One short story a month. One hour. Good conversation.
NEXT SESSION
Sunday, November 22 · 11:00 AM ET · Online
James Joyce — “Eveline” (Dubliners)
Did Eveline choose to stay — or was she never able to leave?
ABOUT THE PIECE
Eveline Hill, nineteen, sits at her window on the one evening that decides her life — a promise to her dead mother pulling her to stay, a ship for Buenos Aires pulling her to go. Four pages long, and its final paragraph is still argued about a century later.
The Irish Literature Collective is a small, independent reading group for Irish literature, founded in October 2026 and hosted from Arlington, Virginia. We meet online once a month: one short text, one hour, and one question worth arguing about.
We are not a book club, and not a class. Each session reads a single story, poem, or play closely, works from a core question, and leaves with something made — a lesson plan, a handout, a page of notes worth keeping. Our first season runs from Joyce and Yeats through Swift, Wilde, and Synge to Lady Gregory and Bram Stoker.
Our readers sit in more than one country — our student liaison reads with us from Türkiye — and new readers are welcome from anywhere. Everything is free, every text is provided on the Schedule page, and no background in Irish literature is assumed. If you can read one short story a month, you are qualified.
The Collective is hosted by an ESL and history teacher. Write to us at [email protected] — or leave your email under Register and we will write to you.
An ESL and history teacher in Arlington, Virginia. He founded the Collective in October 2026 and chairs its sessions — choosing the texts, setting each session’s core question, and making sure every meeting leaves with something made.
EDUCATOR
Seat open
The Collective’s second officer seat, reserved for a fellow educator, is currently open.
Further officers will be listed here as their seats are confirmed.
Reading a great short story is one of the cheapest pleasures there is — four pages of Joyce can hold more life than a shelf of longer books. The Collective starts there: one story a month, read slowly, for the pleasure of it. No tests, no grades, no homework voice. Just a good text, and an hour of good conversation about it.
CRITICAL THINKING
On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy… the rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality.
— J.M. Synge, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World (1907)
Synge was writing about the stage, but the rule holds for the reading chair. Read closely, and a story begins asking the questions good research asks. What does the text actually say? What is the strongest claim you can build — and can you quote for it? What is the best case against your reading? What is being withheld from you? And what would change your mind?
Those are a researcher’s moves, practiced on fiction: claim, evidence, connection, falsifiability. Every Collective session runs on five questions, developed with the Research Club:
What does the text actually say? (evidence vs. assumption)
What is the strongest claim you can build — and quote for it?
How does this relate to my own life?
What does the narrator withhold, and how does that change the conclusion?
What would change your mind?
You leave with sharper reading — and a way of thinking that transfers to everything else you read, write, and argue.
Nine monthly sessions, one text each — every reading free to download below. Sundays at 11:00 AM ET, online.
SESSION ONEHELD
Friday, October 30, 2026 · Online
James Joyce — “Araby” · W.B. Yeats — “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” & “Easter, 1916”
James Joyce (1882–1941). Dublin-born, he left Ireland at twenty-two and wrote about almost nothing else for the rest of his life. Dubliners follows ordinary Dublin lives at the moment each one sees itself clearly — usually a moment too late.
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). Ireland’s national poet — co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, senator of the new Irish state, Nobel laureate. His early poems dream of escape; his later ones reckon with war, ageing, and a country being born.
James Joyce (1882–1941). Dublin-born, he left Ireland at twenty-two and wrote about almost nothing else for the rest of his life. Dubliners follows ordinary Dublin lives at the moment each one sees itself clearly — usually a moment too late.
Did Eveline choose to stay — or was she never able to leave?
James Joyce (1882–1941). Dublin-born, he left Ireland at twenty-two and wrote about almost nothing else for the rest of his life. Dubliners follows ordinary Dublin lives at the moment each one sees itself clearly — usually a moment too late.
What does Gabriel learn about himself in the last hour of the party — and could he have learned it any other way?
Our longest read of the season — start early; the PDF is the complete story.
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745). Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, and the fiercest satirist in the English language. Gulliver’s Travels made him famous; “A Modest Proposal” made him immortal — a plan for solving famine that still shocks readers three centuries on.
At what exact sentence does the proposal stop sounding like economics — and why not sooner?
Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). Dublin-born wit and playwright, the most quotable man of his century. Before The Importance of Being Earnest made him London’s darling, he wrote fairy tales — beautiful, sad stories where the kind see clearly and the powerful never do.
Who in the story can actually see — and what does seeing cost them?
J.M. Synge — The Playboy of the Western World, Act I
J.M. Synge (1871–1909). Playwright of Ireland’s west coast, whose ear for the speech of the Aran Islands and Mayo changed Irish theatre. The Playboy rioted at its 1907 premiere; Synge died two years later, at thirty-seven, with six plays behind him.
Why did this play make its first audience riot — what exactly did they hear?
We read scenes aloud together in the session — volunteers take parts.
W.B. Yeats — Three Later Poems: “The Wild Swans at Coole” · “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” · “The Second Coming”
W.B. Yeats (1865–1939). Ireland’s national poet — co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, senator of the new Irish state, Nobel laureate. His early poems dream of escape; his later ones reckon with war, ageing, and a country being born.
What changed in Yeats between “Innisfree” and “The Second Coming” — the man, or the country?
Lady Gregory (1852–1932). Folklorist and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, she collected the myths of the Irish west and wrote many of the plays that filled the Abbey’s early stage. History remembers her as Yeats’s collaborator; The Gaol Gate shows the playwright she was in her own right.
The two women are told almost nothing, almost the whole play. What do they build out of what they’re told?
Bram Stoker (1847–1912). A Dublin-born theatre manager who wrote in his spare hours. In 1897 he published Dracula — and became, without ever knowing it, the most-read Irish novelist of the century that followed.
Where does the story frighten most — in what it shows, or in what it refuses to?
