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,…
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From Issue Eleven
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 Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal
Our Winter Readings series continues with Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal reading her three poems from Issue 11 of The Lonely Crowd. See the website tomorrow for an essay by Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal. Image by Jo Mazelis.
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…
Winter Readings: ‘Making Thrums’ by Susanna Crossman
Our Winter Readings podcast series returns with regular Lonely Crowd contributor, Susanna Crossman, reading her short story ‘Making Thrums’, taken from Issue 11. Photography: copyright Jo Mazelis, 2019.
Winter Readings: ‘Greyhound Nights’ by Jo Mazelis
Our Winter Readings podcast series returns with regular Lonely Crowd contributor, Jo Mazelis, reading her short story ‘Greyhound Nights’, taken from Issue 12. Painting by Jo Mazelis.
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.…
Writing ‘We Rip Holes in Their Paper Faces to Give Them Sight’ / Gary Budden
I don’t like reading about other people’s holidays, especially in fictional pieces acting as a thinly disguised love-letter to a location recently visited. I can’t help but get the sense of a writer showing off, perhaps wishing themselves to appear worldly or worldlier than they really are. How do we pick apart posturing from a…
A Note on ‘Still’ and ‘Even in dreamscapes’ / Christopher Meredith
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…
‘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…