Back when Some Blind Alleys first came to life, about a year ago, its purpose was to publish work by students in my creative writing workshops. At the end of every Creative Writing 3 (i.e. Advanced) course, I held a reading night (this is still the case). At it, students read two pages of their best work. I took extracts from those two pages and posted them on the site for people who couldn’t attend.
Things have changed a lot. On the literary side, SBA is publishing an essay by Carlo Gebler in the next few weeks. We’ve published/exhibited visual art by critically acclaimed artist Vera Klute, and more critically acclaimed artists are forthcoming.
Former students are continuing to publish on the site – fiction and personal essays – but they – and many new voices – are also contributing essays that are less personal, and that inform and entertain: the most read selection on SBA by a contributor in the main column so far is Bryan Butler’s “A very brief history of short animation” – which puts it behind Helen Chandler’s review of Dylan Moran: the single most read contribution (excluding the From the Editor column) on the site, with nearly 1,000 page views.
Ridiculously, my cousin Fielding has destroyed all the records with over 1,200 page views. The man is a star. A number of other From the Editor posts had high traffic: mostly driven by the intrinsic interest of the subject matter – the Achill Heinrich Böll Cottage – or driven by comments.
The next four most read contributions, behind Helen Chandler’s, are also reviews, all of them written by John McAuley.
The most-read contributions that are pure literature (for lack of a better phrase) are, in the following order, “Down by the old motor tax office,” by Donald Mahoney, “Tea and biscuits with Tim Robinson,” by Mick Halloran and “My obsession with endstations,” by Susan Leahy (all essays). These have about 500 page views each. The top rated story is “Is this regression?” by Justin Kidd, with 250 page views.
(While it’s important to say that a page view does not translate into a reader, we can judge the flukiness of high traffic by average length of stay. All of the above had average length of stays of above or at five minutes.)
There’s something really interesting about those statistics, but nothing surprising. People like art, but they don’t like to be suffocated by it; they like, I think, places that provide variety (or lots and lots of Fielding). There are many reasons why five-hundred-word reviews get read more often than moving and complex personal essays or wild and odd short stories, and I don’t have time to go into any of them here.
I like everything I publish on the site, but as the editor I want to strive for balance. On the letters side of things (i.e. not visual art), I want to have Some Blind Alleys do more than witness itself.
One of my favorite publications in Ireland, as everyone who knows me knows, is the Dublin Review – not really for its personal histories or stories but for the criticism and literary journalism. It’s a journal that looks more outward than inward, and that’s the definition of humility in literary publishing, or the definition of readability: it’s definitely the definition of something.
I admire and want to emulate this approach. I wish I had the money to do so more seriously, but I do the best I can. I was extremely happy to publish a recent essay by Jaki McCarrick about Auden and Kavanagh and an essay by Paul Larkin about Henrik Ibsen. I’m not only interested in essays about literature, but absolutely everything that can be written well, inform, and entertain. The more local, the better. The guy who lives next door to you who drives an ice cream truck – write an essay about him, but make it also about the rise and fall of ice cream trucks in Ireland. Some of you may think I’m joking. I’m not.
Beyond all that, though, comes what I hope will be the next successful evolutionary phase of Some Blind Alleys: Arts Features. And a brief introduction to that is the primordial objective of this note.
I want to get writers and journalists pounding the pavement, interviewing interesting people whose work is related to the creation or support of the arts in Ireland.
I have no intention of making SBA an arts features publication. It remains a place dedicated to the personal essay, translation, and visual art, with the odd story popping up now and again. But one arts feature a fortnight would be a great thing, I think, or – if I can attract more essays about ice cream truck men – maybe one arts feature per month would do.
The features would run about 1,500 words.
I don’t want to compete with the Arts page of the Irish Times. I want to explore gestational stuff, obscurity, new things that excite and oppose. I want to interview very young organizations determined to blow up the status quo as well as old, battle-hardened arts administrators who have devoted their lives to hard work so that somebody else can paint, or sculpt, or make movies, or write poetry. I’m interested in innovators in music and film and theatre. This includes not just the artists doing the work but the administrators who have come up with ideas to seed production.
These features are not literary journalism. This is straight-up journalism without hooks or poetic prose (God help us) and without press releases.
This will take a little while to get going, since I’ll need a handful in the pipeline before I commit to a new category. But I think it’s time to start getting a list of potential people and organizations to investigate, and I’m hoping SBA readers will help.
If you know of something or somebody that fits the above description, send an email (or leave a comment). I’m not asking if you have the time to write it up. I can find somebody to write it up. But I’d appreciate the ideas. The only thing I’d ask is that, if you are a wonderful and exciting arts organization or some subterranean subversive music habitat or literary journal, or some battle-hardened and underappreciated administrator, you don’t nominate yourself. Nominate somebody else.
Thanks for the help. See you all at the Christmas party.
It will be easily believed of the Idler, that if his title had required any search, he never would have found it. Every mode of life has its conveniencies. The Idler, who habituates himself to be satisfied with what he can most easily obtain, not only escapes labours which are often fruitless, but sometimes succeeds better than those who despise all that is within their reach, and think every thing more valuable as it is harder to be acquired. – 
