SEAN CARLSON

Drawing from oral histories, archival records, and family letters, notebooks, photographs, and keepsakes, I have been working to complete a creative nonfiction book 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 a few of my recent works:

NONFICTION:

• “Unfun,” The Rumpus

• “Bus to Ballybunion,” Trasna

• “False Cognates,” New England Review - listen to a 10-minute audio excerpt and/or read the accompanying text

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

• “Ghosts of Scene Sites Past,” Gulf Coast

• “Memory is a form of time travel,” Split Lip Magazine

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

• “Infinite Bison,” Full Bleed

• “Adventure in Solitude,” the Oxford Review of Books

POETRY:

• “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)

• “The Sojourn,” Trasna

FICTION:

• Debut fiction coming soon, airing on Irish national radio RTÉ Radio 1’s The Prompt on 6 July 2025

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