‘Often in essays like the one I’m writing here, there comes a time when the author begins to reveal their feelings. However, I don’t wish to write about my feelings towards my father… This essay is about how things turn into waste.’
In the summer issue of the Dublin Review, Justin Quinn writes about the problem of what to do with a dead person’s belongings. At the moment of his death, the status of the items his father had with him in the hospital, and at his home, was immediately transformed, and Quinn’s efforts to dispose of these effects gave him a vivid insight into Ireland’s ecosystems of waste. ‘In the Skip’ is a witty, absorbing and oddly moving exploration of the ways our relationships with people bring us into a relationship with their things.
Also in the spring issue, Lorraine Haigney’s essay ‘Retrograde Flow’ is a brilliantly kaleidoscopic account of living with undiagnosed endometriosis and exploring her murky family history – all the time writing ‘as a person who expects to be disbelieved’.
Michela Esposito was exceptionally close to her grandmother and suffered terribly following her death, grieving her loss but also feeling oddly ashamed of her grief. Her essay ‘Paying the Ferryman’ is a vivid, moving and frequently surprising evocation of her grandmother, of the breakdown Michela suffered after her death, and of the strange ways in which a grieving person rejoins the stream of life.
The summer Dublin Review also includes Kevin Rafter’s gripping account of suffering a heart attack and coming to terms with heart disease; Nathan O’Donnell’s ‘Scavengers’, an essay about people (including his young self) living precariously; and short stories by Juliana Adelman and Chloe Tomlinson.
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The best Irish and International writers of fiction and non-fiction discuss and read from their work that has been published in The Dublin Review.