Your Essay About Sinéad
Read Erika Meitner's amazing poem, "Sinéad O'Connor Was Right All Along" and send us your writing!
The legacy and impact of Sinéad O'Connor's music, protest, and example is global and ongoing, and I need her fierce truth telling at exactly this moment. Martha Bayne and I wished over and over as we compiled the essays in Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O'Connor Means to Us that we could have included twice as many authors. Writers keep asking us about other Sinéad opportunities, so we thought, why not?
Here’s your chance to share yours. Do you have an essay, flash piece, or a few paragraphs about Sinéad you'd like to share? Please send pieces of 2,000 words or fewer to sineadanthology@gmail.com. We’d like to run these through the summer so you can consider the deadline to be August 31, 2025.
Pieces selected will appear in Summer 2025 as they are received on Sonya Huber's Substack “Nuts and Bolts.” All rights revert to the author after publication, and if at any point you need us to take down your essay for the purposes of future publications, we will be happy to do so. Compensation for those chosen for publication will be one copy of the hardcover anthology.
Our first piece is Erika Meitner’s “The Shape of Progress,” which appeared as “Sinéad O’Connor Was Right All Along” in Electric Literature on Aug. 9, 2023.
O Sinéad—you are dead &
the headlines beside you are all
interest rate increases & thermal
hellscapes. I am new to the prairie
but even the New York Times thinks Duluth
is the place to be in the Anthropocene;
climate-proof, they dubbed it:
ample freshwater & buffered
from sea-level rise. Sinéad—
I am listening to “Just Like U Said
It Would B” on repeat & it was exactly
that when you called out misogyny,
excessive commercialism, sex abuse
in the Catholic church, a climate scientist
who says now all the projected changes
are happening, & this morning to beat
the record temps, I woke before dawn
to walk backroad shoulders littered
with crushed Bud Light cans & sandwich
clamshells & skittering chip bags tossed
from car windows into Queen Anne’s lace,
purple chicory still folded in
on itself—it’s so early the sun is just
rising wildfire orange over the tracks
draped in kudzu, & Sinéad, the invasive
species are everywhere—the spotted
lanternflies too that I’m supposed to kill
on sight, but who has the heart
for that kind of violence. I wish
I had your conviction & righteousness.
Instead of thwacking them, I’ve been
trapping them under drinking glasses
until they suffocate & the radio
is playing “Nothing Compares 2 U”
all day as tribute while their delicate
pinkish polka-dotted wings are still
beating, & Sinéad—I think you might
like the farm across the road with
a Manure Happens sign out front,
& even the green barn with punched
out windows next to it the neighbors
call the meth lab, maybe as a joke
or maybe not. Sinéad, you were
always right—nothing compares
to you—not even the climate
apocalypse. But I’m still here
with my similes. This July is the
hottest month on Earth since scientists
have kept records. This week
the ocean off the coast of Florida
reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit—
a toddler running a low fever,
the temperature of an average hot tub.
Sinéad, you sing I will learn how to
sink & to swim, & your voice is
an emergency, triple digits, summer
asphalt, breath blowing charcoal
briquettes to life.
We had a fantastic first launch event at NonfictioNow, a conference that happens every few years and this time was in South Bend, Indiana, at University of Notre Dame. It was a delightful event and so good to see these authors! Also at the conference but not pictured were Heidi Czierwiec and Megan Stielstra, both of whom I also got to hug, so that was amazing!
We’ve got more events and we hope you will join us for some!
July 15, 2025: Dublin.
July 17, 2025: West Cork, Ireland
West Cork Literary Festival: Discussion and readings by Martha Bayne, Mieke Eerkens, and Allyson McCabe.
July 22, 2025: New York, New York
Books Are Magic, 122 Montague St., Brooklyn, NY 11201. Launch event with Sharbari Ahmed, Martha Bayne, Sonya Huber, Porochista Khakpour, and Zoe Zolbrod.
July 24, 2025: Hastings on Hudson, New York
Vanishing Ink Books, 2 Spring Street, enter on Southside Ave.
Hastings On Hudson, NY 10706July 28, 2025: Chicago, Illinois
GMan Tavern: (Bar attached to Cabaret Metro) Book talk and party with Martha Bayne, Sonya Huber, Zoe Zolbrod, Megan Stielstra, and Gina Frangello -- plus musical performances of Sinead O'Connor songs by Amalea Tshilds, Marydee Reynolds, Jane Roberts, Nora O’Connor, Jeanine O’Toole, Eiren Caffall, Julie Pomerleau, and L. Wyatt. 3740 N Clark St. | Chicago, IL 60613
August 7, 2025: Westport, Connecticut
7 pm: Launch Party with readings by Sharbari Ahmed, Sonya Huber, and Nalini Jones. Westport Public Library, 20 Jesup Road Westport, CT 06880 203.291.4800
Other events TBA!
Let me know if you have any questions, if you want a review copy, if you want to host an event, or anything else!
xoxoxox
Sonya
Sonya, RiffRaff bookstore in Providence would be an amazing place for a reading! They have a fabulous community of book lovers and their readings are packed. I had Lucas Mann, co-owner, on Finding the Throughline. Let me know if you'd like an intro.