On writing ‘Lovebirds’ I think some of the greatest rewards of writing often have nothing to do with what the reader gets. By which I mean that it’s not about how good a story you manage to write, what emotional depth you manage to mine. There is only so much one can get out of…
Bethany W. Pope discusses her three poems in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd. Poetry is an amphibious art. Amphí (both; two) βῐ́ος (life). It is an art with two lives — one of the conscious (the surfaceplace where everything is cold, rational, and bright) and the unconscious (where there be monsters). If a writer…
Journalists never estimate the number of words they’ve written during their careers. As a journalist who writes music criticism by dint of an avocation, a subsidiary activity, I’ve written infinitesimally more words on music than I have in the books I’ve had published to date: a novel, a collection of poetry, and two collections of…
My poems often arrive at inconvenient moments; like the client who begins to tell their therapist about the abuse thirty seconds before the end of the session. They spill just before I have to leave for work, or while I’m driving, when a comment on the radio, an ambiguous billboard, causes me to pull over,…
Issue 9 of The Lonely Crowd features three new poems from Louise Warren, including ‘Walt’, which she discusses here. Don’t miss Louise reading these poems at our London event this Thursday. I have always loved the films of Walt Disney, especially the earlier ones. Fantasia, Pinocchio, the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians with its hand…
‘Write what you know.’ For many years it was advice that I tried to follow, a mantra so prevalent in creative writing teaching that it surely couldn’t be wrong. Except, of course, that it is. Or not wrong exactly, but misguided, and limited, and – more importantly – limiting. Taken to its logical conclusion, ‘Write…
On writing ‘Ammonite’, ‘Elegy for Victorian Gasworks’, ‘Near Misses’, and ‘Stitches’ (from Issue 9 of The Lonely Crowd). I would say that these four poems fall neatly into two groups of two: the universal (external), and the personal (internal). Poems in the former category come easier to me than those in the latter. I’ve been…
My plan is to think aloud about my experiences, stretching over roughly forty years, of editing sixteen or so titles. These books, edited by myself or with co-editors, include collections of essays, poetry anthologies, editions of individual writers’ work and proceedings from conferences and lecture series. But I’d like to begin with some (brief) personal…
When I first started writing short stories a few years ago, it didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge: I kept setting them in the dead of night. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, I’m no stranger to the small hours. I’ve spent most of my professional life working the evening shift in newsrooms,…
