Contributors to The Lonely Crowd pick the best books that they have read this year. Mary Morrissy Maybe because I’m far advanced into the writing of a novel, I’ve found myself reading a lot of non-fiction this year, and reluctant memoirists, in particular, it would seem. As a result, all of these writers seem to write slant about personal…
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…
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.…
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…
Tim Evans I first got the news by text, at 8.40 in the morning. I double-checked it on Facebook and phone and eventually realised it was true. But I still couldn’t really believe Mark was dead, because he was the last person I could ever imagine dying…. Not just in his performances, but in his conversation,in his writing, in everything, his life energy was there, keen-edged, mercurial. I had seen him, just weeks ago, at Spoken Word Saturday. To never see him again seemed, well, impossible. I first bumped into him in Swansea years back at a Howl poetry night in Mozarts, in the dark, fin-de-siecle, sticky–floor decadence that was Mozarts’ trademark. In the gloomy back room, Mark’s lanky, loose-jointed frame seemed too tall for the place. And then once he started speaking, started using his voice, you realised you were in the presence of a rare talent. Yes, he was…
(Live at Providero Tea & Coffee House) Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as…
Glyn Edwards For decades my dreams were pike, winched up from the barnacle dark, febrile in the ugly dawn and shameful of scrutiny. At the spinning glint of a pen or the lure of a bedside light a pike would flex in my neck as ruthless as a fired shell and rise at the tense…
Glyn Edwards is a teacher in North Wales, an MA student at Manchester Metropolitan University and a graduate of The University of South Wales. He has guest-edited the poetry in the forthcoming 11th issue of The Lonely Crowd and co-edits ‘Cheval’, the anthology comprising entrees to the Terry Hetherington Prize for Young Writers. He is…
Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd features two new poems by Kevin Cahill. I was dying. The four walls were closing in. At thirteen it was already easier to see the end of the world, than the end of school; the end of my life than the end of the grammar books. The kinks in…
We’re delighted to announce our second London event at The Music Room, 49 Great Ormond Street. Featuring readings from Toby Litt, John Freeman, Angela T. Carr, Fiona O’Connor, Gary Budden, Lucie McKnight Hardy & Grahame Williams. Hosted by John Lavin. There are a limited number of tickets for this event, which may be purchased below via…
Photos from the Cardiff launch of Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. All photos by Michou Burckett St. Laurent The Lonely Crowd in Cardiff were… Jane Fraser lives and works in Llangennith, Gower. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Swansea University. In 2017 she was a finalist in the Manchester Fiction…
Jonathan Edwards was born and brought up in Crosskeys, south Wales. He has an MA in Writing from the University of Warwick, has written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government and journalism for The Big Issue Cymru, and currently works as an English teacher. He won the Terry Hetherington Award in 2010, was awarded a…
Two of my poems published in Issue Nine of The Lonely Crowd (May 2018) came from my collection The Way Out launched in October 2018. ‘Paris, December 25th’ and ‘Mount Ainos’ are both poems about journeys. The entire collection is structured as a journey in three separate parts; In, Through and Out. The journey leads to an ending that is also a point of departure, encouraging the reader to determine their own direction on from the text.