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…
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…
Even the bluebottles have succumbed. Half a dozen, upended on the window sill, legs sculling the air in attempts to right themselves. The room a kiln, sun livid as it seethes onto the glass, braising him in a broth of wretchedness. People comparing it to a time before all this, when there were standpipes in…
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…
Issue 9 of The Lonely Crowd features three new poems from Louise Warren, including ‘Walt’, which she discusses here. Don’t miss Louise reading these poems at our London event this Thursday. I have always loved the films of Walt Disney, especially the earlier ones. Fantasia, Pinocchio, the original One Hundred and One Dalmatians with its hand…
‘Write what you know.’ For many years it was advice that I tried to follow, a mantra so prevalent in creative writing teaching that it surely couldn’t be wrong. Except, of course, that it is. Or not wrong exactly, but misguided, and limited, and – more importantly – limiting. Taken to its logical conclusion, ‘Write…
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,…
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.…
The Lonely Crowd will be previewing their forthcoming ninth issue at Little Man Coffee. Co, tomorrow evening from 7pm. Martina Evans will be reading poems from Issue 9 as well as a selection from her highly praised new collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men. Recent Welsh Book of the Year-winner John Freeman reads…
