Your Essay About Sinéad

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, IrelandWest Cork Literary Festival: Discussion and readings by Martha Bayne, Mieke Eerkens, and Allyson McCabe.
• July 22, 2025: New York, New YorkBooks 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 YorkVanishing Ink Books, 2 Spring Street, enter on Southside Ave.
  Hastings On Hudson, NY 10706
• July 28, 2025: Chicago, IllinoisGMan 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, Connecticut7 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