Alice Kinsella discusses ‘Chase’ and ‘What has night to do with sleep?’, two poems featured in Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. There are some poems you want to write. Poems you sit down determined to write. You fiddle around with them until they finally settle, in all their gorgeous perfection, on your page. But there…
‘Wasps’ is one story of twenty-three that form a collection of short fiction entitled The South Westerlies recently submitted for my PhD. The collection is experimental writing functioning as research in an attempt to know place. The place is my home patch of Gower: latitude 51 degrees north, 4 degrees west, an administrative part of…
There are lots of quotes that come to mind about story writing that feel right to me, about not knowing really what something is until you write to find out. I’m with Flannery O’Connor on this, like most writers I know. I never know the ending of a story when I sit down, I know…
Jackie Gorman reads her poem ‘The Blue Hare’ from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. © Jackie Gorman, 2017. Image © Jo Mazelis, 2017.
Jackie Gorman discusses her poem ‘The Blue Hare’ taken from Issue Eight. You can listen to Jackie read the poem here. For as long as I can remember I have loved hares and probably one of my earliest memories as a child is that of seeing a hare in the fields of Ballyglass, near where…
Photos from the launch of Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd at Little Man Coffee, Cardiff. Photos by Michou Burckett St. Laurent. The Lonely Crowd in Cardiff were Jenn Ashworth‘s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy won a 2010 Betty Trask Award. On the publication of her second novel, Cold Light, in 2011, she was…
Tony Curtis reads from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. Tony Curtis will be reading at our event at Little Man Coffee, Cardiff tonight. Do join us from 730pm onwards. Tony Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales where he developed Creative Writing. His New & Selected Poems: From the Fortunate…
As I sit here writing at my kitchen table, a ladybird is crawling on my leg. I accidentally bring a lot of wildlife home from my work, beetles and spiders, the occasional grasshopper under my collar, ants in the creases of my work trousers or fallen into my boots. The ladybird on my knee is…
The story of this short story? Much like the story of every short story I write – random memories coagulating, some weird shit glimpsed in my peripheral vision, a character or two burping from the murk like hot gas. Stirred and heated and stirred again until, eventually, the voice comes – the thing that makes…