It’s not often you find fiction, non-fiction, photography, poetry and writings on film and dance featured in the one anthology and expect it to make sense. But that’s exactly what Winter Papers set out to achieve. Describing it as a “labour of love” by writer Kevin Barry and co-editor Olivia Smyth, Sean Rocks introduced Barry and writers Sarah Baume, Paul Lynch, Jessica Traynor and Mary Morrissey on Arena to talk about Winter Papers, which is now in its third anthology.
Barry described the impetus for the original volume as a mixture of inspiration and frustration. He had been browsing in a bookshop in Montréal featuring self-published “craft publications” when he thought “God, it’d be great to do something like this in Ireland”. Barry has noticed that artists have responded in a bid to broaden their work.
“One of the things we’d noticed was a kind of a...dissatisfaction amongst a lot of artists and writers that their traditional kind of genres and forms are kind of feeling like constraints…troubled times for a country tend to be very interesting times creatively.
Listen back to the full discussion on Winter Papers on Arena here.