Dublin, 2026

It's been nearly a decade since I last visited Dublin. This time I stayed in the Temple Bar area, round the corner from a night club that's popular, by the sound of it.

I happened to be there on Joyce's birthday, Feb 2nd. Next to his statue there is now a portal showing a live webcam view of elsewhere, and v.v.. He has a bridge named after him, and quotes embedded in the pavement. I wouldn't bother with his poems. "Dubliners" feels heavy on the symbolism nowadays though well worth reading. "A Portrait of the artist as a young man" holds up well - I think it's the best place to start if you're new to him. "Ulysses" is required reading for any budding literary writer, though companion notes are necessary. It's easier to be impressed by the book than to love it. Parts of "Finnegan's wake" are worth listening to, but I wouldn't suggest reading it.

Other Dublin writers get mentions too around the city. Beckett has a bridge named after him. Bram Stoker has a presence George Bernard Shaw's reputation has sunk fast though. I keep forgetting that he won a Nobel Prize.

Oscar Wilde features, and his house can be visited. Sean O'Casey has a theatre named after him. Yeats' Abbey Theatre is still going. Brendan Behan has a statue.

There's an Irish Writers' Centre. I visited the "Museum of Irish Literature" (MOLI) which opened in 2019 (the Writers' Museum has closed). There's a room on Romance and the crossover with LitFic - Sally Rooney. Maeve Binchy was born in Dalkey and lived in Dublin. Women's writing is getting more coverage. The word "pregnancy" was banned in literature until 1960 - "happy event" was used instead.

The jigsaw puzzle used recently in a jigsaw competition shows Ha'penny Bridge, which is close to the "Winding Stair" book shop. I also visited "The Last Bookshop", "Books Upstairs", and "Chapters". The older 2nd hand bookshops have shelves up to the ceiling and waist-high piles of books. I ended up buying "The Stinging Fly" (45.2, with Ilse Pedler in it), "The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story", "Arrows in Flight" (Irish Short Story anthology), "Pulse" (Irish Short Story anthology), and "The Machine Stops", an SF story by E.M. Forster - all 2nd hand or free.

I didn't meet any writers. Next time I'll try to, though the idea of a BYOB open-mic isn't tempting. Dublin seems a welcoming place for story writers.

We visited Bray (Joyce lived there), climbed Bray Head, and walked through Dalkey. We went to EPIC (The Irish Emigration Museum) where I found out that cheese and onion crisps were invented in Ireland), and drank in pubs with live Irish music. I'd forgotten about the Viking influence and the immensity of the famine effects.

The short story, 2025 - going down

Over on The Fort Wayne Review of Books there are some statistics on short story collections.

My guess is that more people read novels than write them. For poetry I think it's the other way round. Short stories have the worst of both worlds - like novels, few people write them and as with poems, few people read them.

The big publishers know this. In the USA, 2025, there were only 20 new English-language short story collections published in hardcover by the Big Five Publishers and their imprints. Only 4 of the authors were white men and they were all over 65. Of course there are paperbacks, translations, and smaller publishers, but all the same it's depressing.

And there's more bad news. Every year since 2004, the New York Times has published its list of 100 Notable Books. 12 short story collections were mentioned in 2008. The trend has been down ever since. None were mentioned in 2025.

Why get published?

On Lit Mag News (Substack), Barbara Krasner wrote about how she’d made an effort to get published in 2025. She sent 660 submissions. For poetry she got a 25% acceptance rate. For fiction she got an 8% acceptance rate. Overall she had 93 poems, 14 essays, 4 short stories, 11 flash fiction,and 2 flash nonfiction pieces accepted.

I can imagine this news items provoking several reactions among writers I know. Some might see Krasner's behaviour as an egotistic attempt to be famous. Why not write more instead of spending all that time sending things off? I belong to a writers group where many of the members enjoy writing and haven't tried to be published (often because they're writing novels). I can understand that point of view. The important thing for them is to enjoy what they do - the satisfaction of finding the right words to express what's inside. After all, joggers don't have to beat records (even their own ones) to enjoy their jogging.

However I can also see the other point of view -

• The late prose writer Angela Carter and the poet Don Paterson consider[ed] their work unfinished until it's published - it's a bit like talking to yourself. An actor or dancer wouldn't practise alone in their room unless there was a performance ahead. A composer works on pieces with the intention of being heard.
• People who wrote in Ivory Towers used to be considered suspect - often because of their seeming disregard for other people.
• If your work would give pleasure to others (or even help others), it's rather mean-spirited to keep it to yourself.
• It's rather presumptuous to think that you're a better judge of your work than others would be. You might think you're understanding yourself, putting valuable insights onto paper using just the right words, but suppose you're deluding yourself? Does it matter as long you're happy? Maybe not, but if the quality of your self-knowledge matters to you, maybe you should get a second opinion.
• Getting published (getting validation from peers) is an inspiration to write more.
• Krasner thinks that because of her publications she "found her community". The interaction between writer and reader isn't as immediate as at a workshop meeting, but when published writers meet (especially if they've been in the same publications) there's a sense of kinship even if they haven't read each other.

Rejections 2025

On Substack, Barbara Krasner wrote about how she’d made an effort to get published in 2025. She sent 660 submissions. For poetry she got a 25% acceptance rate. For fiction she got an 8% acceptance rate. Overall she had 93 poems, 14 essays, 4 short stories, 11 flash fiction,and 2 flash nonfiction pieces accepted. Closer to home, Jim Murdock had 137 poems published in 2025.

In 2025 I made an effort too. I ended up with 9 pieces of prose and 2 poems published. The year began ok but in Autumn/Winter 2025 I had no acceptances - not for want of trying. Here are some significant 2025 dates -

• 8th Nov - having not had an acceptance for nearly 2 months, I broke a record of mine by sending out 14 pieces in a day - 6 poems, 4 flashes, and 4 stories. That meant I had total of 38 pieces out. It didn't help
• 6th Dec - I finally got an acceptance - of a piece sent out months before, written years ago
• 28th Dec - I got an acceptance of a recently sent out 2022 piece

It's at least a year since I've written anything that's been accepted. What am I doing wrong?

• Maybe I've been writing too much, and the quality's gone down - well I've certainly written more this year. My output in 2025 was 5 poems, 36 Flashes and 7 stories - about 22k words. I've hardly ever written more in a year.
• Many of the magazines I used to be in frequently have gone - I've found nothing to replace Poetry Nottingham (20 poems) or Weyfarers (24 poems).
• I'm reluctant to pay submission fees, but the magazines most suited to my work now ask for them - I'm generally in favour of fees. $3 for 3 poems or a story is fair enough. However, I struggle with paying $3 to submit a single 100 word piece of Flash.

This year I shall pay to submit stories that I think merit publication - a couple of my favourite stories remain unpublished - and cannibalize the rest.

Misc notes - Heaney, cliche, genre, Cusk

Snippets from the substack world: Heaney, cliché, genre and Cusk -

• "Heaney didn’t have to resort to poetic metaphor nearly as often as the rest of us, because he always, somehow, found the word he needed" - Don Paterson
• "There’s a big difference between clichéd writing and clichéd wisdom. While certain sayings that feel clichéd to us may be worn thin, they are not lazy strings of overused words. They are idioms, metaphors, proverbs, or aphorisms, and, taken together, they form a kind of common wisdom worthy of defense. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”" - Catherine Shannon
• "the publishing ecosystems for literary and genre fiction differ wildly, particularly in terms of attitudes toward money. In the present, the separation of these two worlds is often justified in terms of aesthetics. ... why did the publishing world bifurcate in the first place? The answer can be found partly in the history of the novel in English. At the start of the 19th century, fiction wasn’t a prestige genre, and genre boundaries were porous. Dickens mixed social commentary with spontaneous human combustion and ghosts. George Eliot wrote a novella called The Lifted Veil about a man with psychic powers. As mass-printed material increased in availability, class divisions within fiction began, driven by ideas about who was reading what. The penny-dreadful (serialized stories) in the 19th century came to be associated with the working poor, the dirtiness of city slums, loose sexuality, and alcoholism. ... Another answer lies in the establishment of Creative Writing as an academic discipline." - Jennifer Pullen
• "I am anti-Cusk and I am grateful for this modest opportunity to push back on her pernicious influence in the literary culture. It’s like a combination of all the vices of fiction in our time: there’s the art house preening, the willful obfuscation, the use of triviality in a way that is somehow meant to come across as portentous. ... the absence of storytelling narrative creates an inexorable pull towards babble. And this is babble." - Sam Kahn

Christchurch and Bournemouth - some firsts

We started a walk along the Dorset coast in Christchurch. It's the first time I've seen a ducking stool. After the trip I read that nearby there's an Anglo-Saxon watermill "unique in that it takes water from one river (the Avon) and spills it into a second river (the Stour)".

The world's shortest funicular railway? Well maybe. Maybe more of them will be needed - in some places there were signs warning about landslides. The breakers began close to the shore, loud. Though it was deep into December and it was raining, groups of people were still surfing, and of course there were many dog-walkers.

I've always like piers, even in winter. I worked on one for a while. This time we walked to the end of 2 piers. Bournemouth had a zipwire in use from the end of the pier - "the world's first pier to shore zip wire".

Bournemouth was busy with lights and stalls - ice-cream; an Xmas tree maze; miniature golf with illuminated balls. I tried a gingerbread latte and a Festive Flake - my first eat-in at Greggs. So this is Christmas.

Writing and travel

Does travel give me ideas for my writing? Not usually. Looking through old photos, some caught my eye, reminding me of significant/memorable events, but few have directly led to a story or poem. Sometimes I get a glimpse of a life style that I can expand into a story - a lifestyle that exists in England too (market-stall owner, homelessness, etc) but seeing it in a new setting brings it to life.

This is from a calendar bought in Prague when Russian things were easy to buy. I've published a piece set there - "Prague '86". I was inter-railing at the time and saw many cities, rarely staying a night in them, never returning to many of them.

The Bosphorus. I liked Istanbul, and we visited several other interesting places on the same tour. I published a piece called "Istanbul" about walking on the walls, looking down on people's gardens, then descending into a suburban side-street.

Gran Canaria. I think this will appear in a story sooner or later. By the leaning tower is a swingers bar - I saw a poster about it after and didn't understand it all. The activity on the nearby dunes was a surprise to me as well.

My shadow on a ski-lift in Italy. Though I've been to Italy extensively, I've only had one Italy-based story published - "First there is a mountain". "Out of the blue" was mostly set in a basement jazz club on a Milan canal, but it could have been anywhere.

The morning after we'd spent a night in the Sahara, Morocco. The camels are tied up off-screen. An experience, but not something to write about.

A backstreet in Essaouira, Morocco, taken from outside a fish restaurant. We bought fish from the market, delivered it to the restaurant and ate there later in the day. I think some of the city's workers are taking a break from the sun and wind here. That alley will appear in a story.

Marrakech. I'd wanted to visit it in my twenties, when I inter-railed as far as Fez. I finally arrived in my sixties. My wife had a cooking lesson there, buying live chicken in the market first - a culture-interaction detail I might use eventually.

Morocco in the mountains. This multi-generational family home has appeared in the final scene of an unpublished story.

The Nile. Cairo with its non-stop car-horns, or the quieter life along the river (we stayed in Aswan for 2 nights, long enough to get to know a few streets) might feature one day. I set a poem - "Escape" - in an Egyptian hotel before I visited the country.

The Taj Mahal from afar, decades ago. You might expect a train holiday in India (Varanasi, Amber, etc) to provoke stories but nothing has happened yet.

I think my most productive holidays are revisits - a chance to compare my old and newer selves.