Links

• Irish Nocturnes, Irish Willow and Irish Haiku at The Davies Group publishers
• Irish Elegies at Palgrave Macmillan
• Words of the Grey Wind at Blackstaff 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
• The full text of "Witness" (from Irish Haiku) can be found here, courtesy of Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing
• Lagan Press, Belfast, from whom Poetry Introductions 1 — co-authored by Chris Arthur, Adrian Fox, Matt Kirkham, Maria McManus & Francis O'Hare — can be purchased here
• Blackstaff Press, Belfast, publishers of Arthur's forthcoming Words of the Grey Wind
• Irish PEN
• International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
• Irish Pages
• The Irish Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibition of William McKeown's work from November 5 2008 until January 11 2009. This includes a series of watercolours entitled "Waiting for the Corncrake". The exhibition catalogue reprints one of the essays from Irish Nocturnes, "The Last Corncrake". For exhibition details see here.
• 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, is an excellent quarterly journal. 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 ex-ploration of an individual's ordinary, everyday experience."
• 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 Open College of the Arts is an educational charity established in 1987. A small dedicated arts college, it offers courses in Art History, Creative Writing, Fine Art, Painting, Photography, and Textiles. For the announcement of Chris Arthur's appointment as OCA's creative writing lead see the OCA blog post.

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"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