The Hanged Man I associate the tarot with my early teenage years, a particularly disempowered time when there was nothing to do but when every moment was saturated with an indefinable yearning. At fourteen, I couldn’t even get a job as a lounge girl in the local pub, the means by which most of my friends gained some independence, working there after school and sneaking drinks with the barmen after closing. I wandered around town with my printed-out CVs, dropping them in front of managers who binned them as soon as I left the shop. In those days, time stretched and warped around us. We were waiting for something external to come and change our lives. The tarot promised us a message from the beyond. The Hanged Man smiles as he hangs upside down. I often drew this card as a teenager, and his expression troubled me. That (ironic?) smile...

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...

Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, November 2024 In September I spoke to Colin Barrett about his latest book, the novel Wild Houses (2024), which was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Colin is also the author of the short-story collections Young Skins (2013) and Homesickness (2022). A short story from Young Skins, ‘Calm with Horses’, was adapted by Nick Rowland into a film in 2019, starring Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan. Years ago, I was working in book distribution when a friend first recommended that I read Young Skins. I responded petulantly to the recommendation, thinking that smalltown Irish malaise was overdone, and that I’d already read enough fiction about it. In our conversation below, Colin touches on the sweeping naivety of youth – how being dismissive, and growing out of it, is a necessary part of being a writer and, in this instance, a reader. Thankfully, I...