Jonathan Edwards discusses his four new poems in Issue Eleven. John Lennon once said that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. For a poet, it’s often the case that a poem is what happens when you’re doing something else. Poems have a terrible habit of leaping out at you when you’re…
Catherine Wilkinson discusses the creative process behind her short story ‘Grey Wizard’, featured in Issue Eleven. The forensic analysis of a story is an exercise I relish, including the detection of which nuggets have snuck in from what aspects of a writer’s life or research: the ornamental eggs from Monique Roffey’s memoir (With the Kisses of His…
Polly Atkin discusses her two poems in Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. ‘Distraced’ I have an ever-growing pile of poems that have been generated by mishearings, misreadings or mis-spellings of words. I find I often have a different interpretation of the fractions that make up words, in sound or on the page, to those…
Natalie Crick discusses the writing process behind her poems in Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. In my poetry I tend to write about lonely places with stark, bleak qualities and most importantly a sense of abandonment. Such places are usually houses or rural farming land, with hints of desertion and decay pervading each stanza.…
I don’t like reading about other people’s holidays, especially in fictional pieces acting as a thinly disguised love-letter to a location recently visited. I can’t help but get the sense of a writer showing off, perhaps wishing themselves to appear worldly or worldlier than they really are. How do we pick apart posturing from a…
Old Parmenides, the pre-Socratic philosopher, held that all change was an illusion. Nobody quite knows what he was on about, though his follower Zeno tried to ‘prove’ that nothing moves with his paradoxes about arrows never logically being able to arrive at their target etc. I like to imagine Parmenides being bitten by a mosquito…
Tim Evans I first got the news by text, at 8.40 in the morning. I double-checked it on Facebook and phone and eventually realised it was true. But I still couldn’t really believe Mark was dead, because he was the last person I could ever imagine dying…. Not just in his performances, but in his conversation,in his writing, in everything, his life energy was there, keen-edged, mercurial. I had seen him, just weeks ago, at Spoken Word Saturday. To never see him again seemed, well, impossible. I first bumped into him in Swansea years back at a Howl poetry night in Mozarts, in the dark, fin-de-siecle, sticky–floor decadence that was Mozarts’ trademark. In the gloomy back room, Mark’s lanky, loose-jointed frame seemed too tall for the place. And then once he started speaking, started using his voice, you realised you were in the presence of a rare talent. Yes, he was…
(Live at Providero Tea & Coffee House) Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as…
Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as a fired shell and rise at the tense…
Glyn Edwards is a teacher in North Wales, an MA student at Manchester Metropolitan University and a graduate of The University of South Wales. He has guest-edited the poetry in the forthcoming 11th issue of The Lonely Crowd and co-edits ‘Cheval’, the anthology comprising entrees to the Terry Hetherington Prize for Young Writers. He is…
It was during my final year in Berlin that Johannes began drinking in the pub. He came on Fridays, to end the working week sitting at the corner of the bar. Johannes went to the pub, he said, to be somewhere different than the places he spent the rest of the week, to be among…
Susmita Bhattacharya C. G. Menon is the author of Subjunctive Moods, published by Dahlia Publishing. She’s won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, Bare Fiction and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and she’s been a judge for several international short fiction competitions. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University. She is currently working on her first novel.Susmita Bhattacharya: What inspires you to write? C. G. Menon: I sometimes read a story or novel that I wish I’d written,…
Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd features two new poems by Kevin Cahill. I was dying. The four walls were closing in. At thirteen it was already easier to see the end of the world, than the end of school; the end of my life than the end of the grammar books. The kinks in…
We’re delighted to announce our second London event at The Music Room, 49 Great Ormond Street. Featuring readings from Toby Litt, John Freeman, Angela T. Carr, Fiona O’Connor, Gary Budden, Lucie McKnight Hardy & Grahame Williams. Hosted by John Lavin. There are a limited number of tickets for this event, which may be purchased below via…