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.
Schietree 