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...

Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022 Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not...

Hilary A White | Tolka, Issue Six, April 2024 Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for an emerging writer. It was part of a cultural moment in which brave and bold non-fiction written by women (see Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat) seemed woven through a period of great social change in Ireland. In May 2023, it was revealed that the award-winning writer, poet and anthologist was set to publish Hagstone, her debut novel, in spring 2024. Sinéad and I had crossed paths on the arts journalism circuit, and I had attended one of her essay-writing workshops. As a great many people will have experienced, she has been very supportive of my own tenuous beginnings in writing. We arranged a chat over Zoom about...

Sara Baume | Tolka Issue Six, July 2024 Mollie leaned over the kitchen sink and picked up a little glass bottle from the windowsill. She measured three drops into the plastic cap and showed me – it was viscous, dark brown – then she added a splash of water from the cold tap, and swirled, and held it out again so that I could see how the substance had turned – in a fraction of a second, in a spontaneous display of alchemy – so pale and cloudy that it resembled weak, milky tea. Then she knocked it down her throat like a shot, twisted her face in disgust and listed the names of the supplements she was taking to sustain her immune system. The sun was high above Mollie’s cabin. Light reached in the kitchen window and across the sink, fingered the rug in front of the log stove...