Arrival and Departure:"Fishing the Sloe-Black River" (1994)

Abstract

‘Fishing the Sloe-Black River’, the title story of McCann’s first published collection, appeared in print a year before the complete volume of stories was published by Phoenix House. The quasi-magic realist narrative was included in an edition in 1993 entitled, Ireland in Exile: Irish Writers Abroad, edited by Dermot Bolger. This volume gathered Irish writers, some well known and others relatively obscure at the time, who lived outside of Ireland in London, Tokyo, Cambridge, New York, and elsewhere, and included Emma Donoghue, Harry Clifton, Rosita Boland, Joseph O’Connor, Sara Berkeley, and Greg Delanty, among others. At the time, McCann was teaching English in Japan and, as we shall discuss, ‘Fishing the Sloe-Black River’ is a story that confronts the experience of Irish emigration from the perspective of those that remain resident in Ireland. The story deals, specifically, with the generation of parents whose children have departed the country. The collection, Ireland in Exile, strove to capture, in Bolger’s editorial words, ‘the experience of a new breed of Irish writer abroad – writers who have frequently turned their back on a country which has long since turned its back on them, but whose work is increasingly a central part of Irish literature’.