Ty Mawr Wybrant (William Morgan’s birthplace) You carry the emptied acorn cup like an offering, one palm steadying the other, keeping it raised, level with your nose; studying it with giantwide eyes as though the vacant chrysalis still cherishes life and you might witness its spell. Your mother convinces you to let it snuggle up…
When I sit in Phil and Julia’s kitchen Shrimp arrives, quietly padding around. Julia always says the same two things: she does like men. She’s a terrible flirt. Now she adds: she’s very old. Shrimp pushes her nose towards my flies gently, just once, and then looks soulfully into my face, and I gaze back,…
One flame on the budget candle In the extravagant candelabra – Savings must be made somehow… …then stage left, three girls, posh voices – Fuck it! Let’s go. We could go to Brum. We could get off at Hereford. You’re just so funny. She’s a right laugh. What’s that? I don’t know – my…
In February I went to visit the artist Shani Rhys James to talk about her work ahead of her forthcoming exhibition in London. I had been asked to write the introduction to the catalogue so I was excited to see both the new work and her workspace. I arrived at Welshpool station to find Shani…
Photos © Michou Burckett St Laurent. Many thanks to Vinny Casey at The Workman’s Club for all his help setting up the event.
Christopher Cornwell
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…
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…
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.…
Philip Gross reads ‘Knife’ from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. Philip Gross is a poet, librettist and writer for children. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009 with The Water Table, and Wales Book of The Year 2010 with I Spy Pinhole Eye. Deep Field dealt with his Estonian refugee father’s final years and…
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.
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…
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.
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,…