It is with much bittersweetness with which we announce the third and final edition of An Áitúil, our long withstanding collaboration with The Martello Journal. Over the past two years, we have cultivated an anthology dedicated to the idea of “the local” in Ireland, and celebrated the powerful responses of our local’s place in our hearts and our lives. Upon reflection, our first edition brought forth the significance of the local’s physicality: the aspects of space, proximity, and memory which create its shape. Our second edition referred more towards its emotive state, and the ways in which we as individuals hold it dear. With this in mind, we have decided to bring this final volume back to the beginning, so to speak, and emphasise perhaps the most important part of our local – the people who live it, and the people who leave it. 

 

At this young stage in our lives, we are witnessing (or perhaps participating in) the gradual diminishing of friends and loved ones who remain in these local, homely spaces. Emigration has played a huge part in that, and we, as editors and young adults, feel these changes as constant, incessant things, with no small degree of pain. There are difficult and complicated questions to explore as we decide to leave these sacred spaces – who are we, without the local? More than that, who are we when we are left behind? Can things go back to the way they were? And what, most importantly, does absence mean to us, either as the one who stays or the one who goes?

 

Two years ago, when deciding to embark upon this anthology, we wrote that: ‘Aítiúil, meaning local, is to us an expression of magnetism and emotion that calls people into a shared song. A place affined with home is more than the sum of the times you darken its door or halt on a journey through. There is a persistence of how one feels that is woven into the winds that whip around it. Consider this feeling, and melt into it, think of the good and the bad and the nights spent trying to avoid too much of either. Think of what is home and very far away from home, what is boundless and what is just a ways down the road.”  And now, at this moment, we ask you to take that feeling and expand on it – send us work that is heartbreaking, bursting, and screaming out to sea –– all that is found here, right outside your door, in the garden, at the end of the lane. We want to know you and what is around you, what ties you to this place, this country, and what makes you leave it. 

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Specific guidelines will be as follows:

 

i. This is an anthology in collaboration with The Martello Journal, and is not an edition published by either of us. An Aítiúil will not be the ninth edition of The Madrigal, or the sixth edition of The Martello. It is a project undertaken by both of us, collaboratively.

 

ii. You may submit 1-3 poems, up to 1,000 words of prose, and an unlimited number of art and photographs. You may submit to each category, but please ensure each category receives a separate email submission. You may not submit to the same category twice.

 

iii. All work must be centred around Ireland, as this is an anthology dedicated to such. Do not send us work which does not connect to this theme.

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Send all work to anaitiuilsubmissions@gmail.com; we can’t wait to read them. 

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With love,

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Helen, Luke, Úna and Jack