Kimberly Campanello | Tolka Issue Seven, July 2025 The poets K and G live on neighbouring islands. They have never met, but they follow each other’s writing and know the look of each other’s haircuts, vacations, spouses, G’s child and K’s nieces and her friends’ children who chalk her garden walls, pots and statues with flowers, faces and I RULE. The two poets know the look of their mutual commitment to bodybuilding. The two poets write about traumatic historical and personal events. Rather than coming up with their own words, they locate language that has been used already to write or speak about these terrible things. They carefully separate parts of this language from the body of the texts, shaping it to reveal the form of what is really there, what is really felt. Eventually another poet remarked upon their respective gym photos and suggested that K and G write...

Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023 Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’,...

Eerie calm. A standing wave, a never-ending breaker on a rock cliff, a bass vibration that trembles through every cell like the mountain itself is humming, rain washes the windows like poison— Someone screaming, Fuck! Fuck! * What happens to your Feed after you die? There’s no way to survive that. No way. No, I don’t know know; I didn’t watch it with my own two eyeballs, but I know. Stop, just shut up for one second, I know. And so there’s this thing attached to me, this awful piece of knowledge like a – like a dead dog. A dead-dog piece of the story. What happens to the Feed after you die? When you die it rules out posting something like: hey I’m dead. The word sloshes around like a dog dish full of water. You might die, but your Feed lives on in a kind of afterlife. Friends...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Online Only, May 2025 Over the years, we’ve published a series of casual conversations between writers in Tolka. We have paired authors such as Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, as they have reflected on how they write their books and discuss the fundamental underpinnings of their art, as well as talking about what they’ve had for dinner and seen on the telly recently. We’re now delighted to publish a new conversation between Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh. Lucy and Aimée first met in 2022, when Aimée took Lucy’s Faber Academy course on the short story, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since. Lucy and Aimée are both writers from Belfast. Lucy is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories published by Faber: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021) and, most recently, Openings (2024). Her most recent novel, These...