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 –...

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’,...

Moya Lothian-McLean | Tolka, Issue Three, August 2022 Emma Dabiri and I are talking at opposite ends of the day. In Pennsylvania, where the Dublin-born scholar and broadcaster is currently teaching, it’s 11 a.m.; for me, the evening is drawing close. But Dabiri is energised; it’s the third occasion (by my count) that we’ve been thrown together in an interview context and yet she always finds a new, fascinating thread of thought during our interactions. Dabiri is a multi-discipline thinker. While her work fits into rich traditions of radical perspectives, her areas of interest – Black feminism, the Black–Irish experience, intersecting histories of oppression, marginalised history, to name but a few – are often underexplored. It’s why her non-fiction interventions have become such landmark works. Her first, Don’t Touch My Hair (2019), is well on its way to modern-classic status as a creative text, marrying academic research, personal experience and...

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...