Editing, publishing, mentoring

I began working professionally in publishing in 2009, starting my career with The Lilliput Press.

In 2011, I joined The Stinging Fly as Assistant Editor and worked on a number of issues of the magazine, as well as short story collections published by The Stinging Fly Press.

I became Editor of the magazine in 2014. The Stinging Fly has an open submissions policy – anyone can submit work to the magazine, and it’s from these submissions that the magazine puts together each issue. During my editorship, I read thousands of short stories and worked with hundreds of writers. It was a privilege to read all this fiction and poetry, and to edit and nurture so many superb writers – a number of whom have since gone on to publish books of their own.

Around this time, I devised and edited a book called Dubliners 100, which invited contemporary Irish writers to write ‘cover versions’ of the original stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners. The book was published by Tramp Press and won the Best Irish-published Book at the Irish Book Awards.

After the publication of my debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, I decided to step aside as Stinging Fly editor to focus on my own writing and to gain further experience in teaching and mentoring.

In 2017/18, I became Writer in Residence at University College, Cork, where I taught on the MA in Creative Writing and ran a college-wide fiction workshop. Sometime later, I returned to The Stinging Fly as Editor at Large, where I ran the organisation’s writer development programme; mentored a number of emerging writers; and commissioned and edited fiction, essays, and literary criticism.

Today, I work independently with writers, offering one-to-one mentoring and group workshops.