every Wednesday this month, the Irish Essayist series will see writers test the continually-expanding essay format to…

Most of us can recall the personal essay from our Leaving Cert English papers: that chance to write about our own lives and reflect on the world in all our eighteen year old wisdom.  Who doesn't love a bit of self-indulgence? Though long…

They tell you that Christmas phobia is like a holiday phobia that stems from ‘some early childhood Christmas related trauma’ but your early childhood Christmases were fine. They were better than fine, they were idyllic, magical, wondrous…

People are strange and there’s no accounting for taste – great opening line to an article, isn’t it? But it’s true. What you love, I may hate. What you hate, I may love; I mean I even have a bit of a liking for Highlander II: The Quickening…