Mark Murphy talks to the Craicly founder about turning three years of storytelling nights into A Seat by the Fire – and why she asked her publisher not to tidy the voices up.

Fresh from her Business Post profile, Jane Gormley features again this week, this time in the Irish Post, the newspaper of the Irish in Britain. In ‘Jane Gormley brings Irish voices to the page’ (15 September 2026), Mark Murphy turns to the book itself: how it came together, whose stories are in it, and the one thing Jane asked of us along the way.

Twenty-two voices

A Seat by the Fire: Craicly Stories for Ireland, out from Mercier Press on 26 October, gathers twenty-two stories from people who have stood up at Craicly gatherings over the past three years, alongside Jane’s own writing – part manifesto, part memoir. As Murphy reports, the great surprise of building Craicly was the talent in the room: people who had never thought of themselves as storytellers turning out to be very good ones. Jane puts it down to something particularly Irish – an instinct for how a good story should be told.

The early participants, she says, were essential to everything that followed, and looking back a book was probably inevitable. She had always loved writing, though she had never been published; through Craicly she heard the stories first-hand, heard how the room responded to them, and heard the voices of the people telling them. Choosing which to include was the hard part. Every story shared had its own qualities and its own subject, and she thought all of them brilliant.

From voice note to page

Craicly nights are never recorded – it is part of what lets people trust the room and speak freely. So the contributors who agreed to appear in the book mostly sent Jane voice notes, telling their story again, and she transcribed them herself.

Spoken and written storytelling, she told Murphy, are very different forms, and her solution was to change as little as possible. She pressed her publisher hard not to polish the pieces into something that sounded too perfect. ‘I wanted them to read like oral stories,’ she said – keeping the turns of phrase and quirks that make one person’s voice unmistakably their own.

Dairy farmers and mischievous octogenarians

The range is wide. One story follows a young Cork dairy farmer, a family man with small children, forced to sell his entire herd during a difficult period in his life. Another, from Dubliner Maeve White, is a good deal funnier: the shenanigans of her father and her Uncle Tony, both in their late eighties, after being packed off on a cruise. That variety, Murphy writes, is what gives the book its character.

Jane’s advice for anyone tempted to try storytelling themselves is short: just write. It is easier, and more achievable, than people think.

Launch

A Seat by the Fire: Craicly Stories for Ireland by Jane Gormley is published by Mercier Press on 26 October 2026. Jane and Craicly will mark publication with a launch evening at Bewley’s on Grafton Street, Dublin – details here. Pre-order now or ask your local bookshop.

Read Mark Murphy’s full piece in the Irish Post: ‘Jane Gormley brings Irish voices to the page’, 15 September 2026.

A Seat by the Fire: Craicly Stories for Ireland

A Seat by the Fire is a collection of true stories along the way from farmers, bakers, butter champions, psychic mediums and one very reluctant Belfast best-man. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is a book about the oldest remedy for loneliness this country possesses: each other.

ISBN: 9781917453905

Pre-Order

A Seat by the Fire: Craicly Stories for Ireland by Jane Gormley is published by Mercier Press on 26 October 2026

Read more: Jane Gormley and Craicly in the Business Post.