Jaki McCarrick discusses her Pushcart Prize-nominated short story, ‘Fogarty’, published in Issue Eight. A few years ago, on a flight to Paris, I read an in-flight magazine feature about an ex-Naval Seal who gave survival courses to business people. As I read, it dawned on me that a survival course would make a great basis…
After the first draft, I was glad to see I was writing a haphazardly global story, where the narrator shambles from here to there in pursuit of something that surely can’t be love. He tries really hard to make it love, but it’s more likely the desperation of needing something to feel desperate about.
The landscape of Southern Italy coexists with myth. Antiquity is commonplace, and life there centres around history in a way I envy. It’s easy to romanticise the food, the weather and the sweltering, lazy summers, but my fascination with the region goes deeper. I was born in Hertfordshire, the birthplace of the new town project,…
I drafted ‘Above Tree Line’ in the first class I took when I decided to start writing more seriously. At the beginning of the course the instructor asked us, ‘What do you need to write about?’ I need to write about that night on Santa Fe Baldy with Bob. This story signalled a change away from…
It’s a very great pleasure to be asked to introduce Christopher Cornwell’s first collection, Ergasy. I’m an admirer of his work, and it’s a privilege to be able to recommend it to a wider readership than his circle of friends and admirers.
Cath Barton discusses her new short story in Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. I often take an image as a starting point for a story. The title of this one is that of a drawing by the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch, dating from about 1500. It shows an owl in the hollow of…
Louise Kennedy discusses her short story ‘Wolf Point’, taken from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. I always feel like a chancer when I talk about stuff like ‘my writing process’; it makes me sound like I know what I’m doing. Especially these days, when my process is to agonise over each sentence until I…
I hate flying. I’m not alone in that of course. But the fear of flying is new to me. It happened a few years ago in my late twenties. Very nothingy flight to a nothingy European airport, but I was flying on my own, and somehow, the routine soft vibrations of take off unsettled something inside of me. The woman next to me, also flying alone, asked if she could read my palm, and keen to distract myself from the stubbornly vague and new sense of terror I obliged. I thought she was mad, or perhaps some sort of answer to teenage me’s prayers, but when the jaundice of the seatbelt light overhead signalled, accompanied by the polite ding to bring our attention to it, I noticed her shoulders contract and when she squeezed my hand it became clear that all she had been seeking was distraction.
I had to look back at my first draft to remember which came first: the dream sequences about sharks or the woman narrator’s story. It was the sharks. Like so many of my stories, I often write something and then suddenly it will connect with something else which provides the spark to create a story.…
