Moya Lothian-McLean | Tolka, Issue Three, August 2022 Emma Dabiri and I are talking at opposite ends of the day. In Pennsylvania, where the Dublin-born scholar and broadcaster is currently teaching, it’s 11 a.m.; for me, the evening is drawing close. But Dabiri is energised; it’s the third occasion (by my count) that we’ve been thrown together in an interview context and yet she always finds a new, fascinating thread of thought during our interactions. Dabiri is a multi-discipline thinker. While her work fits into rich traditions of radical perspectives, her areas of interest – Black feminism, the Black–Irish experience, intersecting histories of oppression, marginalised history, to name but a few – are often underexplored. It’s why her non-fiction interventions have become such landmark works. Her first, Don’t Touch My Hair (2019), is well on its way to modern-classic status as a creative text, marrying academic research, personal experience and...

Darran Anderson | Tolka Issue Four, December 2023 The job was to collect memories. I hadn’t been back in town long and I wasn’t in much of a state to work, although I was even less cut out to starve. It was only temporary and I’m not sure there was ever an official job title. ‘Are you a good listener?’ was all they asked, which somehow sounded like a trick question. The job required a researcher, of sorts, on a Mass-Observation-style project, to be sent out to homes, pubs and workplaces. While there, I’d simply encourage people to reminisce. Each time, I had to roll out a disclaimer that, in all likelihood, their testimony wouldn’t be used or would be whittled down to a passing anecdote in a leaflet. Still they wanted to share their stories, in meticulous and sprawling detail. So, paid by the hour, I let them. The...

Brian Robert Moore | Tolka, Web Only, June 2023 In Italy, no author is as commonly associated with auto-fiction – or with the murky limbo that exists between fiction and non-fiction – as Walter Siti. Through his first three novels, which formed a ‘fake autobiography’ culminating with Paradise Overload (Troppi paradisi) in 2006, Siti proved that the self can be as effective a means as any for probing the obsessions, ills and ecstasies that characterise contemporary Western society. Even as the figure of Walter Siti has moved into a secondary role in much of his writing, his novels have continued to meld an almost investigative rigor with emotional depth and a uniquely propulsive style. By portraying and deconstructing contemporary Italy from the inside, Siti’s writing has captured how no facet of modern life – even, or especially, love and sex – can exist detached from macro systems of money, media...

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...