In February, my Irish passport finally arrived. I opened it, read my name and beneath it, my nationality, or rather náisiúntacht. I was an Irish citizen now. I sat down on the stairs and cried.
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Normality is fiction: a conversation with Samanta Schweblin
I think fiction starts with something really unusual. We keep trying to be normal, day after day, but normality is a fiction. It is a space between you and me, but there is nobody who occupies that space.
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Permission to connect
Much of the world around us wants to pretend that it is not pulsing with carnality. Outside of sanctioned times and spaces, we are asked to pretend this energy doesn’t exist. In this way, we are being asked to stem the natural flow of dialogue with ourselves, isolating a central aspect of our being.
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Super families
Nowhere in fiction does the found family, or family of choice, exist in such abundance as it does in superhero narratives.
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Editorial: (found) families
In this issue of PEN Transmissions, we explore different types of family, different ways of building community.
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Home, Tarçın and my mother
I wished I could explain what had happened since we had last met. How people were rounded up late at night and how at sunrise, it looked as though nothing had happened. How dad was imprisoned for his journalism, shot at, exiled to Germany.
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The otherness
She just doesn’t like the idea of metamorphosis. It terrifies her to picture that some unforeseeable change could take place in her body abruptly and she’d wake up a foreign object.
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