Our guest editors for issue #12: John Patrick McHugh & Jessica Traynor

We’re delighted to announce some additions to our team for Banshee issue #12 (autumn/winter 2021). The fiction in issue #12 will be edited by acclaimed short story writer John Patrick McHugh, while the poetry will be edited by award-winning poet Jessica Traynor. The flash fiction and non-fiction in issue #12 will be edited by the core Banshee team of Laura Cassidy, Claire Hennessy and Eimear Ryan.

John Patrick McHugh’s debut short story collection, Pure Gold, is published this month by New Island. His work has appeared in Granta, Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, Banshee and The Tangerine. He says:

Please send me your weirdest story, your funniest story, your most troubling story, your most heartbreaking story, your most riveting story, your most difficult story, your best story. I have no fixed taste on what a short story should be, or indeed what a short story should do beyond move me in some capacity: I’m hungry for whatever you think it should do, whatever you think it should be. Short fiction is one of the most exacting artforms – every word has to do something, every line must build towards something – but it is also, thankfully, one of most versatile and exciting.

Three small questions to keep in mind before submitting your piece:

1, Is the opening paragraph the actual opening paragraph for my story? Or is the second paragraph the opening and the current opening paragraph is a mere placeholder, a cough before I begin my brilliant speech?

2, Is this story particularly dour? Excessively gloomy? Are my characters humourless due to some pre-conceived notion of what a literary short story should be like? Am I withholding jokes and gags and banana peels because I’m worried it may dimmish the work’s ‘literariness’?

3, Did I have fun writing this? Is that sense of fun – in the line, in the plot, in the description, in the startling glimpse of life – still present, or has it been diluted? And if it has been diluted, can it be retrieved and resqueezed into the prose?

Jessica Traynor is a poet, dramaturg and creative writing teacher. Her debut collection, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. Her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Times poetry choice. She is Poet in Residence at the Yeats Society, Sligo, and a Creative Fellow of UCD. She says:

The poetry that excites me most is the poetry that lures me somewhere pleasant, only to frighten me a bit by allowing me a glimpse of the uncanny reflection in the mirror, the hint of confrontation in a glance, the encroaching rot in the fruit bowl. It’s also the poetry that deals with difficult, unspoken thoughts – unspoken not necessarily because they are romantic or beautiful, but because they threaten to reveal our inner chaos, to spill it out into the world.

Poetry as celebration is one of the purest forms of expression. But let’s leave that aside for a moment and poke around in the mud and blood and guts of life. Human beings are messy and complicated and contradictory. We’re surrounded by hills and valleys and beautiful clear ocean vistas, but also by rotting leaves and sewage treatment plants and immortal, invasive micro-plastics. I’d like to see poems that rummage around in all that, yet still manage to unearth, as Maggie Smith puts it, some ‘good bones’.

Submissions for issue #12 will be open from 1-31 March 2021 – check out our submission guidelines here!