“In research libraries and collections, we may capture the portrait of history in so-called insignificant visual and verbal textualities and textiles. […]

If you are lucky, you may experience a moment before.”

                          —Susan Howe, Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2015)

Writing Ireland aims to explore Irish social and cultural histories through the excavation and creative (re)interpretation of archival materials. This path was set out years ago, when as a young poet and publisher I began a correspondence with the Irish-American writer Susan Howe, whose work mines historical archives to lift slighted voices out of obscurity, creating a poetics of recovery that is at once rigorous and deeply personal.

When official histories are compiled, aberrant voices are marginalised.

The feminine.

The queer.

The vulnerable.

The outliers.

The unwell.

The extraordinary.

They don’t fit neatly into the stories we tell of ourselves.

But Howe’s work, among others, points to a practice of historical reimagining rooted in all the materials we secure, catalogue, and safely put away. Those materials await rediscovery in archives, libraries, and special collections. In our own time, oral histories and interviews trace memories that refuse to be erased, even when misremembered.

This imprint is invested in the artist’s capacity to illuminate the past with present urgency.

Jonathan C. Creasy
Publisher