Leila Segal I awoke one morning after a most disturbing dream in which I had met my own death. The dream had a clear narrative in which I had gone looking for a lost friend and found that she had burned herself to death. When, at the end of my search, I was told what…
Poetry Siblings or Smile please, but don’t say ‘cheese’! If you’d stopped me on the street a few hours before I started writing this and asked how my three The Lonely Crowd poems were connected, I’d probably have replied that they weren’t particularly linked at all. As a writer, I tend to put submissions together…
Ruby Cowling I’m afraid I have to start by stripping ‘Superfar’ of its title. I only titled it out of administrative necessity; it started life as a single letter, which I wrote for The Letters Page, and only grew into the three-letter piece later – and letters don’t have titles. So this series of three…
The story is unashamedly a response to the 2014 events in Gaza, and whereas I hate to sense a writer embedded somewhere in their story, this is inevitable at times, as we mine the rich seam of all we know, all we feel. Certainly I’m wary of politicizing work, not for fear of setting an unpopular aesthetic course, but because it tends to groan with its own didactic lumbering. Such stories can feel contrived, gimmicky, inauthentic and worse: sticks to beat the reader with. But of course characters are unfailingly political creatures, inhabiting some political system or other, prey to decisions made by the powerful. And of course the short story, perhaps more than any other literary form, is adept (perhaps best placed) at shining a light on the dispossessed, the marginalised.
Carly Holmes After my novel was published and my PhD finished I found myself suddenly anchorless, panicked, and quite depressed. I missed the process of writing The Scrapbook desperately, that total immersion, but the more time that separated me from it the harder it became to write anything at all. Of course, the thing I…
Shauna Gilligan Collaboration is neither predictable nor guaranteed between artists. It is, perhaps, something as intangible as taste, or instinct. How does one artist know that the process of collaboration with another will work, or produce something concrete at the end of this collaboration? Indeed, how is the duration of collaboration defined and adhered to? Are…
Rebecca F. John I stumbled across the image on the internet. Really, I did. Just as the unnamed character in my story does, I was scrolling mindlessly through an article one evening when I was captivated by the most unusual of photographs – that of a bat foetus, ‘the head twice the size of the…
or My Quest for World Peace Camillus John World Peace Hilary Mantel blew Margaret Thatcher’s brains out in fiction last year and exploded them joyfully over the faces of her encircling Tory retinue. They’re still wiping bits of her cerebrospinal fluid off their faces to this very day, I’ve heard (tastes like chicken soup, apparently).…
In the new, Winter Issue of The Lonely Crowd, we published an extraordinary, multi-layered photo essay by Susan MaierMoul entitled Fountain. Here the writer Eamonn Sheehy discusses Fountain with MaierMoul, as well as his own forthcoming work, Summer in the City State. Eamonn Sheehy: I first came across the work of Susan MaierMoul when her short…
Educated later in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at St. Malachy’s College – a fine old school, alma mater to, among others, the novelist Brian Moore, who also took to Canada – my first introduction to good writing was through H. Rider Haggard and Graham Greene. Still in my teens, I discovered Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck and James Baldwin for myself. Typically, Baldwin’s great novel, ‘Another Country,’ was banned in the Irish Republic. My lust to write – it was nothing less – began almost at once.
Jane Roberts A country road is a macabre place indeed. The road is a constant stage for that peculiarly fragile balance, the theatre of life and death – of birds, of all creatures, and humans. I had a car accident on black ice last winter. It was slow-paced, but the car was out of control and ended up ricocheting off objects like the ball on a pinball machine. No one else was involved in the incident: my car had substantial damage; I had whiplash, a blow to the head, and a previously fractured rib that began to groan again. In…
Many of the pieces presented here are bathed in a winter light, whether it be short stories that take place directly in the season, such as 2015 Jerwood Prize-winner Jo Mazelis’s 16th Century-set, ‘The Twice-Pricked Heart’, Fred Johnstone’s Joycean ‘The Beautiful Daylight Has Gone’, or Jamie Guiney’s delightfully gentle-hearted, festive tale ‘Christmas Eve’.
Zoe Ranson ‘Clue’ began life as most (if not all) of my stories do, from something I saw. Wherever I go, whoever I’m with, I’m only partially present. Another part of me is feeding on the surroundings: recording sighs, defining smells, absorbing the way people speak, what they talk about. Questions emerge quite organically from these harvested fragments of reality, which subvert and tear off in a new direction. So ‘what if?’ and ‘how?’ in turn scatter sparks which illuminate a path I can follow and my stories surface from the imagined answers. I’m a culture junkie. I get inspiration…
I’d walk past homeless men in the underpass a stone’s throw from the expensive café with its nine pound breakfasts and connoisseur coffee. Shiny sleeping bags and a whole lot of guilt. When the rains came, the underpass would flood, impassable black water. Sometimes a wobbly wooden beam would be slung across, a slippery makeshift bridge.