Myth-Making
Short Stories and Doorways
We Sleep Within the Vast Sadness of the Mountain
Creaturely transformations, an encounter with the daughter of the minotaur, descending to the Down Below…
‘I never lie to the girls. They brave the passage to choose a new form and I let them play with Hyena, Mouse and Porcupine, my latest metamorph.’
(5-minute read)
Shortlisted for Fractured Lit’s Ghost, Fable and Fractured Fairytale Prize 2022
Ancient Power of Fright and Lust
A white lemur and the world-tree stick, a scroll of water separating into rivulets, a woman tired of holding the worlds together…
‘Tame our sister, the merchants say to the bearded sorcerer. We trapped the moon inside her, but the tides are playing havoc with the ships and Sister won’t obey.’
(5-minute read)
Written in response to the painting ‘Syssigy’ by Leonora Carrington
Odyssey to the Origin of Our Reader
The garden with a cosmic vase, the november snowfall of a poet’s world in the river at dusk, the coming of age landscape…
‘Unknown pleasures release green mist into my dreams, a reflection of the beginning in which a mermaid, tattooed bather of youth, swims to the west of the west.’
(1-minute read)
Written in response to titles of paintings by Matthew Wong
Red Mirrors
Extract from the novel in progress
In a world in which psychological states are real landscapes, a pair of shipwrecked lovers cause each other's deaths again and again, a half-human island girl searches for her missing sisters, while in the mountain citadel a guardian investigates the parade of red mirrors and a timeless woman speaks with the voice of blood.
‘In the mountain citadel, I ate my eye so I could see. The mountain dissolved me, took me inside his deepest secrets and made me watch his genesis. Then I watched his long erosion so I’d know how to perceive what wasn’t there, how to fill the space he once filled and sculpt his shape from our tattered geometrics.’
(Extract: 5-minute read)
Present at the Birth of Mystery
Trapeze acts, somersaulting to someplace new, the day-ghost moon sinking blue…
‘A fish with a bouquet of anemones said, Swim with me in the sky. Time is a river without banks.’
(1-minute read)
A companion piece to ‘Archipelago’
Written in response to the painting ‘Blue Circus’ by Marc Chagall
Forbidden isles, orphic bliss, clouds eclipsing then revealing rocks in wrecking places…
‘It isn’t theft if it’s your destiny, a gossamer thing, blown from your palm in one foul breath.’
(1-minute read)
A companion piece to ‘Present at the Birth of Mystery’
Proportional wizardy, the bright moon collapse, swarming meadows and secretive bodies of water…
‘I watch him trying to read me like a castle. My twin-towered gateway and murder holes intrigue him, while my barbican is a provocation to test my water defences.’
(1-minute read)
Fractured shoreline, coastal metaphysics, the golden wheel accelerating the shift…
‘Max wants to believe himself the giant of this grand adieu. The dunes of the silt desert shift as the blue gryphons walk towards him, but he isn’t the one calling them.’
(5-minute read)
A Russian storyteller walks out of his time and captivates a traveller with impossible tales…
‘You could use this skeleton and revisit your own life to see what could have been. At one point you’ll find yourself out beyond Andromeda. It’s really very pleasant there at this time of year.’
(5-minute read)
A whole life, abstracted and transformed into the mystical; a vision of before and after and the exile of the inbetween…
‘fresh from the ocean of sensation, i was born into a world of concepts, my face eclipsed by expectation, the passage of a wide brush shading my features before they'd become my own.’
(5-minute read)
Written in response to a series of photographs in Aesthetica Magazine, Feb/Mar 2023