From Issue Eleven

Winter Readings: ‘Blackbird’ by Jaki McCarrick

Jaki McCarrick reads ‘Blackbird’ from Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. Jaki McCarrick is an award-winning writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Her play LEOPOLDVILLE won the 2010 Papatango Prize for New Writing, and her most recent play, THE NATURALISTS, premiered in New York to rave reviews: “Best Bet” International Theatre, Theatre is Easy; “Impeccable,…

On Three Poems Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal discusses her three poems featured in Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. While living in Dublin during the year of 2017, I relocated to Antwerp, Belgium for the summer to work on the archives of Samuel Beckett at the University of Antwerp. That summer often felt like wearing the shoes that didn’t quite fit…

Winter Readings: Three Poems by John Freeman

John Freeman reads his three poems from Issue Eleven of The Lonely Crowd. John Freeman is a prize-winning poet and critic whose work has appeared in magazines and anthologies over several decades. His most recent books are What Possessed Me (Worple Press), and Strata Smith and the Anthropocene (Knives Forks and Spoons Press), both published…

Writing ‘Traces’ / Darragh McCausland

As a commuter, I became interested in repetition. For the guts of a decade, I’ve worked in a part of Dublin that is out in the suburbs, miles away from where I live. To get there by 8.15 am, I walk a bit, then get a tram, then a train. The entire process takes about…

On Writing ‘Town Talking’ / Jonathan Edwards

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…

‘Grey Wizard’: The Seeds / Catherine Wilkinson

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…

Composition Notes: boggled, distraced … / Polly Atkin

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…

Writing ‘Summer’ and ‘Victims’ / Natalie Crick

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.…

‘The Haunted Land’ Paul Scraton

It was during my final year in Berlin that Johannes began drinking in the pub. He came on Fridays, to end the working week sitting at the corner of the bar. Johannes went to the pub, he said, to be somewhere different than the places he spent the rest of the week, to be among…