Eric was late to the airport, but Laura was not there yet with her life. The pieces of it would not come together. She was studying, she was being evicted, she worried her boyfriend was cheating on her. Someone had stolen her identity and was buying blenders from abroad in her name and she had spent a lot of time sorting it out.
The police told her the blenders were likely bought for mixing drugs. How could people do that to their bodies? Laura was training to be a nutritionist.
Listen to our Poet of the Month, John Freeman, read ‘Little Dancer, Fourteen’. You can also read the poem below. The Lonely Crowd · ‘Little Dancer’, Fourteen’ by John Freeman A particular young girl at ballet class adopts the classic pose she has been trained in, head up, shoulders back, arms down behind her,…
Alan McCormick lives in Wicklow. He’s a trustee of the stroke charity InterAct Stroke Support, who employ actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.
As well as The Lonely Crowd, his writing has featured in many publications, including Best British Short Stories, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Exacting Clam, Confingo, Popshot, Poetry Bus and Sonder; and online at Dead Drunk Dublin, Époque Press, Books Ireland, 3:AM Magazine, Fictive Dream, Trasna and Words for the Wild. His story ‘Fire Starter’ came second in 2022’s RTÉ Francis MacManus Story Competition, and ‘Boys on Film’ was runner up in 2023’s Plaza Sudden Fiction Prize. His story collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, which included flash pieces illustrated by the artist Jonny Voss, was longlisted in the Edge Hill Prize. He’s recently completed his second story collection and a book of memoir essays with the assistance of an Irish Arts Council Literature Award.
Pauline Flynn reads her poem from Issue Fourteen. The Lonely Crowd · Mary of Egypt goes into the Desert to Repent her Lascivious Life Read how Pauline wrote ‘Mary of Egypt…’ here. Image by Pauline Flynn.
Gavin Goodwin reads his short story, ‘The Fox’, accompanied by Nerys Clark on cello. The Lonely Crowd · ‘The Fox’ by Gavin Goodwin Gavin Goodwin lectures in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. His most recent publication is Creativity and Anxiety: Making, Meaning, Experience (Palgrave, 2023). ‘The Fox’ was written and performed by Gavin…
Our Winter Readings series continues with an extract from Emma Venables’ brilliant Issue Thirteen short story: ‘A Conversation with Oma, 1968’. Emma Venables is a writer and academic, currently residing in the North-West of England. Her short and flash fiction has been widely published in places such as Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Ellipsis Zine, and The Forge Literary Magazine. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’, came runner-up (3rd) in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Fragments of a Woman, will be published by Aderyn Press in June 2023. You can follow Emma on Twitter @EmmaMVenables
Raine Geoghegan reads her two poems from Issue Thirteen . ‘The Man I Thought was Welsh’ ‘My Father’s House’ Raine Geoghegan, M.A. is a Welsh born poet, prose writer and playwright of Romany descent. She is a Forward Prize, twice Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net nominee. Her work has been published online and…
Madeleine D’Arcy reads from ‘Human Soup’, her short story in Issue Thirteen. Madeleine D’Arcy’s début short story collection, Waiting For The Bullet (Doire Press, 2014), won the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Prize 2015 (UK). In 2010 she received the Hennessy Literary Award for First Fiction and the overall Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writer.…
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch reads her two triolets from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd.
Natalie Ann Holborow reads one of two new poems featured in Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. Find out how Natalie wrote the poem, here. Natalie Ann Holborow is the author of And Suddenly You Find Yourself and Small (Parthian) and co-author of The Wrong Side of the Looking Glass (Black Rabbit Press). She…
The Lonely Press is delighted to publish Visions of Llandaff, a stunning collaboration between poet John Freeman and photographer Chris Humphrey. Here, Freeman reads an extract from the volume. The above photograph is by Chris Humphrey and is taken from the book, which may be purchased here.
Katherine Duffy reads The Ladybirds from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. Katherine Duffy lives in Ireland. Her poetry pamphlet Talking the Owl Away (Templar Poetry, 2018) received Templar’s Iota Shot Award. Two previous poetry collections were published by The Dedalus Press (Ireland). Her work was highly commended in the 2018 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry Competition. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Blue Nib, Skylight 47, Mediterranean Poetry, and in the anthologies The Word Ark (Dedalus Press, 2020) and Places of Poetry (Oneworld, 2020).
Eleanor Hooker reads from Issue Thirteen of The Lonely Crowd. The Lonely Crowd · Eleanor Hooker reads ‘The Girl With Bees In Her Eye’ Eleanor Hooker’s third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) and her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Holland) were published in 2021. A recipient of the Markievicz Award in 2021, her poetry book Where Memory Lies…
Legion is a sequence of origin poems using the honeybee as a metaphor for the poet and a sting in childhood as the impetus to write. Michael Hartnett’s poem ‘A Necklace of Wrens’ is perhaps one of the best know origin poems by an Irish poet. The wrens settle on the young child in a feather necklet, marking him as a poet. This anointment caused the wrens to injure the young poet – Their talons left on me/scars not healed yet. Without subscribing to the notion of the tortured artist in this poem, Hartnett acknowledges, unsentimentally, that his craft arrived from an early wound. In his elegy to Yeats, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’, Auden wrote Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry/ Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still. The idea of writing from a wound or a place of sorrow is not new and although disparaged as cliché, it resonates as a reality for many poets and writers, and to deny this fact is a form of silencing.‘Dancing as Fast as I Can’ is a poem that looks at the symbiotic relationship between the artist, their advocates and the ‘establishment’. It questions what these associations might entail for an artist and their artistic independence. The poem acknowledges that while most artists would like their work to be selected and advanced, not all are chosen, and perhaps a negative consequence of being absorbed into the hive is that the artist becomes managed, and looses their ability to produce beyond the constraints of that environment.