Category: Writing
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Rethinking Mythogeography
I first came across Phil Smith in Walking, Writing and Performance, in which he appears as ‘The Crab Man’, an alter ego also credited as one of the contributors to 2010’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways: a collection of fragmentary narratives that construct and deconstruct an approach to walking as an artistic practice, a…
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Ishmael House
Ishmael House stands along a small stretch of gravel road leading up a hill away from our town. A two-storey granite brick sentry that appears, alongside an old and dying ash tree as no more than an accent stretching out onto desolate sky. The boundary, not that it is needed, is a fence that seems…
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Ghosts on the Shore
Identities – of people and of places – form slowly over time, through the sedimentary accretion of multiple overlapping layers. Even the oldest or most deeply buried stories never entirely disappear. Sometimes it takes the archaeologist, or the psychoanalyst, to do a little digging. Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore enacts a sustained process of…
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The Old Weird Albion
Histories and hauntings of the English South When I think of the South Downs, I see a watercolour of Beachy Head by Eric Ravilious. A chalky white cliff illuminated by a lighthouse with an ominous raincloud hovering above it. I remember climbing to the top of the Devil’s Dyke to look at the pastoral Constable…
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On Time and Mess
Once we understand excess, then we can get really simple. – Robert Rauschenberg Exploring poetry’s absent indispensable character Because poetry is not a thing that lives, to put it mildly, upon the regulation and control of grammar and correct spelling, in the final preparations for the publication of my book, ‘I fear…
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Broke-Down Fords and Angels
Part I Dry Creek is where I grew up, but it isn’t my home, not really. It’s the place I went to school, where my family resides, the place I learned that belonging isn’t a thing you get just because you grow up somewhere. Dry Creek is the hole my mother got sick in and…
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Forever Changed in a Second
Part II She sat in the waiting room of the family doctor watching the children play in the wallpaper across the room. Her eyes followed as boys and girls stacked blocks, rolled balls, and carried bright red balloons from scene to scene. Praying that if she stared long enough, the pounding in her chest would…
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Road to New
Part III As we drove across interstate ten towards Baton Rouge, I wasn’t sure if I was saying hello or goodbye. Hello to the miles and miles of Louisiana marsh I hadn’t seen in years. Hello to the hope of something new glimmering in the back of my mind. And goodbye to pretty much everything…
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The Unending Cycle
For Ayesha I look into Haruki’s eyes and discover something that disturbs me profoundly. There is a familiarity. In the aftermath of The Demolition Of My Construct (my break-up), I must admit I am suffering from a fear of intimacy with anyone, anything. Even these fluffy felines, Haruki and Mowgli. What I see in his…
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The Second Body
At 6 a.m. on a Thursday morning in November it was completely dark outside, but the butcher’s shop was strip-lit and the raw meat area was full of busy young men. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing – the men were large and they were moving quickly in a small crowded…
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Concrete Music – Artificial Plant – October
Concrete Music over six foot lying on its back damp-worn sides as souvenirs of basement tenure unmoved to the top floor a sun-bleached face now that the upstairs neighbours are rubble ears within shouting distance. With shells, the BLOCK was returned to itself though imprecisely scythed; concrete lines don’t demarcate but are breached…