This one needs a little explanation. I wrote it to see what would happen when I broke apart English syntax, in response to an exercise in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. You take a few sentences then randomly pick words and string them together anew, trying to avoid making any sense and remembering to use the little words so it still appears to resemble something recognisable. Then you read it back to yourself.
This exercise showed me how much the structures of my thought are shaped (determined?) by the common arrangements of language, and where I could go when I loosened my grip. For the rest of the day I felt as if I were walking on marshmallow, that I’d glimpsed some deep mysteries of the world, though couldn’t quite articulate what they were.
This was the beginning of experimenting with how to use language to get beyond language, rather like with abstract painting, to see whether I could induce a mesmeric world of emotion and sensation where a reader fully participates in co-creating the story. The novel Red Mirrors was the result.
Coiled Mirror Reverb
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