Links

• Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Haiku at The Davies Group publishers
• Irish Elegies at Palgrave Macmillan
• On the Shoreline of Knowledge at Sightline Books/Iowa University Press
• Words of the Grey Wind is now out of print. It was published by Blackstaff Press
• Reading Life at Negative Capability Press
• Irish Writers Online — a Concise Dictionary of Irish Writers, created and maintained by Philip Casey
• The Irish Diaspora Studies scholarly network, in association with The Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds — see item 5 on the Contents page: "Essays of Chris Arthur" by Patrick O'Sullivan
• Heidi Evans's interview with Chris Arthur (89 KB PDF) from the Swansea Review
• Lagan Press, Belfast, publishers of Poetry Introductions 1 — co-authored by Chris Arthur, Adrian Fox, Matt Kirkham, Maria McManus & Francis O'Hare
• Robert Atwan, "The Top 10 Essays Since 1950", Publishers Weekly, October 12th 2012
• Julia Sukys's website, Writing Life: Reflections on creative nonfiction, biography, life-writing, and the personal essay
• Irish PEN
• International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
• Irish Pages
• The Irish Museum of Modern Art hosted an exhibition of William McKeown's work in 2008/9. This includes a series of watercolours entitled "Waiting for the Corncrake". The exhibition catalogue reprinted one of the essays from Irish Nocturnes, "The Last Corncrake".
• Quotidiana (kwo*ti*de*A*na) N. 1. The land of everyday, commonplace things; 2. The online compendium of 381 public-domain essays.
• The Pedestrian, edited by Christopher Spiker, was an excellent quarterly journal which has now, unfortunately, ceased publication. An indication of its interests is evident from the statement that each issue "presents a topic and explores it from a variety of perspectives, most often making use of the 'familiar' (or 'personal') essay, a genre well suited to exploring the ordinary. We anthologize essays from the past that are relevant to each topic, some by classic essayists (Montaigne, Hazlitt, Chesterton, Woolf, and White, for example) and some by people less well-known. In addition, we publish new contributions that carry on the tradition of what Michel de Montaigne coined the 'essai' — conversational 'attempts' at an honest exploration of an individual's ordinary, everyday experience." Some information about the journal remains on its Facebook page here.
• Kostis Kourelis's Blog. Kourelis writes: "I have embraced Chris Arthur's mission statement, 'the strangeness that attends even the most mundane circumstances', in his essay '(En)trance' reprinted in The Best American Essays 2009". Kourelis is an architectural historian and archaeologist who teaches at Franklin and Marshall College. He applies some aspects of "(En)trance" to "objects-building-situations".
• The Royal Literary Fund
• "Ars Poetica and the Essay"
• Assay, a journal set up "to test and analyze the nonfiction texts we read".
• The Essay Review, the purpose of The Essay Review — an official University of Iowa publication — is "to recognize the poetic, academic, social, and existential achievements of the nonfiction essay".
• essaydaily.org, edited by Ander Monson & Craig Reinbold, "is a space for ongoing conversation about essays & essayists of note."
• The Essay Prize "is given each year to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying"
• Dundee University Review of the Arts sometimes includes material likely to be of interest to essayists.
• “Why I Write”, a contribution to the Royal Literary Fund’s Vox series
• Ohio State University Press's 21st Century Essays series

If you would like a link included on this site, please send details to the email address on the Contact page.

"The personal essay in our time ... stays alive because it dares to be unique and because it strenuously resists the encroachments of standardization, whether social, cultural or academic."

Robert Atwan

"The culture administered by the universities has always regarded the essay with suspicion."

Susan Sontag