Dan Coxon reads ‘Sound of the Riverbed’ from Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd. Dan Coxon edited the award-winning anthology Being Dad (Best Anthology, Saboteur Awards 2016) and is a Contributing Editor at The Lonely Crowd. His writing has appeared in Salon, Popshot, The Lonely Crowd, Open Pen, Wales Arts Review, Gutter, The Portland Review and Unthology…
Jo Mazelis Our interview with the inspirational Cardiff-based photographer continues… Jo Mazelis: Photographers like Andreas Gursky and Hannah Collins produce massive, almost life-size prints of their work to create images that are almost immersive — yet with most of humanity now seeing all images on their mobile phone screens do you think something has been lost…
Jo Mazelis Born in the Rhymney Valley in 1968, conceptual landscape photographer and photography writer Rob Hudson turns 50 this year. Now living in Cardiff he has developed a vision for landscape photography that embraces ecological concerns and seeks to develop our appreciation of our land through sharing ‘the stories we tell each other of…
On writing ‘Lovebirds’ I think some of the greatest rewards of writing often have nothing to do with what the reader gets. By which I mean that it’s not about how good a story you manage to write, what emotional depth you manage to mine. There is only so much one can get out of…
Bethany W. Pope discusses her three poems in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd. Poetry is an amphibious art. Amphí (both; two) βῐ́ος (life). It is an art with two lives — one of the conscious (the surfaceplace where everything is cold, rational, and bright) and the unconscious (where there be monsters). If a writer…
Journalists never estimate the number of words they’ve written during their careers. As a journalist who writes music criticism by dint of an avocation, a subsidiary activity, I’ve written infinitesimally more words on music than I have in the books I’ve had published to date: a novel, a collection of poetry, and two collections of…
Every piece of writing feeds into something else. The two poems here [in Issue 9] were written on the same day, which is most unusual for me. But nothing comes from nowhere. All writers are walking around with a headful of tunes. Sometimes you find the energy to write them down. I’ve been thinking about my ‘boots’ and that overgrown back lane for years. I owned a pair of Dakota boots in Saskatchewan and have written about those.
Because I think it an extraordinary place, the three miles between the mouths of the Cynffig and Ogwr are often where I locate my writing. And when you’ve been to Saddam Hussein’s Babylon or the old totalitarian squares of Tirana, you don’t need to invent new worlds because it’s already impossible to do those factual places justice…
On writing ‘Ammonite’, ‘Elegy for Victorian Gasworks’, ‘Near Misses’, and ‘Stitches’ (from Issue 9 of The Lonely Crowd). I would say that these four poems fall neatly into two groups of two: the universal (external), and the personal (internal). Poems in the former category come easier to me than those in the latter. I’ve been…
My plan is to think aloud about my experiences, stretching over roughly forty years, of editing sixteen or so titles. These books, edited by myself or with co-editors, include collections of essays, poetry anthologies, editions of individual writers’ work and proceedings from conferences and lecture series. But I’d like to begin with some (brief) personal…
When I first started writing short stories a few years ago, it didn’t take long for a pattern to emerge: I kept setting them in the dead of night. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, I’m no stranger to the small hours. I’ve spent most of my professional life working the evening shift in newsrooms,…
I wrote ‘Madness’ to express the strangeness of the mind. This madness does not depict a Miss Havisham nor a Hannibal the Cannibal form of insanity but a madness that makes a normal person a stranger to themselves. It is a strangeness that resides within our daily lives. The poem has been written in a…
The Sea Laughed and the Stomach Blushed is read by Larissa Thompson & Madness by Sammy Pop. These poems by Rhea Seren Phillips are published in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd. Rhea Seren Phillips is a Ph.D student at Swansea University. She is studying how Welsh poetic forms and metre could be used to…
Where I’m from, you don’t have to travel very far for the towns to peter out and the hills to start bulging from the ground. I have become very interested in these edgelands, zones where the urban meets the rural, in particular, areas where brown belt land has at some point transitioned back to green.…
In the late spring of 2017, a friend and I walked up a local mountain known, in English, as Pincushion. At the summit you look out over Okanagan Lake, a deep freshwater fjord, as it turns southward into the land of antelope brush. Beyond the lake, on the opposite shore, is Okanagan Mountain, and then…