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...

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...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023 This Plague of Souls is Mike McCormack’s fourth novel. It follows Nealon, an artist who has returned from prison following the collapse of a criminal trial against him. His family home in rural Mayo is empty, and he is besieged by phone calls from a stranger determined to meet up. The third act of the novel stages this meeting against the backdrop of a national security crisis. Through a breadth and style that is typical of McCormack’s writing, the distinctions between the local and the global begin to break down: ‘Those oil spills and poisoned lakes, those great gyres of plastic waste spiralling in the southern Atlantic. There were things coming apart, falling from their proper being’. McCormack is the author of the novels Crowe’s Requiem (1998) and Notes from a Coma (2005), as well as the short-story collections Getting It in...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Issue Four, March 2023 In July 2022 I set up a conversation over Zoom between two authors and friends, Nicole Flattery and Colin Barrett. I sent them a list of questions, asked them to hit record and left them to it. Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic from Mullingar, County Westmeath. Her short-story collection, Show Them a Good Time, was published by the Stinging Fly Press and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, is set against the backdrop of Andy Warhol’s Factory in 1960s New York, and was published in March 2023. Colin Barrett is a writer from County Mayo. His first short-story collection, Young Skins, was published by the Stinging Fly Press in 2013 and his second collection, Homesickness, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2022. His debut novel will be published in late 2023. The questions I sent to Nicole and Colin...