Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’. The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of...

Erin Dorney | Tolka Issue Three, January 2025 Day 3 Dear Adriene, Female bears sleep right through birth. You say, give your littlebelly a pet – you say, smear a little honey across the ribcage – butvisualise for me waking up, unaware of any sign of danger, withsore teats and tiny eyes you can’t escape. I’ve never wanted notto be a mother more than now, half-asleep with heat. Instead,I claim this fusty cave, a lunar flag ‘waving’. You say, notice howyou feel, and I assure you, I’ve been trying. Day 4 Dear Adriene, Teach me how to talk to invisible things. How to measureshoreline length. Focus on a steady state. How can some thingstwist in my mind like morning glories? I think I am invasive.I keep saying no but you grow into all my empty spaces. Dearones, how you multiply. Day 21 Dear Adriene, What are you waiting for? A...

Jessica Traynor | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 My first memory of my cousin who went to jail is of him playing guitar at my grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. One of my uncles had a job in RTÉ, so the party was in the canteen, a brightly lit wilderness of painted breeze blocks. The extended family were all there; party pieces were expected. I’d written a poem, because I hated being asked to sing – the idea of it made me sick with anxiety. The entreaties of increasingly drunken aunts and uncles to perform meant I had to keep roaming about the room on a circuit of perpetual avoidance until the time came for me to say my poem. I was maybe nine or ten years old and the poem I’d written was about a man coming home from a long time away to find his family gone and his...

Isobel Harbison | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023 The first night home from the hospital I lay in bed. My body had spent a week wrestling with labour until, eventually, the baby was taken out with a knife. He slept beside me now, breathing fast. It was a warm late-summer Sunday in London and the bedroom window was open. Our rented apartment ran adjacent to the railway bridge and opposite another beige tower block, the hard U-shape trapping the voices of the wine-soaked clients from the restaurant below and sending them rebounding upwards. I listened to the misshapen chorus. Having a small child, I thought, knowing virtually nothing about the endeavour, is like having the front door of your home removed so that nobody can leave unless some other adult is in there. And with this thought came fear. I might lose night. * Crepuscular animals forage and fuck at...