Ralf Webb | Tolka Issue Eight, July 2025 People lose their minds on the first hot day of the year. This is a truth unique to these islands. Men strip off and light up in petrol station forecourts. Office workers on lunch break collapse face down in the grass. It’s a kind of domestic apostasy. Sun madness. Chlorophyllous delirium. One spends half the year holed up in damp-ridden, poorly insulated lodgings that the sudden promise of warmth, a super hit of vitamin D, engenders a state of temporary insanity so acute that it might merit as a legal defence. Things, in essence, get weird. Something like this seems to be happening in Wiltshire’s Bradford-on-Avon, where, on an unexpectedly sweltering mid-May afternoon, in the region of four hundred Morris dancers have descended, carrying percussion sticks, dulled swords and polka-dotted handkerchiefs to help celebrate the community’s seventh annual Green Man Festival. Bradford-on-Avon...

Tim MacGabhann | Tolka, Issue Three, May 2023 As I get older I find myself better able to let things live under their own aspect: isolated, apart – like a single dart of seed blown from a dandelion or the colours in Cézanne which become their own blocks of solidity – as though beyond form. It’s a young person’s illness to look backwards so much. When I knew Sam I was coming into the last of those years when I might have been able to think of myself as young: that is to say, in those years when I already felt as though I were no longer young. When you get past those years, you start to feel young again. You don’t want them back, either. The low burnish of things as they are is enough: that gleam on the rim of a cup, early in the morning, a weathervane...

Doreen Cunningham | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 Noreen Masud’s memoir, A Flat Place, explores the flatlands of Britain, as well as reflecting on her upbringing in Pakistan and Scotland, through a mixture of literary criticism and anti-romantic nature writing. A Flat Place contains stories of brutality, the patriarchy, colonial violence and the erasure of histories of people of colour. Noreen’s experience of living with what she hesitantly defines as complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) is a many-layered account of childhood trauma with no single cause or event. Noreen describes how, along with her siblings and mother, she was confined by her father inside their house, and how she found solace in glimpses of her first flat place, open fields near where she lived in Lahore as a child: I waited, every morning, as the dawn mists rose over Lahore, for the car to round the corner and open...

Mae Graber | Tolka, Issue Four, July 2023 John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and then his dog ate it. I love Of Mice and Men. It’s my favourite book, and I love that a dog ate it. I wish I had more details about the dog to tell you. He was not John Steinbeck’s famous poodle, Charley, who there is a wealth of information about. All I can find out of this book-scarfing hound is that he was a setter and his name was Toby. For me, personally, his literary contribution blows anything Charley ever did out of the water. I would bet my life that Toby was over eleven months, but under one-and-a-half years old. I can suppose this with such certainty because younger puppies are too unreliable to leave alone with manuscripts, and John Steinbeck, as an avid dog-haver his whole life, would have known this....