SEAN CARLSON

Drawing from oral histories, archival records, and family letters, notebooks, photographs, and keepsakes, I have been working to complete a family memoir / creative nonfiction project that traverses the remarkable story of a family with sixteen children as they depart from their lane in the Irish countryside and find their ways in a changing world — across the United Kingdom and the United States — struggling through love and loss to hold onto a home that cannot keep them. The result is both a social history of Ireland across the twentieth century and a universal narrative exploring the effects of migration on those leaving and those left behind. Please sign up for my mailing list here and don't hesitate to reach out via email.

In the meantime, you may appreciate some of my recent work:

NONFICTION:

• “Cut-ups,” Catamaran Literary Reader - forthcoming (Spring 2026)

• “Henry Street at Christmas, 2012,” Bulb Culture Collective

• “Painting the Last Photograph,” New England Review (46.3-4: Autumn/Winter 2025)

• “What We’re Reading: On Oona Frawley’s This Interim Time,” The Common

• “Teenage Kicks,” The Missouri Review - read the opening excerpt here and/or the full essay via Project MUSE

• “Unfun: On Mariah Stovall’s I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both,” The Rumpus

• “Bus to Ballybunion,” Trasna

• “False Cognates,” New England Review (45.4: Winter 2024) - listen to an audio recording and/or read an excerpt

• “Soft Appeal,“ The New York Times (Metropolitan Diary column)

• “Ghosts of Scene Sites Past,” Gulf Coast

• “Memory is a form of time travel: On Colm O’Shea’s ‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull,’” Split Lip Magazine

• “What’s in a name?” The Boston Globe (Ideas section)

• “Infinite Bison: On the Tate Modern’s Magdalena Abakanowicz retrospective,” Full Bleed

• “Adventure in Solitude: On Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death,” The Oxford Review of Books - nominated: Best of the Net

• “At home in the in-between: Julia Sanches on migration and movement,” Motif Magazine

• “Life mission: Looking into a distant moon ocean,” Motif Magazine

• “The other side of lonesome: On Lucero’s tour with Jade Jackson,” Motif Magazine

• “When the storm is on top of us: On Elizabeth Rush’s Rising,” Motif Magazine

• “The reach of a single village,” The Irish Times

• “An Irish journey, shared by all,” New York Daily News

• other local reportage on arts, music, and literature for Rhode Island’s alt-monthly (2019-present)

POETRY:

• “Easter Week in Valencia,” Image Journal - forthcoming

• “Not poisonous but bitter,” Sobremesa Magazine - forthcoming

• “Not a serious weed,” The Oxford Review of Books - forthcoming

• “Elegant Spring,” the Irish Independent (New Irish Writing, November 2025)

• “Curry soup at a Polish bakery in Tralee,” Crannóg (Issue 63)

• “Stranded,” The Bangor Literary Journal (40 Words Competition Finalist)

• “A Knock in Cill Rialaig,” Ragaire Literary Magazine (Issue 2) - nominated: Pushcart Prize

• “Water wants,” Ninth Letter

• “Anger is a fishing trawler,” Elsewhere: A Journal of Place - also featured in the poem-a-day anthology Verse Daily

• “Every time a fly went by," The Honest Ulsterman - also featured in the poem-a-day anthology Verse Daily

• “California Redwood in Killarney,” the Irish Independent (New Irish Writing, May 2024)

  • anthologized in Green Verse: Poems for Our Planet (Saraband Books, Ireland/U.K.: 2024, U.S.: 2025)

  • translated into Bulgarian by Rumen Pavlov; translation published in Литературен Вестник

• “The Sojourn,” Trasna

FICTION:

• “Cricklewood,” The Prompt on RTÉ Radio 1 (Irish national radio)

INTERVIEWS:

• “Home and/or Home,” The Common - a conversation with Erin Fornoff and Gustav Parker Hibbett

• “Laying the Groundwork,” Motif Magazine - a conversation with Stephen Brodsky of Cave In

• “The Gems of August Wilson,” Motif Magazine - a conversation with Michelle Cruz of Trinity Repertory Company

• “Reminiscences on Winning a Pub in Ireland,” Motif Magazine - a conversation with Trevor O’Driscoll