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.…
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…
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…
Two of my poems published in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd (May 2018) came from my collection The Way Out launched in October 2018. ‘Paris, December 25th’ and ‘Mount Ainos’ are both poems about journeys. The entire collection is structured as a journey in three separate parts; In, Through and Out. The journey leads to an ending that is also a point of departure, encouraging the reader to determine their own direction on from the text.
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of the year. Cynan Jones It’s been a strange twelve months. I had a baby right at the start of it. That pretty much blew reading out of the water for most of the year. I was sent a lot of unbound proofs ahead of publication,…
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of the year. Valerie Sirr One of the rewarding outcomes of subscribing to small publishers of books and magazines is the surprise packages that drop through your letterbox from time to time like unexpected gifts. Another source of books this year is an old bookshop with several…
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of the year. Gerald Dawe With the volume of book publication hitting dizzying heights, matched by the promotional buzz of the market-place and sales via self-promotion, it sometimes feels that ‘literature’ has become just another product in the digital world of global media. Whatever is good for…
Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick their favourite books of the year. Jo Mazelis The intriguing title of Martina Evans’ Now We Can Talk Openly About Men is taken from a phrase that the author remembers was once spoken when a group of her female relatives were gathered together. All of the women that day…
Sophie Van Llewyn discusses her short story, ‘Dinner for Two’, taken from Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. At the time when I began writing ‘Dinner for Two,’ in the winter of 2017, I was, primarily, a flash fiction writer. I had a six-month-old baby, and I only had time to write when she was napping.…
Ellie Rees discusses her two poems in Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. What happens to a poem when you take it out of its context, when it loses the support of the poems that lead up to it, and the reflective glow of those that come after? In The Natural History of Selborne, first…
Paul Whyte discusses his short story, ‘Bottle Gardens’, featured in Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. I’ve lived with a relatively severe anxiety disorder for most of my life. It’s a part of who I am, and that’s ok, over the years I’ve come to accept it. Thankfully, I seem to be managing it pretty well…