About this Event
Nobody Mentions the Ghost
After Dark: The Supernatural in Irish Fiction
With June Caldwell and Martina Devlin, in conversation with Susan Tomaselli
What if one of the strangest things about Irish fiction is how little we find strange?
In some literary traditions, the appearance of a ghost is an extraordinary event. The story stops. The living are terrified. Explanations are demanded.
In Irish fiction, someone might encounter the dead, hear a warning, sense a presence or accept something that simply cannot be explained. And the story carries on.
Nobody necessarily questions it. Sometimes nobody even remarks on it.
And perhaps that's the really interesting thing.
For the final event in our After Dark series, Chapters Bookstore brings together two extraordinary Irish writers, June Caldwell and Martina Devlin, in conversation with Susan Tomaselli, founder and editor of the influential literary journal gorse, for an exploration of the supernatural in Irish fiction and what our apparent ease with the inexplicable might reveal about our culture, our history and ourselves.
This isn't really a conversation about horror. It is about something considerably more intriguing: why the boundaries between the natural and supernatural often seem so wonderfully porous in Irish storytelling.
We have inherited a literary tradition in which the dead are not always entirely absent, the past is rarely finished with us, and the inexplicable can sit quite comfortably alongside everyday life.
From folklore and fairy belief to the Gothic imagination and contemporary literary fiction, Irish writers have long made room for what cannot easily be seen, proved or understood.
But why?
Is it the legacy of an oral storytelling culture in which the otherworld was never particularly far away? Is it something to do with religion, memory, grief or the way we understand the relationship between the living and the dead? Or have Irish writers simply become exceptionally good at allowing the uncanny to exist without explaining it away?
And what happens when the ghost never actually appears, but its presence shapes everything?
Three remarkable literary voices
June Caldwell is one of Ireland's most daring and distinctive fiction writers. Her acclaimed collection Room Little Darker takes readers into unsettling, darkly funny and sometimes surreal territory, where the familiar becomes extraordinary and the boundaries of reality are never entirely reliable. Her work asks us to look again at the things we think we understand.
Martina Devlin is an award-winning novelist, journalist and literary scholar whose fiction explores history, myth, identity and the stories we construct around the past. Her novel The House Where It Happened draws on the Islandmagee witchcraft trials, while her latest, Glorious Monsters, enters the extraordinary world of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein. Few writers are better placed to explore the relationship between the Gothic imagination, historical memory and the stories that continue to haunt us.
Susan Tomaselli, founder and editor of gorse, is celebrated for championing adventurous and unconventional writing. She will guide what promises to be a wide-ranging, surprising and wonderfully unpredictable conversation about literature, belief, imagination and the Irish relationship with the unseen.
A different kind of literary evening
This is not a book launch, a horror panel or a conventional author interview.
It's an opportunity to listen to three fascinating literary minds explore an idea that we rarely stop to consider, precisely because it feels so familiar.
There may be ghosts. There will almost certainly be disagreements. We suspect there will be quite a bit of laughter too.
And perhaps we'll leave looking differently at the stories we've grown up with and wondering whether what we Irish accept quite naturally is really very normal at all.
Join us at Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin 1, for the concluding event in our After Dark programme with assistance from Dublin UNESCO City of Literature.
Because in an Irish story, the most extraordinary thing about a ghost might be that nobody finds it extraordinary.
Friday 13th November 6.30pm
Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin 1
Admission is free. Reserve your ticket through Eventbrite.
Event venue & nearby stays
Chapters Bookstore, Parnell Street, Dublin 1, Ireland
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