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“To write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write is to write.”

If you don’t follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you may have missed our announcement that we’ve opened submissions for issue two. The guidelines are here. To summarise: we’re looking for your best work, for writing that resists definition for stories and poems that strain against classification. We’re not looking for book reviews per se (we do consider them for our online arm) but we will consider essays related to books. We’re also looking for interview proposals: we’re open to suggestions, though we do have a list of people we’d love to talk to, but don’t have the time ourselves. And we’re especially looking for submissions from women; we don’t get enough, frankly.

Say hello to gorse

It’s here! Pre-orders are heading out to you lovely people this weekend. We’d love to hear what you think, so please do get in touch. We’re selling copies through the website for now, but can be spotted in Chapters Bookstore, Dublin, from February onwards. We’re talking to some other wonderful bookshops about selling us too, so watch the skies.

Above all to wander

We’re looking for essays – like this and this and these – to publish in gorse, both online and in print. Here are some essays elsewhere that we like:

Introducing: Darran Anderson

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

Fantômas, Lolita, cargo cults, poèts maudits, who better to tell a Serge Gainsbourg story than Darran Anderson? Whether it’s essays on memento mori, imaginary cities, the night, the Shipping Forecast or the literary nasty, if Darran keeps writing ‘em, we’ll continue to read. He is, as Lee Rourke says, one of our brightest minds. His essay for gorse is on the moderns and their literary and artistic antedcedents.

Introducing: David Winters

Editors’ note: As we head towards publication, we thought we would introduce our contributors.

David Winters is an invigorating literary critic (“criticism will be renewed by being disembedded, deligitimized, deinstitutionalized”), who has lead discussions on Gordon Lish (“it’s no overstatement to say that Lish is to the second half of the 20th century what Gertrude Stein was to the first”) and modernism. In an interview with HTMLGiant David said,

“Perhaps every novel contains a “theory” of the novel, as part of its cache of tacit knowledge. A novel has an understanding of itself, whether it knows it or not…“The novel” as a grand project: the idea fills me with nervous exhaustion. What I can say with confidence is that I’m less and less interested in that sort of novel. I’d rather read a book that wants to do away with itself. Deep down I closely identify with literature, but I also compulsively want to kill literature.”

For gorse, David interviews literary experimenter Evan Lavender-Smith.