Alice Kinsella discusses ‘Chase’ and ‘What has night to do with sleep?’, two poems featured in Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. There are some poems you want to write. Poems you sit down determined to write. You fiddle around with them until they finally settle, in all their gorgeous perfection, on your page. But there…
‘Wasps’ is one story of twenty-three that form a collection of short fiction entitled The South Westerlies recently submitted for my PhD. The collection is experimental writing functioning as research in an attempt to know place. The place is my home patch of Gower: latitude 51 degrees north, 4 degrees west, an administrative part of…
Glyn Edwards’ ‘The Birthday Waltz’ is featured in Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. Here it is accompanied by @dantrev1 of Black Mountain Lights. Wales Arts Review described Glyn Edwards as one of the ‘most exciting young voices in Welsh poetry’. His first collection will be published in Autumn, 2018 by The Lonely Press. He is an…
There are lots of quotes that come to mind about story writing that feel right to me, about not knowing really what something is until you write to find out. I’m with Flannery O’Connor on this, like most writers I know. I never know the ending of a story when I sit down, I know…
Jackie Gorman reads her poem ‘The Blue Hare’ from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. © Jackie Gorman, 2017. Image © Jo Mazelis, 2017.
Jackie Gorman discusses her poem ‘The Blue Hare’ taken from Issue Eight. You can listen to Jackie read the poem here. For as long as I can remember I have loved hares and probably one of my earliest memories as a child is that of seeing a hare in the fields of Ballyglass, near where…
Photos from the launch of Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd at Little Man Coffee, Cardiff. Photos by Michou Burckett St. Laurent. The Lonely Crowd in Cardiff were Jenn Ashworth‘s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy won a 2010 Betty Trask Award. On the publication of her second novel, Cold Light, in 2011, she was…
Tony Curtis reads from Issue Eight of The Lonely Crowd. Tony Curtis will be reading at our event at Little Man Coffee, Cardiff tonight. Do join us from 730pm onwards. Tony Curtis is Emeritus Professor of Poetry at the University of South Wales where he developed Creative Writing. His New & Selected Poems: From the Fortunate…
As I sit here writing at my kitchen table, a ladybird is crawling on my leg. I accidentally bring a lot of wildlife home from my work, beetles and spiders, the occasional grasshopper under my collar, ants in the creases of my work trousers or fallen into my boots. The ladybird on my knee is…
The story of this short story? Much like the story of every short story I write – random memories coagulating, some weird shit glimpsed in my peripheral vision, a character or two burping from the murk like hot gas. Stirred and heated and stirred again until, eventually, the voice comes – the thing that makes…
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 loss of language, an exploration into our place in the world broadened steadily through later collections, most recently A Bright Acoustic (2017). Recently liberated from 25 years of academic life, he is an insatiable collaborator across art forms, e.g. with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River, and with composer Benjamin Frank Vaughan on The King in the Car Park, a cantata about the re-discovery of Richard III, performed in Leicester Cathedral.
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 loss of language, an exploration into our place in the world broadened steadily through later collections, most recently A Bright Acoustic (2017). Recently liberated from 25 years of academic life, he is an insatiable collaborator across art forms, e.g. with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River, and with composer Benjamin Frank Vaughan on The King in the Car Park, a cantata about the re-discovery of Richard III, performed in Leicester Cathedral.
In Shirley Jackson’s work there is a single recurring character – often a very minor one. He appears under a number of different names: James or Jimmy or sometimes Jim Harris, and sometimes only as a mysterious unnamed man in a blue suit. Mr Harris is sometimes a writer. At other times he’s an academic, a researcher or a bookshop owner. The mysterious visitor is intimately connected with the written word, with books and the production of text. This charismatic and often dangerous stranger has been suggested by some critics to be evidence of Jackson’s intricate, career-long engagement with an old Scottish Ballad in which a women’s dead lover returns to lure her away from her husband. The lover, as most versions of this ballad emphasise, is the devil himself.
Here are some photos by Jo Mazelis from our event at Noah’s Yard in Swansea last night. Thanks to everyone who came along and made it such a lovely evening. (n.b. photo of Jo Mazelis by JL).