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…
It was the Morrisons in Hastings that lit the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside the place: the car park. Ashamed to say now, but I didn’t notice its wonder at first. I was like all the others who tramp to and from their cars without paying due attention,…
George Eliot said that the novel, ‘like crystalline masses … may take any form, and yet be beautiful; we have only to pour in the right elements – genuine observation, humour, and passion.’ I have always loved the way Eliot angles this image of crystal masses: the freedom it accords to the novelist. Her remark picks up my memory of schoolgirl experiments in the chemistry lab: we left a dish containing a solution of chemicals; when we came back a week later, it had branched into a multifaceted cluster of crystals, in a structure amazing to the imagination.
Photos © Michou Burckett St Laurent. Many thanks to Vinny Casey at The Workman’s Club for all his help setting up the event.
