Brian Dillon | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 I was fifteen years old when it first appeared. I’d cycled to school as usual, survived a flummoxing maths lesson without shame, settled into the day’s second period and opened my science textbook, when I found I could not see straight. I blinked hard at the page; something remained in the way. I tried to get the object in focus, the better to banish it, but it would not resolve. The thing was not exactly there, no blurred patch or dark hole in space, instead pure absence, as if one side of reality had simply dropped away. I recall thinking that whatever this was, it would be hard to put into words. I looked up from the book and there the nothing was still, obscuring several classmates, half the blackboard and an array of chemistry equipment on the teacher’s desk. Surely I...

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Online Only, May 2025 Over the years, we’ve published a series of casual conversations between writers in Tolka. We have paired authors such as Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, as they have reflected on how they write their books and discuss the fundamental underpinnings of their art, as well as talking about what they’ve had for dinner and seen on the telly recently. We’re now delighted to publish a new conversation between Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh. Lucy and Aimée first met in 2022, when Aimée took Lucy’s Faber Academy course on the short story, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since. Lucy and Aimée are both writers from Belfast. Lucy is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories published by Faber: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021) and, most recently, Openings (2024). Her most recent novel, These...

Not finding a four-leaf clover in the playground. Taking two leaves off one clover and holding the stalk up to a full one, then going around boasting about my fake four-leaf clover, knowing in my heart it could only bring bad luck. My mother in a Dolce & Gabbana swimsuit at the hot sulphur pools in Fontpédrouse, and the snow on the mountains behind her. The colour and shape of the fallen maple leaves in Phoenix Park, walking around on my own after taking oxycodone. Ice-creams in the corner shop like little pink feet. The girl from the school next door who used to hang out in the bushes where we went to smoke. She had cigarette burns all down her cleavage. She said she let her boyfriends do it and seemed to find it funny. Watching a video of a bullfighter being gored to death and the camera panning...