With The Four Faced Liar, Cork has a new literary journal
At The Firkin Crane on Friday night, under the eye of the 'Goldie Fish', writers, poets and well-wishers gathered for the launch of Cork's newest literary journal.
‘Under the Four-Faced Liar it‘a 3 am…The iron tongue of Shandon Steeple is silent now and the great clocks on its four faces merely click and cluck and grumble as they haggle amongst themselves.’ - The Four-Faced Liar (2020) Ger Fitzgibbon, from the editorial pages of The Four Faced Liar.
In early 2022, when Patrick Holloway, Lucy Holme, Stephen Brophy and Rosie Morris were brainstorming names for their new Cork-based literary journal, unanimity quickly grew around one suggestion: The Four Faced Liar.
There was much to like about the name: it’s about as Cork as you get (Tripe + Drisheen was taken!) and, as Patrick tells me over Zoom, there was the symmetry of the four editors and the four clock faces on Shandon Bells. But, as he recalls, there was one dissenting voice - his.
“It’s nice,” Patrick told the team, “but I don’t get it.”
To which his three fellow editors asked him what he was on about. Swear words were included in the original conversation.
“Patch, you’re from Cork, like, what’s your problem?” Stephen, one of the editors, asked him incredulously.
Patrick, or Patch as he is more commonly known, told me that the root of the problem lay in provenance. He hails from Crosshaven and left Ireland at the age of 18 for Scotland and then Brazil, moving back to Cork in 2021. Of course he knew Shandon Bells, but he hadn’t a notion that in Cork city, at least, it also has a more famous moniker.
He got a quick history lesson, and was quickly put in his place. But the upshot was that their journal had a name. Filling it though would be a much longer process.
The idea for the new journal was Patrick’s, but the effort to bring it to publication was very much a group one. The four writers knew each other through fellowships at the Munster Literature Centre. Patrick approached them all separately and sold each of them the idea.
There are a few names in the inaugural issue of The Four Faced Liar that have broad recognition. The editors commissioned work from Jan Carson, Mary O’Donnell and Dylan Thomas Prize-nominated Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe. There’s also work from Billy Fenton and an interview with Cork author Danny Denton. Artist Shane O’Driscoll, a co-organiser of the Ardú Street Art Project, illustrated the cover.
But, for most people outside of the literary community, most of the writers assembled in the first edition are unlikely to ring a bell. That’s by design.
Early on, the four editors had a “values” meeting in which they formulated the core principles that would shape the journal.
With the Four Faced Liar, Patrick says they really wanted to put the emphasis on giving new writers a break, and to pay them.
“We wanted to be paying better than most of the journals that are already there,” Patrick says, adding that whether they publish only one issue or a thousand issues, that they would not compromise on this point. Although the plan for the second issue is already in the works.
Secondly, they wanted new voices.
“With some journals, even in Ireland, you see the same names a lot. There is this kind of like, ‘Are they even reading the submissions?’” he says.
The editors put their rates on the submissions page when they launched the website promising to pay out €200 for a short story or creative non-fiction piece, €100 for a poem or piece of flash fiction, and €100 for visual art. These rates are broadly in line with journals such as The Stinging Fly and Southword.
Patrick studied creative writing and has won several short story competitions. He’s also about 40,000 words into his first novel, but he still thinks that getting your first piece published will always be one of the biggest moments in a writer’s life.
“I remember my first kind of paid publication, I think it was in Poetry Ireland Review, many, many years ago. And there's nothing quite like that first buzz of knowing that you're going to be in a journal, and I think the payment is really important. That you receive money for your work, for your time, for your effort, for your skill, and talent.”
Once the core values were formulated and with a name in the bag then came the business of soliciting submissions and getting funded.
Funding came from two sources - a crowd funding model from which they raised €6,000 and also the four editors dipped into their funds to supplement where needed. A recent Arts Council application was shot down, and they were too late to apply for funding from the City and County Councils for their first issue.
There were around 1,200 submissions for the first issue; thousands of pages to read through. The editors read ‘blind’, meaning that the author’s name did not appear on the work, so as to remove bias.
The volume of submissions meant that it took longer than they would have liked to before finalising their selection and getting the journal off to the printers. That’s something Patrick said they would like to streamline for the next issue.
So what does The Four Faced Liar look and read like? Firstly, despite the comparatively small budget, they did not compromise on production. From the layout to the images, it’s a sleek journal. And while The Four Faced Liar is published in Cork, this is not a journal about Cork. Submissions flowed in from all over Ireland and throughout the world, and in its essence, or at the very least in the first issue, it’s primarily a representation of that.
“We wanted to represent what we thought was the best of what we received in,” Patrick says. “And obviously, that is very subjective to four people, you know.”
With the Four Faced Liar, they also wanted it to talk about the world in which we live, which extends beyond Cork. For the inaugural issue the roll call of nationalities includes Nigeria, Greece, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, England, Canada, Scotland and the USA.
“Obviously, I read loads of things that aren't from Cork or from Ireland, but they could be you know,” Patrick says. If there’s a theme to the first issue, it’s how literature - poetry, short stories and essays - is universal.
That said, a darkly wry short story about Ireland’s first serial killer from Donegal-based writer Dean Fee starts out in a Garda barracks on Barracks Street. A beautiful poem by Mary O’Donnell recalls the sorrow and bleakness, but also the humanity, in occupied Ukraine.
As for the process of putting together the journal, of actually getting stories down on a page and out into the world, Patrick says he has learned "so much from it," adding that he's aware of how clichéd that sounds.
“The best thing of all of this is I have found three amazing friends. I think the four of us have created a really brilliant bond.”
“Obviously, there’s been moments of stress, but the respect amongst the four of us is lovely. You know it’s been such a beautiful and great journey to be on with them. And I know moving forward that it will just go from strength to strength.”
And for as long as he lives Patch Holloway will never not know that the Four Faced Liar is named after Shandon Bells. And now, the name of a new journal that was dreamed up and sweated into existence in Cork in 2022.
The Four Faced Liar is stocked by Point Road Cafe, Crosshaven; Cork Flower Studio, Douglas Street; Wunderkaffee, Faranavara, Faran and on The Four Faced Liar website.
