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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…