Joanna Pidcock | Tolka, Web Only, September 2023 Um, so, it’s strange, isn’t it? Yes, it is, in a good way. I first became aware of my double when I was shortlisted for a major literary prize, only to find that she had won it two years earlier, making my own effort look like a funny mistake. Within this context, I simply looked exactly like her, only spelled slightly differently, misspelt even. have you seen this?? was the most common text I received in the days following the shortlist announcement, coupled with a link to some page with her photo and her achievements and her name, is this you?? In the weeks following this uncanny coincidence, I uncovered more: as well as having very nearly the exact same name, my doppelgänger and I had both moved to the UK from former colonies (she, Canada; me, Australia); were both ‘nature writers’,...

Ana Kinsella | Tolka, Issue One, Feb 2023 Entry My first home in London is a houseshare with five Icelandic artists. The flat is a maisonette with a small garden on a Shoreditch housing estate, and the garden is neglected, with a fringe of bamboo taller than any of us. I find it through a friend of a friend and take the room without viewing it. These facts are enough to make me feel legitimate and deft at being in the city, despite my newness. I’m a natural. It is not my first time living away from home, but it is the first time that it feels meaningful, a page turned rather than merely interrupted. I have a job, sort of, and a course of study, and people to have dinner with at the wide pine table whose grooves and knots I can still feel under my fingers. The East...

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...

Liam Cagney | Tolka, Issue Two, December 2022 As Indrani and I sweep up the charred-black staircase past a precipitously tottering woman, and as we hand our coats and bags to the tattooed Garderobe worker, and as we slip into a dank graffitied toilet cubicle, then, buzzing to at last be here, sweep back downstairs into the bar, slipping through the chest-to-chest throng, all leather and beards and babble, I have no inkling of the paranoia into which, like a slobbering dog falling into canal slime, my night will plunge, because for now, as I glimpse Indrani’s complexion lit up George Grosz red, we are completely intoxicated by Griessmuehle’s carnival, the club girls in glitter-ball face masks, the sweating bears, the spilt drinks and music, a pandemonium that, after the quiet unreality I’ve endured recently alone in my high-rise flat, feels like a happy dose of unbridled realness. * It’s...