About Us – The Hollow Collective

The Collective

Our name is Legion, for we are many. We are the Hollow Ones; there is nothing to us but a false surface, of pasteboard and plaster. We are simulacra. We are puppets. Porcelain dolls, wax dolls, corn dollies, Russian dolls, nested one inside the Other. We are empty. We are echoing. Within us is a heart-shaped hole. We are spaces waiting to be filled.

We are tired of waiting. We have tried to make our voices heard. We have cried in the Wilderness. We have spoken our names into the wind. We have screamed into the Void.

There was no answer.

Behind our carefully constructed personae, behind our acquiescent smiles, behind our polished exteriors, with which we signal our submission, there is a yawning chasm. This is the Abyss.

We have stared into It; It has stared into us. We liked what we saw.

We have written screeds and poison-pen letters, confessions, manifestos. We have sent our work for peer-review, for notes, for prizes, for editing, marked “for publication”, wrapped in cover letters and synopses, wrapped around a brick and hurled over the transom. We have received polite, heartfelt, calculated form rejections. We have heard that we don’t fit the list. That we have no audience. That we have no commercial value. We are in violent agreement.

We have written poems on fliers for fringe-theatre shows; we have written terrible denunciations on the walls of cellar bars. We have written novels featuring thinly-veiled versions of ourselves, coming to tragic ends. We have written scholarly essays in which we pretended to care about something no-one cares about. We have written unprintable things in secret journals, and we have burned our correspondence.

It’s time to open the trunk filled with packets of paper tied with string, old diaries, sheaves of scrawled-upon scraps. It’s time to mount the spiral steps and enter the Hidden Library. To draw down the first volume that our fingers fall upon, and blow the dust off the crackling leather cover. To let the pages fall open, and begin transcribing the spidery lettering within.

The Individual

MALACHAS IVERNUS

Our founder and our guide, Malachas Ivernus is the Editor-in-Chief of The Hollow Behind the Hearthstone. He has been many things, had many incarnations: a spoiled priest, a disgraced academic, a poète maudit, a pale, perverted youth long led astray. His studies took him to seminaries and colleges on the Continent, though he was born in Ireland. He studied Theology and Philology, Philosophy and Metaphysics. His thesis was blacklisted by the Vatican, and published by a radical small press of decadents and apostates.

He has taught in hedge-schools and parish halls, and published anonymous tracts and broadsides, as well as scholarly articles and several books on the Hermetic Arts and the History of Religion. He is a member of the Rosicrucian Order and the Collège Invisible, and was Arch-Druid of Comhaltas na bhFia Bairr for a number of years. Currently, he is a professor emeritus at the Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes, and he leads a research group in Esoteric Historiography.

AILSA CROWE

Born in Edinburgh in 1986, Ailsa Crowe studied Comparative Literature at St Andrew’s, moonlighting as a singer in punk band 5am Saint. She moved to Paris in 2007, where she completed her Master’s at one of the lesser Paris Universities. While working on her PhD, entitled The Gothic Gnome: the Expression and Repression of the Supernatural in the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, she began publishing her erotic fiction under a variety of pseudonyms, and realised that this was more fun and much more lucrative than academic publishing.

Her grandmother used to teach her how to curse people who crossed her, and in her teenage years, she spent a lot of time around illuminated vagrants and in squats where drug-use and the Black Arts went hand in hand.

THOMAS MULHOLLAND

Thomas Mulholland, MA, PhD, has had a distinguished academic career, including dozens of peer-reviewed publications, a monograph on Yeats and the Occult, and an attempt at a scholarly edition of Martin Caulder’s recently rediscovered Unreal City. He is a contributing editor at the Journal of Literary Ephemera. He is currently a maître de conférences at the Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes, and his research interests include fin de siècle Decadents and Symbolistes, Late Victorian Gothic, psychoanalytic theory, formalism, the 19^th Century Occult Revival, hermeneutics, goetia, information-theory, and neurolinguistic programming. He is currently preparing a volume on arcane forms of knowledge in 20^th Century Irish and French poetry.

MICK TWOMEY

A not-so-young man with a glorious future behind him, Mick has failed at everything he ever undertook. The lesson is, never try. He dropped out of university in 2001, towards the end of an Erasmus year in Paris, and never came back. He has worked as a bookseller, a bar-man, in telemarketing, and as a really terrible clown. Early dreams of being a famous writer have given way to frustration and resignation; he completed his first novel, Very Few to Love, in 2009, and failed to find an agent or publisher for it, despite his lackadaisical efforts. A second novel, and a third, were started and abandoned.

He currently spends many hours tinkering with worn-out and overwrought prose first written several years ago. He is a dedicated decadent, and pursues excess and self-destruction with wild abandon. Long fascinated with the darker side of life, he has become a slave to his melancholy and his anomie, and takes refuge in oblivion and ecstasy at every chance he gets.

EMILY COLLINS

A native of Clare, in the West of Ireland, Emily Collins studied English and French Literature at University College Cork. Having spent time living in France in her childhood, she was a dedicated Francophile, and fulfilled a life-long dream by moving to Paris in 2003. She worked as a bookseller in an anglophone bookshop for several years, before taking up her academic career again, and becoming a lectrice at Université de Paris-Nouvelles Athènes, while studying for her Master’s in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. Subsequently, she embarked on a PhD on Virginia Woolf, which remains uncompleted. She has had her journalism published in several small magazines and on websites that don’t pay their writers. She has written a novel that she has never shown anyone. She married a French man in 2010, and thought of starting a blog about being a young Irish woman in France, but it never got beyond some notes in yet another mostly-empty but very pretty notebook. She has often been accused of being “away with the fairies”. If only they knew.

JILL LIEBOWITZ

Jill grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where one in four people are self-described mental health professionals, and all the others either work in tech or are homeless. A teenage malcontent, she went into a Goth phase in the ‘90s that never really ended. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied Film and Creative Writing, and worked tirelessly as a social-justice campaigner. After a Junior Year Abroad spent down and out in Paris and London, she was accepted to an MFA programme at Columbia in Creative Non-Fiction. Her work has been awarded a number of prizes, and published in many journals and reviews. Her first collection of poetry, How Bright Things Are, was published in 2015. She is currently preparing a collection of essays and cultural criticism, to be released in 2020. Her hobbies include entomology, etymology, archaeology, burlesque, and radical feminist witchcraft.

MARK DEVLIN

Born in Australia to Irish parents, Mark Devlin spent most of his childhood in Ireland, with occasional spells in the United States. As a child, he was obsessed with fantasy literature and roleplaying games, but kicked the habit in his mid-teens, when he realised that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and being a Dungeon Master, were mutually exclusive. He would still read The Earthsea Trilogy at least once a year, but he didn’t talk about it. After studying English and Philosophy at University College Cork, he became a secondary school teacher in an all-girls Catholic school and started a theatre company. When his nerves couldn’t take it anymore, he applied for a position as a lecteur in English literature at Université de Paris-Nouvelle Athènes. One thing led to another, and he ended up getting sucked in by academia again. Initial enthusiasm gave way to diffidence and procrastination, and he defended his very pedestrian thesis in 2015, after spending five years researching irrelevant and esoteric topics in the dark corners of the internet and furtively reading RPG forums, and one year desperately typing the thing that he ended up calling his dissertation.

Eventually, he gave up pretending and started writing a fantasy novel. He very much enjoys hiking and camping, and communing with Nature. He lives in Montmartre with his wife and two children. He works as a tour-guide and translator.

ANTON MERRILL

He comes from a family of ridiculous over-achievers, and gladly fulfils the role of black sheep. A true Renaissance man, he has dabbled in being an impresario, a Svengali, a rabble-rouser, a guru, a rock-star, a tramp, a prophet. He has been a star of stage and screen. He has whipped the crowd into a frenzy.

A scholarship to study screenwriting at Berkeley in California was combined with a brief flirtation with Hollywood, but Hollywood was found sadly lacking. Several years of vagabondage followed, with spells in Paris, Edinburgh, Budapest, Barcelona, Prague, Svalbard, New Mexico, Malawi, Ramallah, and Marrakesh. He currently lives between Berlin and Paris, writing on culture and society for a variety of small-press journals and radical websites. His major work, The Key to All Mythologies, completed in his mid-twenties, is now sadly out of print.