A Note on This Special Issue

There is a certain symmetry and circularity to the issue you are looking at. The very first issue of Prairie Schooner appeared all the way back in January 1927 under the founding editorship of Lowry Wimberly. That inaugural issue included a review of three novels by the Irish novelist and sometimes poet Donn Byrne (full name Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne). Born in New York in November 1889 while his parents were there briefly on business, he grew up in a Gaelic-speaking community in Ireland before attending the University of Dublin. Returning to New York in 1911, he became a prolific fiction writer, but financial reversals forced him back to Ireland, where he died in an auto accident in June 1928. The review in Prairie Schooner observed that while "very little has been written to date on Donn Byrne," there was little question that "more will be written in the future." The reviewer particularly admired the sweeping, lyrical, and proto-mythic romanticism of Byrne's writing.

Seven years before Byrne's birth in New York, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde visited Lincoln, where he lectured at the University of Nebraska in the spring of 1882 as part of his American speaking tour. The chair of the university's Department of English, G. E. Woodberry (whose liberal thinking would cost him his job later in the year), escorted him both to his in-town speaking engagements and (eerily) to the Nebraska Penitentiary, which stood on the treeless outskirts of Lincoln and whose castle-like architecture had caught Wilde's attention. Both in Lincoln and in Omaha, Wilde's appearance created a considerable sensation, including a good deal of consternation among the married men, who did not care for their wives' infatuation with this charming Irishman.

This present special issue of Prairie Schooner, then, in some respects closes a circle begun a century and a quarter ago with Wilde's visit and inscribed further some 85 years ago with Prairie Schooner's debut. In recent years we have published special issues featuring contemporary writing from various regions and nations, including China and Australia, as part of our commitment to reflect in our pages not simply a national but indeed an international sense of the contemporary literary community. But this issue featuring Irish writing today involves a "specialness" that is both distinct and different from any other. America has long cherished a special relationship with Ireland, a relationship most immediately and characteristically visible when St. Patrick's Day arrives, but one that is in reality far more deeply woven into the cultural fabric of America and that embraces regions and families, time and space, in ways that are particularly unique. Perhaps more so than any other nation, Ireland claims an enduring hold on the American imagination, maybe because the Irish culture, transplanted to America, remains so uniquely and unshakably Irish despite its geographical displacement. Perhaps, too, the deeply felt cultural memory of the 1840s, the terrible toll on Ireland and her people of the famine years, and the trauma of the ensuing mass emigration resonates with particular power among Americans. And perhaps, too, and finally, it has to do with the indomitable spirit of Ireland and the Irish that forms so distinctive an element of American culture, even today. It is telling that a recent survey concludes that some thirty-five million Americans claim a connection to Ireland and to Irish history and culture.

This issue of Prairie Schooner offers a snapshot of contemporary Irish writing. Unlike many "special issues" of journals, this one has not begun with a predetermined narrow list of contributors from whom we solicited the contributions that now appear here. Instead, we have happily welcomed the work of many writers who responded to our general invitation for submissions, and this present issue samples some of the most compelling and vibrant contributions from among this wealth of splendid material. It represents, then, a cross-section of the Irish writing community today, in all its rich diversity. In the voices that speak here, readers will hear—perhaps will recognize, certainly will respond to—echoes of a culture that...