Photos © Michou Burckett St Laurent. Many thanks to Vinny Casey at The Workman’s Club for all his help setting up the event.
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From Short Fiction
Dublin Readings
We’ve an event in Dublin on March 8th, 7pm at The Workman’s Club in Dublin, featuring readings from recent issues (7 and 8) of The Lonely Crowd. We’ve an electrifying line-up of writers for the evening and you can find out a little bit more about them here: June Caldwell worked for many years as…
An Interview with Nuala O’Connor
John Lavin Nuala O’Connor is one of the most talented and prolific Irish writers of the new millennium, having published five short story collections, three novels and three poetry collections in little more than ten years. Joyride to Jupiter, her fifth short story collection, was published this year to considerable acclaim in Ireland and it…
An Interview with Tom Vowler
Dan Coxon Ask five writers what it is that makes a great short story, and you’ll probably receive five different answers. Some will focus on form, others on characters, or plot. Some will be all about the language. If there’s one point that they’ll all agree on, it’s that a short story should be concise.…
On Writing ‘A Shiver of Hearts’ – Una Mannion
When I was 14, I knew someone, another teenager, who had a miscarriage and woke her mother for help. She knew she was pregnant but she didn’t know what was happening to her. Her mother left her in the bathroom and shut the door, shushing her from the hallway so others wouldn’t hear. The image of a girl left alone to that ordeal on the other side of a shut door still grips me. And while both that event and the story happen in the 1980s, the shame and hushing still feel very real to me.
Writing ‘Fogarty’ Jaki McCarrick
Jaki McCarrick discusses her Pushcart Prize-nominated short story, ‘Fogarty’, published in Issue Eight. A few years ago, on a flight to Paris, I read an in-flight magazine feature about an ex-Naval Seal who gave survival courses to business people. As I read, it dawned on me that a survival course would make a great basis…
How I Wrote ‘The Sadness The Weirdness’ – Toby Litt
After the first draft, I was glad to see I was writing a haphazardly global story, where the narrator shambles from here to there in pursuit of something that surely can’t be love. He tries really hard to make it love, but it’s more likely the desperation of needing something to feel desperate about.
On Writing ‘Framing Ilva’ – George Sandison
The landscape of Southern Italy coexists with myth. Antiquity is commonplace, and life there centres around history in a way I envy. It’s easy to romanticise the food, the weather and the sweltering, lazy summers, but my fascination with the region goes deeper. I was born in Hertfordshire, the birthplace of the new town project,…
READ BY THE AUTHOR: ‘The Sadness The Weirdness’ by Toby Litt
Toby Litt is the author of nine novels and four books of short stories. He is currently writing Wrestliana, a memoir about his relationship to his great-great-great grandfather, William Litt – a champion wrestler, poet, smuggler and exile. Toby’s most recent novel is Lilian’s Spell Book. Toby teaches creative writing at Birkbeck College.
