SANCHO PANZA LITERARY SOCIETY

TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN RESIDENCIES

In the grandest sense, this workshop is a love letter to the grey melancholia and sublime legacy of ideas, imagination and creation of the Irish literary and political tradition. Academically, it will be both a writer’s workshop and an open forum discussion of immensely influential published Irish works (half of our in-class time will feature workshop discussion of your submissions, and half will be open debate of selected published titles, though that ratio can certainly be tweaked in either direction depending on group preference. We will of course also be exploring Dublin’s playhouses and museums, and the wild Irish landscape and seaside. .

There is, tucked away somewhere in our history, and still stored safely in the recesses of our hearts, an eternally glorious intellectual intersection where abstract contemplation, artistic creation, and real political movement merge, and it is eloquence that guides us in its direction. There is a mystical quality attached to this place—a fundamental affirmation of the fact that the natural emanations of the mind and soul are the most influential arbiters of both visceral and corporeal reality, and we will experience it in residence at the historic and beautiful Trinity College Dublin, alongside students and faculty from all over the world, and the legendary Long Room Library and Book of Kells exhibit. We think we know this mystical place in America—an experiment in blood galvanized by the strokes of so many pens—and think we believe that liberty is simply and only the harmony of idea with decision, but the watchwords of our age are now clearly pragmatism, calculation, compromise, and relativism. The latter two are concepts so embedded in our psyches and so commercially deified that we now fail to even whimper when we compromise too much, because we can’t understand what it is that we’ve lost. But know that the remedy for this (reading, writing, and breathing) is simple if you just want it, and this workshop hopes to be a forum for a discursive kind of identity in the most ideal locale for that on earth, and a real comparative look at one of the richest and most passionate literary cultures the world has ever known.

We need to look more broadly to attain a genuine and rich sense of self; breathing foreign air reminds us that the world is both bigger and smaller than we ever believed it could be. We will search for and argue about the best ideas articulated in the most beautiful fashion, and study bombastic writers such as Brendan Behan, Seamus Deane, Oscar Wilde, John Banville, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The academic argument is balanced, if not superseded, by our day to day experience—Trinity is centrally located and we can explore all of Dublin by foot. Trinity College is the real star, and we are uniquely fortunate to be in residence there, particularly at such an amazing rate.

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Previously Featured Readings:

Borstal Boy, Brendan Behan
Reading in the Dark, Seamus Deane