Julia Merican | Tolka, Web Only, April 2024 Amina Cain’s writing articulates seemingly small, peripheral things that nonetheless hold us in their thrall with bewitching precision: the specific sadness of candlelight dancing across a solitary dinner table; how we catalogue our encounters with books that have moved us; the pleasure of going out to buy the persimmons and the butter, of sinking into a painting after a long day of labour, of meeting a friend after a spell of loneliness. Cain is the author of the short-story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (2009) and Creature (2013), the novel Indelicacy (2020), and A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022), a series of essayistic enquiries. She spoke to me from Los Angeles in October 2023.  Julia Merican (JM): When I knew I was going to be speaking to you, I started to read the interviews you’d already had with other people....

We were young and given over to certain clichés of youth. We had recently discovered drugs and drug music and drug culture, and now, with no college and nothing else to make us feel special, we leaned hard into the stoner vibes. Our heroes were the usual suspects, Jim Morrison, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jimi Hendrix, William Blake, Charles Bukowski, et cetera. These were our guys. They were all guys. It was 2004 and we felt absolutely no compunction to cultivate any interest in female artists. We were eighteen-year-old boys; feminism was a joke to us. But to be fair, we did love Janis Joplin, and all she had to do to get our attention was drink herself to death.

Roisin Kiberd | Tolka, Issue Two, May 2022 T+1 minute Static shots of a rocket in a Texan desert. The broadcast is live, backgrounded by the gentle hum of engines. Six bodies are huddled inside the capsule; three men, fifty-seven, fifty-three and eighteen, and an eighty-two-year-old woman. They crossed the bridge, rang a silver bell, strapped in, and endured the countdown. Now they will be blasted into the sky, so far as to glimpse a fleeting oblivion. Regret and possibility collapse as they depart the earth. The flames press down, the rocket jolts, and it feels like they’re soaring out of hell. News journalists and bystanders gather on tarmac some distance away. On YouTube, a commenter types ‘With that ship design, Bezos seems like he is trying to compensate for something.’ Everything here he has paid for; the richest man on earth and, soon, somewhere off-earth, too, on the way...

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...