Susmita Bhattacharya C. G. Menon is the author of Subjunctive Moods, published by Dahlia Publishing. She’s won or been placed in a number of competitions, including the Fish, Bridport, Bare Fiction and Short Fiction Journal awards. Her work has been broadcast on radio, and she’s been a judge for several international short fiction competitions. She has a PhD in pure mathematics and an MA in creative writing from City University. She is currently working on her first novel.Susmita Bhattacharya: What inspires you to write? C. G. Menon: I sometimes read a story or novel that I wish I’d written,…
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From Short Fiction
Issue Ten Launch
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…
Writing ‘Dinner for Two’ / Sophie van Llewyn
Sophie Van Llewyn discusses her short story, ‘Dinner for Two’, taken from Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. At the time when I began writing ‘Dinner for Two,’ in the winter of 2017, I was, primarily, a flash fiction writer. I had a six-month-old baby, and I only had time to write when she was napping.…
Writing ‘Bottle Gardens’ / Paul Whyte
Paul Whyte discusses his short story, ‘Bottle Gardens’, featured in Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. I’ve lived with a relatively severe anxiety disorder for most of my life. It’s a part of who I am, and that’s ok, over the years I’ve come to accept it. Thankfully, I seem to be managing it pretty well…
Read by the Author: ‘Messages’ by Meadhbh Ní Eadhra
Meadhbh Ní Eadhra reads an excerpt from ‘Messages’, her short story in Issue Ten. Meadhbh Ní Eadhra is from Galway in the West of Ireland. She writes in Irish and English and has published three award-winning novels for young people, Rua, Fáinne Fí Fífí and Faye. She won the Moth Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received numerous national Oireachtas literary…
Writing ‘Above It All’ / Angela Graham
In order to consider the germination of my story I’d like to refer to Dan Coxon’s online piece on this site On Writing ‘Sound of the Riverbed’, in which he assesses the worth of the adage, ‘Write what you know’. He concludes: Perhaps I was wrong to reject Mark Twain’s ‘Write what you know’. Perhaps…
Read by the Author: ‘Badgerface’ by Lucie McKnight Hardy
Lucie McKnight Hardy reads an extract from ‘Badgerface’ featured in Issue Ten of The Lonely Crowd. Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales, and is a Welsh speaker. She has various pieces of short fiction published or forthcoming in print and online, and her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, will be published by…
Writing ‘Soft to Good, Heavy in Places’ Grahame Williams
I began this story last October, on the day and date the story takes place, in the town in which the story takes place, sat in the passenger seat while my brother drove us home from our grandfather’s funeral. My girlfriend sat in the back, five months pregnant with our first child, and we listened…
On Being Fallow / Arnold Thomas Fanning
Time goes by and I do not write. Despite Kafka’s warning – “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity”[*] – I do not fret, I do not let this sit heavy upon me. Rather, this period of time, to outward appearances so unproductive, is a time without worry, a time of lightness indeed, an unburdened…
Writing ‘Leave The Light On For Me’ / Jane Fraser
‘Leave The Light On For Me’ is one of twenty-three stories that comprise a short fiction collection entitled The South Westerlies that I submitted for my PhD thesis in 2017. The collection is an attempt to know my place of Gower. All the stories are set here where I live, work and write, in the…
Writing ‘Brave Girl’ / Kathleen MacMahon
It’s a funny thing how different a short story is to a novel. You’d thing they’d be much the same to write, if not to read. The writer, after all, would set to work with the same basic tools, using the same skills. You’d be facing the same challenges, only on a different scale, or…
READ BY THE AUTHOR: ‘Sound of the Riverbed’ by Dan Coxon
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…
The lost songbook of misremembered earworms, or the small pleasures of writing / Armel Dagorn
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…
‘Dazzling the Gods’ by Tom Vowler
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…