‘Tenebrae’ in The Wild Hunt

The bluebells are wet outside the window and in the dark we make coffee and stand looking over our plans, and talk to each other without moving our lips, or touching, or seeing one another. You disrobe and pull on old-fashioned trousers, shirt, braces. Wool, linen, nylon, metal. We have to finish something larger than ourselves. I disrobe and attire myself in an old-fashioned pair of trousers, shirt, braces, jumper. Wool, linen, nylon, metal, and wool again. I light seven candles in the library and carefully put them out one by one by blowing on them. You go out to the coop and call softly to the animals sleeping inside.

A new story (ish) up in one of my favourite places, The Wild Hunt. There are lots of atmospheric, rich, unsettling pieces up there today, and I highly recommend that when you have the time, you make yourself a coffee (black) and read through them at leisure.

The story/prose poem piece of mine is from the collection I just finished – the third one. The most experimental, I think, in that it has short stories, poetry, prose poems, mini essays and the like in it – and ‘Tenebrae’ is probably a good indicator of tone, but not of form. I’m hopeful the collection will be taken up somewhere, given that the individual pieces of it have been published well in literary magazines (and best of lists!) but given its wild unruliness I know it needs to find the right editor, the right home. I’ll wait with it. That’s all writers can do; make and wait. And live and read. I’ve just finished reading Proofs and Theories, a collection of essays by Louise Glück – one of my favourite poets – and am sitting in the depths of its alacrity and its referential coils. But at last the sunshine is out here in Scotland, so I might go off and do that other thing. The living part.

‘Slake’ on The Rupture

I have a new story up on The Rupture today:

I was looking for a place to sit down when I saw a woman dressed in black tearing a page out of the book she was reading and putting it into her mouth. The café was dark, with rain trickling down the windows and the gothic city behind it painted broadly, though the woman was lit up in the golden beam from a downturned pendulum light, also black, giving an appearance as if the whole thing was a deliberate set up for such a performance.

Read the full thing here, and check out the other new pieces in 108.

After All Disintegrating as an Active Mode on Hobart

Here’s a story of mine, in the fantastic Hobart:

 

It is very much par the normal course of events to find yourself lying sheathed in an almost translucent blue-and-silver shawl on a patch of ochre dirt land, stroking the ground a little, early of a June morning. So it was with Simão. You may guess he had been drinking; sure he had. There were pinkish orchids in the trees above and glossy bromeliads bending wet and clutching each branch a bird or two with an intellectual and mocking eye.

In the history of human adventure this was all quite meek. Battles have been fought on frozen rivers in which everyone was naked and the squelched and various wounds steamed mightily and the blood froze like a red carpet under the players. At other times let’s be clear whole families were lost as city streets were renamed by a single pen stroke, or under a cracked glass were rerouted into a subterranean channel. Even once it is rumoured that an astronaut vanished from the international space station, though its doors are kept firmly snibbed even in the finest weather.

Read more

As you can probably tell, the piece is inspired by Calvino. I’ve been reading his work lately, and keep thinking how I need to swoop up everything he ever did.

Currently: I am heading to London soon for a showcase of Scottish writing, then to Italy for a retreat, where I hope to get a slew of work done. It’s been slow here, on that front. But Spring is coming, and writing always gets into gear then.

 

Story Roundup + Interview

(a picture of Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil)

 

Here are some pieces recently published in the following places:

 

Vol 1. Brooklyn

Occulum

Queen Mob’s Teahouse

 

There’s an interview with me in Westender

 

And tickets are on sale for my appearance with the excellent Camilla Grudova at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, on Friday the 24th of August at 6.30pm.

The Unsung Letter No. 60

 

This week, Kate Kiernan tells us of a book of short stories examining transness and human nature in general:

 

In many ways [redacted]’s short stories succeed in establishing a trans subject whose transness is meaningfully enmeshed within a broader human (and, indeed, non-human) community; the revolt of her characters is not a queer one per se (a constructive expression aimed at a status quo) but a natural one (a destructive expression of who they are).

 

Read the full piece here.

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