Bless us, St. Nico, we who need a mirror when no one else on earth understands. Save us, your flock, from threats of dreaded normalcy. Especially faggots like me – reared in the deep, rural south, suffering through adolescence starved for a savior anti-Madonna fierce enough to hold her own. We once were lost but your evening of light helped us see.
Give us strength these days to confront unforgotten failures on our own. Your mercy doesn’t wash away the sins but instead lends credence and visibility to our disgrace. Through no intention of your own but because of who you were then, are now and will forever be, you are canonized as a patron saint to jilted lovers, downtrodden vagabonds, misunderstood, unwitting geniuses, the woman underestimated by men of art and industry. You remain many things for many people, yes, again, even an impetuous, lowly faggot like me, and so many more who find themselves on the other side of popular prayer.
Never one to be eclipsed or upstaged by so many men with half your divinity and faculties, you showed us a path to perpetual salvation. And though the road leading to the lawns of dawn be paved with the best intentions that trick the feet with false feelings of comfort and success, your gospel grants the reassuring guidance necessary to leave overdrawn caresses as we continue our pilgrimage through this travesty called life.
And through thorough examination of your documented life journey, we find that you had faults of your own, all too common prejudices of your day and age. You, too were human. Too late to forgive and too grievous to forget. We address your own sins to show how failures of flesh and mind exist even in the holiest of people. Base level skin and bone shells are capable of only so much. With this recognition we more easily see our own faults and become grateful for what life we have left to correct our mistakes and right our wrongs. We add a prayer here for you, St. Nico, that you have or will realize and reckon with these trespasses.
Your art, Elysian. Your influence, limited but crucial for us who know…we, the innocent and vain. We’ve got the gold and with this transmutation we now have a way to wrap our troubles in dreams. May our holy headphones make us mediums for your message of insouciant misery, your promises of ways around instead of directly through adversity with little confrontation.
We close this prayer to thee, Teutonic saint of uncompromising individuality, with waves of gratitude lapping at your detached, disinterested and icy shore. You come into our lives when we need you most. You offer salvation in the form of an unfeeling monotone that warms when we recognize a shared__________________. You imbue us with the power to suffer, resilient and beautiful, any hardship the world throws our way. You point us in the truest direction, we see and go wherever your gaunt fingers command. All this and much more which we will never be truly worthy. You fell on accident and hemorrhaged for our sins. We know this and we hate ourselves for this interpretation. Solace comes when we listen to your songs. Forgiveness comes when we sing along as if these hymns have the power to restore. Transcendence comes when your droning voice overshadows our own and lifts us up with you in heaven before sending us crashing back down to reconvene our suffering here on earth. But highly blessed, strengthened and remade by your redeeming grace.
And the people said: My Heart Is Empty
Jarrod Campbell is a writer living in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. His fiction, essays, poetry, non-fiction and reviews have appeared in print and online with Heavy Feather Review, Northwest Review, Boner World (Berlin), Modern Literature, and more. A collection of short stories, The Reason I’m Here, (Stalking Horse Press, June 2023) was named an anticipated LGBTQIA+ read by Lambda Literary the month of its release.
Driving from Edinburgh to Cairnryan, still in a state of dulled lucidity, unable to fully grasp the enormity of the journey. Once boarded, sounds, smells and motion wake me. I notice the dissipating sleep inertia while cruising. I observe how coastlines move along the ferry. Waves delineate the present, allude to the past and possibly a future. In my mind, I draw the shores with cliffs and hills, inlets and rivers flowing. Sketch the clouds too.
Some ancestors endeavoured the same voyage. Probably many times. Perilous on occasion. From Argyle to Antrim. Settling. My family’s history, a fragmented genealogy, has recently become more important to me. I’ve managed to connect dots, milestones and major events.
Forefathers joined rebellions and fought for hope. Romantically perhaps, I wish valorous and chivalrous men engaged in battles to protect the vulnerable and those who couldn’t stand up for themselves. But I know these forefathers — particularly the first ones who crossed from Normandy to lead the charge at Hastings — were mercenaries. Medieval warriors for coin who later became part of more rewarding and legitimate causes. Fights for freedom. Something I like to mention with pride.
Thinking of those many descendants and generations through centuries of being and remaining unsettled. Stories to make sense of my own existence.
The crossing is smooth. Too short for elaborate meanderings. As I never used this ferry crossing before, ruminating through history appeals, is pertinent. Locations as markers of my mariner heritage: Loch Ryan, Carrickfergus and Whiteabbey. An ancient maritime route. Connecting Scotland and Ireland, trading and exchanging stories, for centuries.
Docking in Belfast comes as an interruption. Like the ancestors, who feel so discernible now, this is a brief stay. Layover, a pause. I walk and my antecedents walk with me. Unsteady and slow, vague and opaque. But they are there. Here.
. . .
Reaching Ireland feels like an achievement, culmination of many attempts and struggles. There’s a sense of accomplishment. Finality or not. So…I tell myself this won’t be the last time. Self-reassurance feels like cheating life. And death. Perhaps I have always been a cheat, an imposter — a syndrome that has plagued me since early teens.
I see opportunity for new experiences, even repeats, as a welcome sign, a bonus, a rewarding gift for my own persistence and perseverance. An inherited determination that has possibly prolonged my life, or slightly plateaued the progression of symptoms and appears to have altered the course of expectations, both from the clinicians perspective and our (family and me) own.
“Life expectancy is six to nine years for most. Some get twelve.” It says so on the website, in the leaflets. Nine years in, I sincerely believe I have more than three years left in me. A calculation I have never expressed, never shared. An aspirational awareness.
When the new neurologist affirms the diagnosis — Corticobasal Degenerative Syndrome — he immediately adds ‘atypical’ with a gentle smile, referring to an uncharacteristically slower decline than expected. I return his smile. As if we bond in a complicity to deceive the expected. Gratitude, an element of self deprecation and a desire to cheat the norm. He tells me there’s no certitude, no predictability or any clinical factors to provide a reliable prognosis. But he knows the numbers as well as I do. He too, understands time. And he knows it’s irreversible and incurable, degenerative. Curtains are closing, slowly yet very surely. He knows, he alludes to it and he gives me another, now even more compassionate smile. I like his manner, his tone and expressions, his clarity, his twinkle. A shimmer like tiny stars on dark curtains.
Some use the word gift, as if a benevolent creature rewards me. I accept it all: my condition, the illness, the lack of clarity and certainty of prognosis, the inability to obtain assurance. There’s defiance and acceptance. I resist limitations while embracing an increasingly disabled life.
I no longer drive myself. I miss it. The car, the independence, possibilities and destinations. Actually, I no longer have the ability to do much myself. Beyond some thinking. And even that is difficult. For more than three quarters of the hours of the day, I struggle with everything. 75 per cent of the time I exist in near to full obscurity. I live in the vicinity of perpetual fog, my life floating around mist banks. Fog formations over bodies of water with me on a boat without mast or sail, no oars nor anchors. To me this mist, the fog, appears monochrome, as rudimentary woven linen and lace. Écru. Raw and untreated. Weirdly tangible. Veils, retaining some elegance and delicacy, rather than heavy ruby theatrical curtains. They open a few hours each day when I feel freed, am allowed to wonder and be lucid.
Definitely happy. Really happy. Childishly happy.
Despite that, some hours later, I am always ushered back to my veiled sense. An uncertain existence, where all true consciousness evaporates, just leaving some cloud-like space I fill with unknown. Unknowns. Plural.
Repetitive oscillatory motions, erratic pendulum patterns. Yet, I am truly happy.
Embarking on this road trip, I emphatically exclaimed it — “I am the happiest I have ever been.” — unsure if anyone would believe me. And maybe it did sound unreal, not credible, callous even. Surely, key events in my life Have rendered me happier. No! Maybe this is a different connotation of happiness, or as I see it, another realm, a new dimension.
An end-of-life prolepsis, ahead of time. An early fictionalised version, or view, with sea horizon clarity on a bright day. Translucent and floating above aquamarine, turquoise, cyan and seafoam. Tangible glee, near-delirious high spirits I can hold in my hand as tanzanite, reminding me of trichroic properties. Appearances of sea blues, sunset violet, with lavender tones, hints of tangerine, blood orange and burgundy.
It is not contentment, not merely gratification, neither fulfilment nor a feeling of comfort. It is an elevated joy, elation and the discovery of tingling delight. Even a somewhat tantalising notion of new found jouissance, discovery of late life ecstasy. Rather apt, timely. My own renaissance.
As physical excruciating pain has a hold over me, like a threatening hang-man standing on a scaffold not too far away, smiling. Agony always is an ugly face.
When I mention joy and happiness, others often find it impossible to imagine. Maybe because of my facial expression, at times anguished, when muscles jerk and spasm and my entire body is assaulted by torrents of aches.
Or maybe because of the finality. What appears contradictory makes it even more special for me.
The north to south drive crisscrossing counties and sceneries is not so much a reminder of previous returns home, but a refreshing perspective of an amazing varied tapestry of places and meanings. New, old, new, old. Non-linear meaning, circular mapping, a cartographer’s wild dance and rites of spring. Around a fire with flames reaching up as if to colour the night sky yellow to amber. Past autumn, in a brightness of winter. Anticipation of renewal.
Closer to home, it is more recognisable.
Memory-lane is flanked by old copper beach trees whose drooping branches appear to prepare for weeping. Nature’s anticipation of sadness and a reminder of cycles. Limbs surrender. This is not my dolorous time. Not yet. Desolation emerges in shapes from crystalline and fluid to sharply outlined and clear. Coloured or black. Sorrow hangs on branches as a substitute for once vibrant leaves. They all fell and are heaped along the path to form floating ephemeral dams and ditches, they’re soft-walling the roadside but it’ll only take the lightest breeze to displace them. I like the lightheartedness of that thought. Any glumness I might have carried on my shoulders floats away. Anticipatory melancholy instead of deepest darkest grief, is what I note about this lane.
Sweetest melancholy. Pensive and pending in this moment. Slow yet still rhythmic. Poetic and impressionistic vibrant.
While I look at the sky, we’re driving slowly towards the river, swollen as if the banks are no longer able to contain the landscape, flooding the cartographers precision with new impressions. I settle for seeing clouds simply move. Different boundaries. New horizons. Not for me. Or not for long for me. Again, I wonder if cloudscapes, seascapes and landscapes, those I happily contoured or traveled through for decades, are as inviting to generations following the imprints. In sand or dust or ash.
This visit is about letting go. Like clouds. Or feathers of smoke from the wood and peat fire that invites me to sit down. Perhaps have a drink. Smile. Or not. Yes, smile.
Smile…
. . .
In 2013, Bo Mandeville moved from Ireland to North Wales to run the National Writers’ Centre. After less than two years in the post, he had to retire due to a neurodegenerative disorder. Over the years, his multidisciplinary practice has taken him from Ireland and Belgium to France, Netherlands, Germany and the United States. His work spans cultural anthropology, film-making, writing and creating (mainly) anonymous, ephemeral land art. He set up and directed several multidisciplinary arts projects and festivals, curated film events and was a board member of an EU Film Festival organisation. Bo has scripted several film projects, produced and co-directed documentary films and gave talks about film at events and colleges.
over seventy windblown years tied to the mast, patience has eluded me leaving me to hum along the shrillest siren call in grating irritation struggling to find or develop a minimal measure of discernment to catch my breath, one breath between the healing itch the mending pain and the vicious nag of wounding aches might say my suspicious mind dove for a dark, silty bottom and found the drain unclogging gratitude or trust to sluice and flush a pressured dram of bittersweet relief
. . .
David Rodriguez is a 71-year-old prodigal son trapped in a Ground Hog Day loop. The thought that all the scribblings of my circuitous, rambling life will either end up in the dumpster or belong to a posterity I will never see has been keeping me up at night lately.
The North Shore, Blackpool. All photos by Stefan Svennson.
Every year, in the last week of June, the mills, engine rooms, and coal mines in Oldham closed down, and an exodus followed. My great-grandparents, George and Alice (both born in 1867), dressed to the nines, would board the ‘Wakes Week Special’ at the station and head for Shangri-La. The railway served as a steam-powered conveyor belt that shifted human assemblies from the factory floor to a manufactured seaside resort I had the best of reasons to return to Blackpool. It was a joke of a place where you could let rip, lose yourself and fall in love. It was my seaside heritage and had become synonymous with northern soul.
The West Coast express from Euston was packed with jovial passengers, many bursting with stories, but even before Watford Junction, I was in the zone, oblivious to my surroundings, absorbed totally in forcing sonic madeleines up to the surface. The first to return was the voice of my father, “Look, son, can you see it, there, faraway beyond Crow Wood?” From the same vantage spot on Billinge Marilyn looking out to where the skyline met the Irish Sea we had seen an island of unearthly beauty covered with trees. Once he was certain I had spotted the thin vertical silhouette that he said was the Eiffel Tower, he started to parrot, “There’s a famous seaside town called Blackpool, that’s noted for fresh air and fun, and Mr and Mrs Ramsbottom went there with young Albert, their son. “
I eventually arrived with my bucket and spade at the advanced age of eight and a half. Outside the Fun House on the South Shore, an automaton with large, round eyes, bright red lips, and a disconcerting gaze sat inside a glass cabinet. A crown was resting on its frizzy hair and a sad Pierrot sat on its lap. As it rocked on its throne, it emitted a deranged cackle that I felt compelled to imitate and which, like a nursery rhyme, would become indelible. At the Winter Gardens, I had been mesmerised by a magician in his tailcoat and white bow tie called the Amazing Yoxani who was bound, placed in a bag, and then locked in a large trunk by a female assistant. The heavy curtain fell, and when it rose moments later, there he was, bowing and smiling at the audience. He then bounded over to the trunk, unlocked it, and liberated his female assistant. I knew it was a trick, but it didn’t matter but it felt very real. Cinematic flashbacks of the wooden hut for lost children at the entrance of Pleasure Beach, the pennies that never fell from the shelves in the amusement arcade, sheets of spray spilling onto the promenade and the drawn curtains of the fortune tellers’ kiosks flooded in as the train approached Warrington. In the menagerie at the Tower, I listened to a recording of Stanley Holloway reciting his monologue of Albert and the Lion. Dressed in his Sunday best, young Ramsbottom had stuck a stick with a horse’s head handle into Wallace, the lion’s ear and paid for it with his life. My father had frightened me by telling me it was a true story.
My paternal grandparents, Ben (born 1892), a machine fitter and Doris (born 1899), had also gone to Blackpool by train from Oldham during wakes week. Granny once told me that when the Tower and the gleaming sands came into view through the carriage window , the atmosphere changed. The starchiness vanished, and the excited holidaymakers burst out singing, passing round bags of sweets. She also told me of a rainy day on the promenade when she had watched with astonishment as a group of miners she recognised from Wood Park Colliery had passed her jigging with joy.
I changed trains at Preston and on the last short leg through the flat and characterless Fylde plain a man sitting opposite me asked me if I was off to see the ‘Lights’. When I told him I was going dancing, he replied, “You’ve got the right place, pal, they even dance in the street.” Blackpool North had an end-of-the-line feel. Its platforms were deserted, and its surroundings resembled a sanitary landfill. Inside the station, there was a large concourse with no seats that served as a holding area beyond the automatic ticket barriers. Two long queues of passengers snaked round its perimeter. A gaggle of officious station foremen guarded the platforms to ensure orderly boarding for the trains to Lime Street and Manchester Airport. Outside the station, there was a connecting underpass to the tram interchange. Head down, I hurried past a group of inert heroin addicts and a man wrapped in a layer of homemade lard, clutching a can of ale. Behind me, I heard the low hum of a modern tram gliding towards the shore. Talbot Road felt edgy, cut off and run down with swathes of arrested brownfield development. Even in the town centre, there was a moribund low season feel. The many multi-storey car parks and spacious lots were almost empty and the few people in the street seemed in a hurry to get home
In a few minutes, I reached the Golden Mile . The priapic Tower was lit in indium blue, and the Prom bathed in electric sunshine. There were many live shows and music venues on the strip. At the entrance to the North Pier a middle-aged woman where I bought some sticks of rock called me ‘sweetheart’ in a cheery Lancashire brogue. The illumination and movement had lifted my spirit. Someone had written in chalk on the pavement, Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present. It was a sin to be unhappy in Blackpool. The Scots and Scouse hordes were walking the walk, and there was a hen party from Yorkshire. I could hear the sea booming in the dark dusk. Ocean Boulevard, The Esplanade and the Atlantic were the set for our shared illusion. Dray horses with jingling bells were clip-clopping towards Central Pier pulling pink Cinderella carriages sprinkled with tinsel
There was already a line of old souls outside the Tower Ballroom, intent on securing tables close to the dance floor. I walked towards Pleasure Beach, hoping to hear the bellowing mechanical laugh of the ‘King of Fun’, but all I could reconnect with was uptown Motown and Stax music coming from the crowded bars. The scaffolding of the roller coasters resembled glittering lattices in the darkness. Their cars, full of screaming late-night riders crawled up the steep inclines before shooting comet-like through a starless sky. The Blue Waves, The Windmill and The Sands were derelict, but there were still plenty of pet-welcoming boarding houses advertising Free Showers. The Sea Front Camelot Tea Rooms, which I felt I remembered from seventy years ago, was offering every permutation of the Full English breakfast.
When I returned to the Tower, the queue had been replaced by a strong smell of vinegar and fried onions. I looked up at its archways, stained glass windows and the vertiginous criss-cross lattice of iron and steel. I showed my ‘Togetherness’ wristband to the smiling doorman and climbed the stairs to Circus Walkway. As I rounded the first corner, I was hit by the sound of Frankie Beverly belting out If That’s What You Wanted. I started to mouth the lyrics with the same autonomic reflexes that compelled me to mimic heading a ball every time I watched a corner kick:
Ha! Since I’ve been left here, darling, I’ve been walking into closed doors, call yeah! I needn’t tell you how much I love you, but I just can’t take it no more, ah yeah!
The final three in the Dance Championship, Tower Ballroom, Blackpool.
The ballroom on Level 3 was rococo with Victorian knobs on. It was adorned with columns, arches, cherubs, friezes and balconies. A large crystal chandelier hung from the sliding roof. An invocation to the dance written by William Shakespeare, “Bid me discourse; I will enchant thine ear”, written for Venus in her seduction of Adonis, was emblazoned on the top of the proscenium arch. Below the stage, the Mighty Wurlitzer used to orchestrate the quickstep, tango and waltzes lay dormant for the weekend. The disc jockey, Richard Searling was tucked unobtrusively between two large LED video screens whose purpose was to magnify and project the spinning discs. The music was rawer and looser than Motown but had the same mono, four on the floor backbeat. Every record had a hook line that was repeated over and over and the beat was kept heavy. I imagined the clanking and grinding of engines, the honking of forklifts and the rhythmical high-pitched clatter of looms on the mill floor. A fervent, supercharged excitement rose from the ballroom’s sprung wooden dancefloor. The dancers’ intricate backward swerves, dervish spins, Soul Train turns, backdrops, swallow dives, and somersaults of the dancers reminded me of the amphetamine-driven rats I had studied in the speed laboratory. The music seemed timeless. Soon I was floating out on the floor, feeling the syncopated horns and strings, galvanising my thinning muscles. I was still the old modernist, making moves I didn’t know I still had in me. I owned the music, kept the faith and was not too old to dream.
The stars of the northern soul scene were black American artists, almost unknown to the general public and a handful of blue-eyed white singers like Frankie Valli, Timi Yuro and Dean Paris. The disc jockeys were unfussy magicians who constructed an illuminated reality from pieces of plastic and were able to create an illusory willing suspension of belief . Most of the favourite tracks were obscure flops from the sixties and seventies with furious melodies, heavy syncopation and powerful vocals. Years of communal connoisseurship had led to an impeccable quality control. As the hours passed, listening to the music, I fell into a trance. There were moments when I was carried back to the Abracadabra magic show with a white rabbit materialising from an empty top hat and a bunch of scarves rising in defiance of gravity. The music became a healing force that loved me back.
Around midnight on the second day, I climbed up to the sweeping upper balcony and looked down, scouring the floor for the Dopamine Dancer and for David, the Boy Miracle from Stirling, who had been brought back to life after a brainstorm by a northern soul tape. The stomping was spontaneous, improvised and high energy. There was no leader, everyone was free to express themselves in their own way but a strong sense of etiquette existed on the floor. Each dancer reacted to those in closest proximity and avoided getting too close by steering an instinctive course, which returned them to their own spot sometimes marked by a pool of sweat. Everyone was committed to having the best night ever. Fifty five years after it began northern soul was now being kept alive by the children and grandchildren of the pioneers from the iconic venues like the Torch, the Highland Room, The Casino, The Catacombs, the Pier, the Ritz and the 100 Club, Some renegades from the funk and disco scene who had belatedly found the holy grail and a few visitors from the Japanese, Australian and Canadian scenes injected new blood. Some of the old soulies were now too unwell to dance but still got high on the music, and there was still plenty of fast footwork in evidence from bald elderly men in Fred Perry shirts, vests and baggy trousers and glowing women of a certain age with long circle skirts and lightweight tops. The motion was soulful, passionate and beautiful to watch. First, I spotted David in a white shirt sitting with friends in ‘ Scotch Corner’ close to the stage on the left in front of the record stalls. Then I picked out Anne, the Dopamine Dancer freed from the shackles of Parkinson’s disease, dancing in the middle of the ballroom. Music had released her handbrake and she could dance all night
From Left to Right: David, Anne, A. J. Lees and Richard Searling, on the stage at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool, November 8, 2025.
On Sunday afternoon, I took a tram back to the station with my heartbeat still turned up and wreathed in a glow of animation. A burly man with a loud voice told me it was a free ride then warned me to transfer my wallet to my back pocket. As my train pulled out of Blackpool North. I felt that I had become truer to myself. The invigorating make-believe world of northern soul was a portal to authenticity. It brought home that the high bogus of scientific fraud, doctored clinical trials and the sale of counterfeit medicine had dragged me down. Some technological titans who believed in the infallibility of machines were trying to reduce medicine to a measurement and I had read about unaccountable customer-friendly chatbots that encouraged the suicidal to kill themselves. Moving to the music had helped me rebuild and resynchronise. The trip to Soul Town told me I needed to take more time out to dance on the edge of volcanoes and spend time watching the sunbeams flirt with the shadows. I would continue to respect data, but I must never lose my delight in magic and faith in God
Footnote: In 1923 Blackpool football club founded in 1887 adopted a distinctive tangerine shirt with its team wearing it for the first time in a 2-2 draw against Oldham Athletic. I associate tangerine with warmth, high energy, adventure and cheerfulness.
. . .
A.J. Lees is a Professor of Neurology at the National Hospital, Queen Square and University College London. , He pioneered the use of apomorphine for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and has received international acclaim for his expertise in the treatment of abnormal movement disorders. He is also an original member of the Highly Cited Researchers ISI database. Born in St Helens Merseyside, he qualified in medicine at the Royal London Hospital Medical College, Whitechapel in 1970 and received his training in neurology at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, Paris and University College London Hospitals. His book Mentored by a Madman, The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill and New York Review of Books) published in 2016 explains the unlikely association between his neurological career and the author of Naked Lunch. His latest book Open the Door to your Heart describes the importance of dance music in his own life and in the restoration of function in some of his patients.
In March 2020, I needed a break and booked the Caledonian Sleeper Train from London to the Scottish Highlands. But, on the third and last day, walking on a wintery hillside, I overstepped and found myself face-down with a broken leg. The overnight journey back to London became an endurance test of jagging pain. I didn’t sleep. Instead, I spent much of the 12-hour journey videoing out the conveniently placed window in my sleeping compartment.
I considered a voice-over for this improvised video, but opted instead for a piano soundtrack, a piece that I had recently improvised. Of course, making this work, I was reminded of John Grierson’s iconic 1936 film, Night Mail, which was shot on the same night-time journey.
. . .
Since the 1980s Nick Stewart has created a diverse body of exhibitions and publications in, drawing, performance, video and photography. He has published two books and, more recently, completed his first feature length film. A wide range of interests and research informs his work but the question of place and national identity in the context of Ireland is of particular concern to him. Nick has been the recipient of numerous awards, residencies and commissions including, The Canada Council, The British Council, The British Film Institute and the Royal Festival Hall in London. He has exhibited widely in the UK, Ireland, Canada, USA, Europe, India and Vietnam.
All this started on a lonely bench at Frustration Station.
There I was, sitting, with a crushing sense of defeat, of failure, and a nagging urge to engage in some kind of creative process again. My life had unravelled slowly but predictably so, over the past few years. 2020 was the last straw.
I used to dream up shows, and stage them at festivals, fringe theaters, and clubs.
Exit – Irreverent Sideshows. Enter – Irrelevant Slideshows.
Working in 2D was not my thing but I was left with no better options. I started playing around with a series of photographs I had taken of two friends taking down an exhibition. I had documented their ‘performance’ — their gestures, interactions, and movements — against the white walls of the gallery.
I don’t usually print the photos I shoot but this time I did. All of them, and more than one copy of each. I propped them up against the wall at the edge of my chaotic desk.
Waiting? Maybe.
I wandered down a path without any sense (nor care) of where I was going. No purpose, no intention, no destination — a random walk in the dark. I let my pen run over the images, then added brush strokes to some, before reprinting them, then more of the same. Over and over.
After a couple of months, I was on a roll, reworking the same photographs again and again, experimenting with collage, color, different inks and paints, re-photographing, and re-printing, adding more ink and paint. I was like a child throwing toys around a sandbox and loving it.
In spring 2025, almost a year after I had shot the original photographs, I stopped for a moment and looked. I said ‘Hi’ to my new friends. I was ready to dance, to transform the photographs more purposefully, and bend them gently along a curve of intention.
I’m not planning to leave this dance floor any time soon. I might even change the music, learn some new moves.
. . .
anna f.’s background is in architecture and predominantly in theatre. She’s the founder and director of the performance group Irreverent Sideshows and recently started the visual arts project Irrelevant Slideshows. She lives in London.
I hold the memories delicately in my fingers wherever I go.
. . .
March 29, 2024, in New Orleans, Louisiana: things at the tattoo shop hadn’t panned out. Business was mind-numbingly slow, and the owner of the shop I was working at decided to let everyone go and use the shop as his own private studio.
I felt relieved, more than anything. I have a deep love for tattooing, but I didn’t feel that working at a shop was what I needed at that moment in time. It was a time in which I was deeply avoidant of anything that could lock me down. I had a gnawing need to move with agility. Any direction, any time. I was shirking structure, seeking something beyond it. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know what it was. I was only sure that I hadn’t found it, yet. In the meantime: my world was wide open.
That day, I collected the last of my things from the tattoo shop. I finished the illustrations I had been working on for some friends’ puppet show. I cut my hair. I drew on long-winged eyeliner, stood in front of the mirror in my room, and looked myself in the eyes. I said: “I want something to happen.”
I had alcoholic Monster energy in my fridge that I’d been keeping for an auspicious moment. The Beast Unleashed – Mean Green. I took it.
I went out.
Someone who was just a distant friend at the time was organizing a punk show in a local liquor store parking lot. It was my understanding that the store loved it when punks put on shows there: it was great for business. I love a punk show, I especially love a punk show in a weird location, so I have to go. The friend I’d made plans to go with canceled last minute. Her ex was there, staring daggers into my back. Talking to my friend Vex, they said, “It seems you’re doing a lot of Closure Things.” I agreed.
Some friends I knew to varying degrees, including my roommates at the time, were putting on a renegade show afterwards. Freak rave with noise interludes. The location, given by hotline, was in a large abandoned lot in a weird part of town- this dead nowhere zone nestled between an overpass and a mostly-abandoned residential neighborhood that had been plagued by strings of misfortune.
I pulled up a dark dirt road in my silver Subaru Legacy and parked. A brightly-painted Ford Ranger pulled up nearby. Two figures hopped out. One, Guinevere, a friend, the writer of the puppet show I had been making illustrations for. Two, Lucian, someone from out of town, who I had met briefly a few days before.
“Oh hey, we were just talking about you,” Guinevere called out.
I was surprised: “Talking shit, I hope!”
We wandered into the weeds, then deeper down a scraggly tunnel of bushes and small trees, the path lined with occasional glow sticks. On the other side of the tunnel: a decaying corrugated metal warehouse.
The spot and surrounding neighborhood had been scoped out long before the event, but the day of the show a huge overturned bus had suddenly appeared in the middle of the building. It seemed like the abandoned warehouse was also someone’s chop shop for scrapping stolen vehicles. Music and visual gear was set up atop the engineless bus. We all climbed on and around the looted vehicle, spun on a freely rotating wheel aloft, jumped through windows above to windows below.
After a while, the novelty wore off, and the undertone of conflict between various coupled friends was becoming ever-more perceptible, so I made my escape to a fire pit outside.
Monster finally cracked open, I found myself talking to Lucian from out of town. We talked a long time about travel, brutalist architecture, and other things that slip my mind now. He said he’d just bought a boat in Martinique, an island in the Caribbean I had never heard of. He didn’t live anywhere. New Orleans was only a stopover on the way to his new boat, bought sight unseen with a broken motor. He seemed confident he could fix it. I believed him. I thought, how cool, I’m sure he’ll have a great time.
Just then, a strange man with a can of beer swayed over to the fire. He was wearing black and white vertically striped pants and looked like oogle beetlejuice. I had never seen this man before in my life. He interrupted the conversation I was having with L. “Excuse me…excuse me, can I just ask you something?” He was looking at me.
“Can I just ask you… what do you see in this guy?” He pointed at Lucian.
He must think I’m dating him or something, I thought. He had no idea this was the first time I’d ever had a real conversation with Lucian, who was pretty much a stranger to me. I thought, the only way to get out of this is to say something funny.
I said, “It’s because he has a boat.”
Oogle beetlejuice laughed. “Oh, so you’re a boat digger, huh?” He thought for a moment. “I guess being a boat digger is more honorable than being a gold digger, since you still have to be on the boat.” We laughed.
At some point oogle beetlejuice made his exit, and it was then that Lucian invited me to sail with him on his boat as crew. He was going to sail in the Caribbean — indeterminate end.
For a long time, I felt like I’d been doing nothing but closing doors. I was unemployed, my life before me was virtually vacant. No plans. I had been waiting for something to happen. I wanted something to happen. Was this it? I didn’t know anything about sailing. I’d never been on a sailboat before, never had an opportunity. But I’d wanted to. I’d wanted it the way one wants an improbable dream: You just want. Your wanting creates a shape. And you think, it’s impossible, and it sinks down. The dream was so deep in my subconscious I could barely feel it rising to the surface.
I said, “Maybe.”
I remember him walking away from the fire, into the darkness, waving noncommittally. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.
I would.
I went to sea with him and it changed me. Four months later, I returned to New Orleans.
. . .
The strangest thing about traveling for a long time is the return. Your descent back into your old life and old patterns feels like a direct confrontation with your past self. All of the choices you’ve made in your life up until your departure seem tinged with sharper edges, yet you feel removed from it. Strangely objective, an outsider in your own life.
You find yourself in your own room — but it feels like it belongs to a person that no longer exists. It is jarring, suddenly to feel a vast gap between you and your older self, a gap you didn’t expect to exist. Around you, people and places loosely gather in similar structure. Most act like everything is the same. You have an urge to explain, to properly convey your experience but words fall flat. How can you explain that you feel your insides have re-arranged themselves? Inside of you is filled with glittering metals that you will walk around with, always now.
. . .
Lake Sleep is an artist living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her art finds form in ink and watercolor illustration, printmaking, tattoo, and digital fragments scattered around the web. Through her work, she pulls at the fragile seams between technology and nature, the tame and the untame, the real and the unreal.
The first time I walked a city without direction was in Florence. Before that trip each day was regimented by parents—a designated set of sites to visit, walking through the streets was a chore between destinations rather than a reason to travel. This time I was fifteen; I made my case that I wanted to go back to a gallery to draw some of the statues, and on the way there I got deliberately lost. It is an intentional form of being lost, formed by noticing buildings or landmarks or quirks of the way two streets intersect into an impossibly narrow corner of a house that begin to build up a map of a place in your head. Medieval cities, souk cities, old towns are all particularly good for this. Ideally this is an act that should be done alone without headphones or distractions, but there is pleasure in doing it with someone you love to share in the ornamentation given to houses, the peculiar shape of that window, the way this street links two parts of the city you might have visited via a different route and then the contours of the place become connected. It is also worth doing the same path at night, but that is not always possible, it depends on who you are. I am very envious of those who feel safe to do so alone.
In Bolivia, high up in the Andean mountain town of Cochabamba, the Spanish phonetic translation of its Quechua name, Quchapampa, or ‘lake plain’, my friend and I were told explicitly not to walk around the city alone. Another person, a man no less, had been beaten up when out for a morning run. To escape being chaperoned was a release, and my habit of wandering down side streets only got me into minor trouble with our host mother, but without this I would never have seen the southern cross from the top of a children’s slide in a playground at night or stumbled upon the embassy quarter with the manicured lawns that were so different from the rest of the city. I looked up the Quechua name for the correct spelling and the city looks different now, with sleek light rail services instead of the converted minibuses decorated with rugs and tinsel that I remember. My memories of the route from where we stayed to the outskirts to the orphanage might be only a shadow now, confined to my memory of walking and recognising the advertisement that was put up that indicated where we would have to ask the minibus driver to stop so we could run across a four-lane road to get to work.
I have repeated these walks in almost every place I have visited, from Hà Nội to Lisbon. London is a special case, a set of villages of sorts that I can navigate around like fruiting mushrooms emerging from the myceliae of the underground system, distinct but not truly linked in my mind. Something strange happens when I live in a place: the urge to wander is all but lost. During lockdown I found an area of the city in which I had lived for over a decade for the first time, as though being forced to stay in place gave me the permission to deviate from the boring routes that I stuck to so rigidly. It was an island, formed over a reclaimed rubbish dump. In autumn the trees are heavy with apples, in winter you can see muntjac deer through the bare branches, breath steaming into the mist. 18th century pottery and old scientific glassware can be picked up when the ground is soft, and in summer there are trees to climb and one spot where you can slip into the river to swim. Take another route, another turn, and you are in a metal processing plant, all noise and smells of oil and burning. This is not an essay about psychogeography or being a flâneur, it is a question of what about settling somewhere is it that resists what is otherwise one of life’s great pleasures.
One of my earliest memories is of walking the mizmaze at the top of a local hill. You pass the plague pits and beech trees before ascending the chalk-based soil that produces scrubby grass and strange orchids. In front of a copse of copper beeches is an old turf maze, but that name is wrong. There are no wanderings and wrong turnings here, the route curls around itself from the entrance to the centre and back out, all it requires is patience and to put one foot in front of the other. I have walked it in winter so thick with frost that the grass appears as a ghost and drunk in summer when the scents of rock rose and thyme mix with bonfire smoke. The turf is cut so as when you begin you put one step in the narrow furrow and the next pace just ahead, it is too small for you not to move forward with each footstep unless you run out of path to tread. There is a peace in walking this mizmaze, an hypnotic action in the movement that compels you to complete the circuit until you walk out of the parallel exit to the entrance and the spell breaks. I have never dared to step through or across the turf to exit more quickly, to do so would feel wrong on a level I cannot articulate.
Perhaps we build our own mizmazes for our hometowns? This journey, this shop, this route between places we need to go, this side of the street to walk down? This does not feel like a spell, however, more as though one is placed on a track that is so practiced that looking around ceases to be of any interest. Yet to deviate from the known routes feels stupid, almost embarrassing. This is not to say that routine is uniformly bad; it is a requirement of becoming a local in a pub or café, which can open up a place where you reside into a place where you live and are known.
After the pandemic I moved to a different town and I despised it. I found it cramped and ugly, and my walks were restricted to going into the town (through an unlit alley, down a residential street that floods when it rains, turn right past the fish shop and across the bridge), to the station (turn right just after the bridge), and around the small park behind my block of flats (enter across a wooden bridge past the teenagers and their dog, walk eight times around the circular loop of tarmac past the unused outdoor exercise machines and the playground with men drinking from plastic two litre cider bottles on a bench, go back via the teenagers). The more I repeated these routes the more I hated the place I had moved. The stench of the canal, the soggy leaves underfoot in winter slippery and hateful, the dark passages I had to navigate to leave my flat.
Eight months after I had moved in I felt furious with everything, most of all with myself. I set out in the opposite direction from the unlit alley and walked aimlessly. An underpass called to me, so I took my time seeing the graffiti, some illustrating a cartoon of the history of the area, half covered up with tags and original art. A manor house that had been converted into a school, then a railway bridge that opened up onto fields with grazing cows and horses, a rock processing plant with large lorries ferrying gravel out, and then a reservoir that fed a river with a set of invitingly large stepping stones. The sound of the water led me to the wrong side of an underpass that opened up into a park that I hadn’t known linked up to the main canal that runs through the town. Walking through the woodland and spiralling back, the single route took me back home.
This will never be my final hometown, but I feel an affection for it in the way I do towards the city where I was born; its ugliness and architectural surprises. Down the residential street one house has a Victorian door and beautifully moulded brickwork that gives texture and beauty to an otherwise uninteresting house. One of the houses by the river is a palimpsest of workhouse and glass conservatories jutting over the water, and just off the main square a bust of Shakespeare stares, weather beaten and softened with pigeon shit, over a town that once was cared for enough to have people decorate it.
. . .
Sylvia Warren is a writer and academic editor. Their work has been featured in Open Pen, Minor Literature[s], the Brick Lane Short Story Anthology, and more. They consider AI an affront to the joyous act of creation but refuse to stop using em-dashes. They enjoy writing, the sea, and sketching the architecture of pubs over a pint.
Every year I’m taken there the air the light the sight of leaves drifting past without a care I’m driving in the Rockies in my old Plymouth Valiant a shade of bronze you don’t much see anymore colour of stubble fields at sundown I’m barely 23, endless Christmas trees line the highway now it’s the mountain peaks the sun is tinging pink I think I even sing (I wouldn’t put it past me) Neil Young’s Comes a time when you’re driftin’ Comes a time when you settle down – Okay, what’s this side of the road a herd of elk just standing there watching five in total the reason I recall is I write it down when I get there the cabin I’ve secured
for winter and right on cue like a movie I pull up just when it’s not dark yet but getting’ there now that song also takes me there to that door the smell of firewood stacked by the door I watch the kettle while it boils I open my notebook on the kitchen table by a window with green curtains and lo and behold I find a candle meant for emergency but at 23 who waits for that you see a candle you light it I write September 1978 on the first page
No, hold on, it’s not a notebook it’s a school scribbler dime store type, Hilroy, map of Canada on the cover timetable on the back and bottom left: 30 days hath September April June and November I write what comes to me how people in the past wrote it snowed all day baked so many loaves of bread as if it needs to be said “Saw five elk on the way here” and leave the unpacking for tomorrow
but when tomorrow comes I don’t unpack too busy sitting in the sounds of silence a woodpecker tapping in a nearby tree maybe I imagined that but I know this much is true: I set my Smith Corona on that kitchen table by the window, the green curtains and I tap too all day long tap tap tap tap into the next night and all the days and nights after that Who knows where those words are now they’re long gone but not the sound they made landing on the page not the smell of firewood by the cabin door the leaves gathering on the window ledge the candle going out I probably slowed the Valiant down when I saw the elk I’m willing to bet I did you never know if they are going to stay or if they will wander
. . .
Working from the small mountain town of Nelson, BC, Canada, Kelly Rebar has written for theatre, film, and television. After a long hiatus, she recently returned to playwriting and created two one-woman shows, both written in verse and scored with music. She also works with photographic images, old and new, and writes short poems.
The dust on the road Rotting leaves on a cold autumn morning The faint scent of hasty intimacy hours earlier The dogs are nervous tonight There’s blood on the wind
Floodstained thaumaturge Pyrolatrous and atavistic Smudging our faces with ash from bridges burnt
I’m following a blood trail My ego has been freebleeding All over the place again
Shamanic nights under a bright full moon Snow in the deep forest Moose tracks in the frozen bog Hematite rocks the colour of red ochre Spells of protection in the night I met a strange god One that no man has ever named
. . .
Myrmalmens ballade [IV/24]
I found God at a gas station in Nissedal Now I’m siphoning gas here in Niflheim There’s a radio tower on the heath Amongst the cows with their GPS trackers
My mind is a swamp Where the air is thick with things That are out to drink my blood
I’ve got a new best friend The red forest ant, Formica rufa Is it all in my mind or are they all Moving with strange synchronicity
. . .
Purple Prozac [VIII-X/24]
Chafing on my chakras Inflammations in my legs Stains on my soul And I’m standing over here Trying to laugh it off Saying pretty please, Pleiades
With your New Moon Theory And my dharmatology Trying to figure out Where all these gulls go to die I’ve got a bad back From looking over my shoulder
The smell of rotten petunias In autumn grey streets I love your geometry Even when you taste like dead dreams
If love is solitude gone bad Then I’m sitting here fermenting With your pyrolatrous autumn colours Alight in the early evening sun
The man I’ve become has no reason To be ashamed of the boy I once was You laid me down among the lupines Placed a cigarette in my hand
Landscapes of IKEAs And your crepuscular smell I’m standing in the middle Of the wrong side of the road Trying to snap a picture For our interdimensional trophy room
Wake me if you wanna smash You said, fell asleep And ran a fever all night
. . .
Born and raised in northern Germany and emigrated to southern Norway in his late 20s to take care of his child, Alexis Karlsen‘s work spans three languages and reflects the life experience of a disillusioned underdog drifter. Alienation, death, restlessness, substance abuse, sexuality, and the unquenchable thirst for love are recurring motives in his writing. Karlsen’s background is in social ecology, and his German-language novel Am Ende des Fadens, which touches on themes of magical realism, is nearing completion after 13 years of work. He can be found on Mastodon: @brisling@merveilles.town.
Once you see past the cellophaned shop-window of tourism and into the infected stomach-wound of political history you begin a journey to the centre of dictatorship. And you’re likely to survive. Because in their eyes you are a mere fly on the wound, spinning on the spot, feeling sick and having to suck it all up. They might feel an occasional tick at the discomfort of you’re reporting all their business, but with a quick swat, the threat of being locked up, they will send you packing. Off you fly back to your country. You’ll soon be back again. You’ll come because the scent of such drama and the chance to ‘make a difference’ is so seductive.
You will climb into airplanes and out of airplanes, stand in queues at airports listening to psych rock on repeat to make it seem cool to be wearing a suit. You will walk into climates where heat makes a sudden pass at you. The hotels will have terraces descending to cake-crumb concrete, ornate cities choking politely below you. You will blag free afternoon tea in the hotel where Agatha Christie disappeared. You will do this for years and years. Buoyed on the beauty of this city, by the people from whom you learn the meaning of solidarity.
You might go to courthouses larger than a demigod. Where justice is not just blind, she’s in intensive care. Every now and then, to fool the concerned Specialists from overseas at the bedside of Democracy daughter of Anatolia, there is a blip on the heart monitor in the form of a ‘good’ decision from the Constitutional Court. Everyone from Europe nods and puts a tick on their clipboards, smiling at each other from behind the surgical masks.
The British and French have scalpels in their pockets, just in case they get another chance to make choice cuts. It’s all they can do not to dot lines on the flesh, “Je vous en prie, madame mais j’ai l’envie de vos cuisses remplis de l’huile noir dorée.” They want to take her back to last century. She is confused and they all think she’s easy. She has had a lot of lovers in the past. They think they can own her just like Croesus tried but those silly billies don’t even know her real identity.
While Consultants from the EU compile assessments on the health and usefulness of the patient, the rats go on eating the body from underneath the bed. Small regional judges rebel against the Supreme Court. The government opens cases against the Istanbul Bar. Everyone visiting agrees the patient looks passably robust if you just don’t get too close.
The brochure that prompted your journey to the centre of dictatorship will be social media posts showing Kurdish boys dead on barricades and their families looking out from front windows, prevented from collecting their corpses due to sniper fire from the Turkish state. Dogs devour sons’ bodies near the door. You’ll see four old people, wearing white and waving flags be gunned down as they sneak out with a stretcher. Neighbourhoods and a city flattened by airstrikes and tanks. Sur, Cizre and the walls of Diyarbakır. It was 2016, just nine long years ago.
You’ll stand up, then, in your kitchen and say, “Yes, I am ready. Show me the treatment of women, show me culture of queer, show me the mothers of the disappeared, show me cyanide gold mines and grandmothers’ resistance, show me trans women called Hande and show the teeth of the police and what they did to her, show me 5000 teenage girls on a Women’s March, kettled in the super highway street of Istiklal, show me that lady in her eighties who sat on a rock with a staff, soldiers in a row behind her, trying to take over the olive grove as she blasts, ‘The State? I am the state here!’’’ You’ll say, “Show me oppression, the politics, police brutality, show me torture, show me 64 guards kicking a dealer to death in the prison at Silivri.” You’ll notice there are less and less women, they’re vanishing at a rate of one to three per day.
There will be an old man to clean your shoes on the pavement before going into court, but because you speak the language and had a family here, you will really talk to him and he will cry tears down a maze of lines from cornflower blue irises, telling you, “Inflation means it’s twenty lira for a few tomatoes, we don’t eat meat and we can’t make a go of it”. You’ll agree it is a sin to take over the Central Bank and to let inflation run at 168%.
By now you will be an international advocate. You will monitor 200 trials, hoping it will all get better. But fascism doesn’t need much sleep. When it’s too late you’ll see that you were not creative enough. You weren’t armed to the porcelained teeth or in league with deep state. How can you succeed? You don’t belong to the right cult. The President will laugh you off: “These people, they come here, make up a few numbers and leave.” At one point you won’t want to believe there are 185 journalists in prison. But you know them, you have met them and hugged them.
In seven years you’ll be scared for twenty minutes. Those twenty minutes on the day you decide to stand up are like being in an iron maiden, seeing your essence squeezed out and poured into a glass phial. You hold it up to the light – it is the right colour. You hand yourself permission to resist. Go and find them. They will show you the meaning of solidarity. They really will. Your dear fierce legal colleague who sticks with you, no matter what. Court reporter girls who stand up to the judge and are the subject of court cases written in the purple official bruise of his ego. The woman with 185 court cases against her, who still sends salvos to officials. The lawyers, physicians. They’re resisting so hard, are we with them?
The first court case you monitor will be Zaman newspaper, the journalist, editor, author and unliked man Ahmet Altan. Why don’t you sit in the front row, a copy of the OSCE Trial Monitoring guidelines on your knee? That’s how you monitor a trial, you see? Are they abiding by procedure? How much spare paper do you have? The trial will begin and you’ll write it all down. Then comes an undercover cop. He’ll lean his whole upper body onto you, staring down at the pad on your lap to read what you’ve written, “Are you with Human Rights Watch?” You should go on to record the rest of the hearing in Welsh shorthand. Barmouth Welsh.
You’ll fly over Mount Ararat, fancy that, with a lawyer called ‘the arrow’. Your combined presence, the lawyer’s arguments will get Berzan out on bail that day. You can change things if you put your energy right into the room. In these times of outsourcing intelligence, of never meeting, of cost-saving, if we stop meeting face to face, stop putting our physical, personal energy in the place where it is needed, where it will be seen and counted, then we will fall down either side of the abyss that is separating us, and will meet in a bloody mess at the bottom, wondering how it happened. The best advocacy strategy meetings will be twelve people around a table in Berlin, or in Brussels, or Istanbul, all equal in struggle and all winning. Slowly some of the elitist ones will unpick themselves like the decoration on a shawl, unwind and leave others in the cold. You’ll work on. Your reports will change the law.
How much is the ticket, you ask. Is it a time machine that will eat tokens made of years, of intimacy, friendships, of all else that exists outside the job? Will it be fuelled by all the poems you wrote and never published? You might only take one day off in seven months in lockdown. What else was there to do but work? When you see how bad it is every moment feels like the threshold of a potential win, of standing with them. And every time you think you’ve made a difference, the state will impress you with their newly proposed law to ban all mention of homosexuality on the internet; their throttling of the airwaves. One small squeeze is all you need once you’ve mastered and collected the horse of freedom, put in the brutal bit of police violence backed up by millions of canisters of poison gas at protests.
You will continue on this journey until the road kinks back and kicks you off the path. You will cling on by your fingernails, while life floats far away. You will stay on the road until a new boss steers the car into the back of a truck marked ‘Investment Bank’ and steals your integrity. Then you will lie about your reasons, out of politeness, and you will leave. You might believe that you can still go on, and that the road will welcome you back, but the road knows you can leave no more tread. That you belong in a field, walking over a bog with a small dog, looking up at the range near where you were born, thinking about sixth century poets, because the remaining road travellers, those local dissenters and human rights defenders, they will go on along the road, two thousand miles away. The fight was always theirs, and they will win. It was never about you.
. . .
Line Stockford is a Welsh poet, editor and translator of Turkish literature. An adviser on Turkey for PEN, she designed and ran human rights projects around linguistic rights and media freedom. She studied the History of Turkish at SOAS, London. Her book-length translations are published by Parthian, Palewell Press and Smokestack Books.
Cutting locust tree saplings to feed to the sheep who blatt impatiently. A locust grove has started and it must be stopped. Locust has thorns and is good for little except feeding goats and sheep. Although I’m sure the land has a different opinion. But the land does not have a vote, so cut the saplings will be.
The cost of the coast is the loss of honest sand, which was host to myriad lives we’ve failed to understand. Now there are daily sweeps of machines to scrape the bought sand smooth. You may find old cups or leftover snack bags there, because shells are crushed by the beach sweeper and these shells all came, once, from another beach from whence this sand was harvested.
Let’s go to the beach. Look. Here there are thorns and thistles. All the things to hurt your tender feet. Thistles wave their brave purple flags above their fierce foliage but it does them no good, cut they will be. Wear your rose gauntlets when you go into that field, and boots. The beach is friendlier, having been made so by voted decree. The sand is very hot, however, as no vote has learned to cool it. No vote could, though some still believe.
Slip into the water, still a bit cool. Out there are creatures who would like your friendship, and others who care for nothing but their next meal. Sometimes they are the same. We might recognize ourselves there too in the water when it’s calm. We’ve not yet drowned nor learned to breathe in the deep. What do we need to learn? I often wonder, or if it is possible at all, to learn, to breathe.
. . .
Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina. Her first full length poetry collection, Becoming Altar, from Subpress.
Through a grimy window open fields small houses by tracks people standing or sitting in doorways watching the train
. . .
6.30 p.m. muezzin’s call to prayer
. . .
The battered, rusted pans the workmen use are as beautiful as things in a museum.
. . .
names of butterflies Sahyadri Birdwing Sahyadri Grass Yellow Sahyadri Rosy Oak Blue Malabar Banded Swallowtail
. . .
Nightfall. A lamp, its shadows
All morning, rain. Thousands of cicadas sing at once. I sit by the window and sip coffee, watching rain pour from the eaves. I’ve lost touch with old friends. Lizard droppings lie scattered on the window sill.
. . .
I’m not useful like a carpenter or plumber. I sit alone on veranda steps, gaze at the evening sky. Neighbors are quiet; the road to the village is empty. The moon set an hour ago.
. . .
Shadows blur on whitewashed walls. Serrated, spinning: leaf midair. Sensitive cells know day from night. Chitin, bone, shell.
A street barber squats on the pavement. Mirror, comb, scissors, razor, soap neatly arranged on a threadbare blanket. Coins fall like stars.
. . .
moth shadow, web let the mind rest
. . .
I’m a stranger, outcaste passing through
. . .
A dog limps past, vagabond. Whisper of river grass.
Drums reverberate. An oil lamp gleams. Heat. Sweat. Gods and heroes dance through the night.
. . .
The rain doesn’t end. Fungus eats our nails, books grow white mold. Pillows and sheets smell of mildew. The whitewashed walls turn green. A huntsman spider clings to a corner of the ceiling all day. There’s no daylight. The rain doesn’t end.
. . .
Fog at dawn. The smell of cook fires, feces, wet earth. The sky stays dark. My heart: a withered seed.
. . .
Last night I dreamed I was walking by the sea and came upon a group of thatched huts. I asked an old man, “What place is this?” “Nelcynda” he said.
. . .
I light a citronella stick. Bullfrogs roar in the flooded paddy field. Already the road is quiet. My lamp flickers and then goes out.
. . .
Kim Dorman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and raised in Oklahoma and Texas. He has worked and traveled in North America, from Mexico to Alaska, and spent time in France, India, and Sri Lanka. His books of poetry include Owner (Longhouse, 2016) and Kerala Journal (Corbel Stone, 2021). He currently resides with his wife in Kerala, India.
as blue-antlered dawn falls vertiginous over mountains
ii.
deadfall, muskeg
flakes of mica
the cryptic living tinted with winter
(each nivean heart an individuated star)
high bright tooth of winter moon
hill-spines arc – every vertebra a birch
iii.
the lake rim glows but its eye is dark
clouds and rain dissolve there
(and shores and rock)
within catacombs of willow
a bobcat ruby-throated attends to its altar of rabbit
and the forest, dimming
snaps shut its anthracite wings
iv.
the river is coal-blue sap
deadfall tamarack
there are flickerings at the edge of my vision –
movements through the long-bodied pines
(wolves are stirring, elk are stirring in the cold embers of this forest)
and water is a dark bloom, is never still
hylae swell
bones blacken
v.
between blue-skinned spruce and a fire calving light and heat
at an altar of water where all are subsumed or broken
darkness is drawing everything open – a long-stemmed and leaning dark
within which I may be scented or seen
and so I try to be silent
to intuit each movement within this catacomb of branches
to not give myself away
vi.
in a place wholly inaccessible I arrive to sticks and cold rain
beside white birch at the edge of a silent lake I rest and wait
for the one voice of night to share with me its oldest name
. . .
Autumn Richardson is a poet, editor and translator. She has authored 5 collections including Heart of Winter, An Almost-Gone Radiance and Ajar To The Night. Since 2009 she has been co-director of the multi-media publishing house Corbel Stone Press alongside British artist Richard Skelton. Between 2013 and 2022 she co-edited the influential journal of ecopoetics and esoteric literature, Reliquiae. Originally from Canada, she now lives on the west coast of Ireland.
Modern life is increasingly connected: central heating to phone, fridge to supermarket, watch to heartbeat. Without touching a button we can chat with friends in Australia, while eating strawberries at Christmas.
Yet beyond this glimmering convenience looms a shadow-side. For modern life in Britain grows ever more disconnected. Food comes from a shelf, water from a tap, and community from an app. As for travel, it occurs at unfathomable speeds, as we rush along tarmac strips, strapped into metal boxes watching screens, following other cars and road-signs, turning when the sat-nav says so. Where travel once generated constant discovery via deep interaction with places and people, modern journeys have become a dream of pure destination, an increasingly impatient thrust toward instant arrival.
Travel by car (or train/plane) performs a conjurer’s sleight-of-landscape, a folding of the map, to magically shift us over vast landscapes without ever experiencing them. This is journey-making with minimal connection. Temperature is thermostatically controlled, sound is piped entertainment, hills are reduced to a slight extra weight in the heel, and rivers to the bump of a bridge under tyres. Between start and finish, everywhere becomes similar grey roads.
All of which causes separation, isolation and disempowerment. With our hyper-reality and digital lifestyles, we have forgotten how to look in our neighbour’s eyes and see how well they are. The smog of mortgages and motorways, and the ever-increasing pace and price of work/life, leaves little time to simply connect with the land, with ourselves and each other. Traditional guides fail us, religions plagued by scandal, and science proclaiming that spirit doesn’t even exist. In this modern landscape, it isn’t easy to break through to the Light. The Way Forward
But there is good news. An ancient spiritual technology has been rediscovered, offering direct engagement with Source. You don’t need to dress smartly, sit still, feel guilty or get bored. No gurus are required, no intercessors or priestly authorities. It is a natural form of whole-body movement, a deep dance through imaginary labyrinths, and a hearty adventure.
Folk call it pilgrimage.
Pilgrimage is the ritual short-form of your life’s journey from birth to death. The aim is that by walking a short way correctly, you can put right your longer journey.
The basic technique of pilgrimage is to set an intention for wholeness, choose a holy place destination, and connect the two by walking. It is as simple, and infinitely complex, as that.
Walking is the oldest, slowest and deepest way to move across the earth. Intention is your motivation, the inner hope for healing that pushes you to make pilgrimage. And a holy place is somewhere in the world you feel can offer the wholeness you need, whether spiritual, mental or physical.
Finding your intention is the first step of pilgrimage. What lack needs filling, what question needs answering? Bringing this into consciousness – as words that can be repeated like a mantra – is a vital cog in the technology of turning a vague walk into a pilgrimage. If you don’t know which port you are sailing to, no wind is favourable (Seneca).
Next comes your choice of destination, a holy place that will harmonise in some way with your intention. You might choose somewhere intensely personal, the burial place of an ancestor or the site of a childhood memory. Or you may prefer to seek somewhere more universally well-known. Certain locations in this land have held the dreams of hundreds of generations of seekers, and in such holy places, deep echoes linger from those whose journeys went before.
You may find this word ‘holy’ troublesome, as if signalling pious spiritual exclusivity. But ‘holy’ doesn’t necessarily mean religious at all (though it can if you want). At root, the word derives from the Old English Halig, meaning wholesome and complete. The Scots word hale (as in ‘hale and hearty’) is its nearest living descendent. The same root word gave us ‘healthy’, ‘holistic’ & ‘healing’.
‘Holy’ is a very distinct word from ‘sacred’, though the two are often used interchangeably. Sacred derives from the Latin sacre, meaning set-apart, distant, unobtainable. ‘Sacred’ is like a distant star, beautiful but untouchable, while ‘holy’ is like a jug of water for the thirsty, something vital to integrate into the depth of your being.
Ultimately, what makes a destination holy is you, your need and the journey you offer. Wholeness (holiness) doesn’t sit around throbbing. It is activated by relationship. The healing magic needs you to need it. And there is no better way to activate this holiness than to take the time and energy to slowly walk toward it. The unreasonable dedication of an intentional journey on foot is a powerfully sincere sacrifice of time, energy and focus – making pilgrimage an effective key to unlock holy places in the land, body, mind and heart.
Deep Moving Roots
Bipedalism – walking on two feet – is our species’ original advantage, the biological life-hack that cast us as the upright strollers of the monkey family. Once we sourced this tech’ of walking, for two million years our ancestors were nomadic, roaming the planet in reverent pursuit of the herds and seasons. Constant movement shaped our evolution, creating the bodies and minds we have inherited today. Our species is homo perigrinus, and who we are grew from life on the path, our oldest home.
Yet a mere twelve thousand years ago, humanity ceased her restless roaming to begin cultivating agriculture and raising static dwellings. Arguably this was a bad move, leading to general imbalance.
Pilgrimage as an activity distinct from normal life arose in response. By providing a ritual reconnection with our ancient wandering freedom, pilgrimage helped keep alive the ancestral strength, beauty and wisdom of humanity’s nomadic inheritance.
Once you start seeing it, pilgrimage appears as one of our species’ great common forces. Wherever a stone has been raised, a temple built, or a spring recognised, so people have come (usually on foot) from near and far, bringing their hopes, dreams, offerings, prayers and songs. If you squint your eyes a bit, even our modern everyday journeys to the shops, to school or work, appear as (debased and frustrated) forms of pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage instinct is as fundamental a law of the human soul as gravity to our atomic reality. It doesn’t matter what faith (or lack) you follow, nor whether you believe in gravity or not. The apple always falls, and pilgrims always come.
But the path has not always been smooth, and pilgrimage has waxed and waned in these lands, attacked by the sharp hopes of kings and industrialists. While I was growing up, the peregrine precedent was almost invisible. Wanderers rarely passed my window. The Romany seemed settled, druids drove vans and troubadours endured mortgages. To be a tramp seemed to require alcoholism.
Yet today we witness the return of honest wandering society, as pilgrimage revives into a living British tradition, like Arthur awakening from his hill of slumber. Our hour of need has come.
Annoying the King
Those who decide the rules in society enjoy imposing their will upon us, because there is advantage to be gained in so doing, and because they can. Pilgrimage offers a shortcut to evade these heavy games of control. By taking the path, you can restore your ancient state of animal liberty, becoming wholly in charge of your time and passage through life, if only for a short-ish while.
Two hundred years ago, to be a British pilgrim you would have been sent to the workhouse or charged with vagrancy. Three hundred years ago, you could be transported to a penal colony or hanged. But today, pilgrimage is free for the dream.
You may feel you have little choice in life, pushed along by the normal forces of work, family and friends. But pilgrimage provides an opportunity – and challenge – to reclaim your personal autonomy, to plant a staff in the river and stride upstream.
For many people, there is a guilt response to this idea. The wonderful inefficiency of pilgrimage makes its time-demands look like gluttony. How can you possibly take two weeks to walk somewhere you could drive in two hours?
Such are the harsh internal shackles of convenience that govern the modern mind. For the responding question must surely be: to whom does your time on earth ultimately belong? Dare you stake one small portion for yourself? Can you really afford not to?
This is difficult to answer from the sofa. No matter what I write, you won’t really know until you step out, staff in hand and home on your back. Not even the ultra-rich truly own their time. But between the roads, the pilgrim inherits the earth.
As medieval scholar J. J. Jusserand said, pilgrimage has always had the power to “annoy the King”. And in our modern age, under the ever-watching eyes of state, corporate and digital kings aplenty, the freedom of pilgrimage shines brighter than ever.
“Liberty calls aloud, ye who would hear her voice…” (from a confiscated broadsheet, 1793)
I hope to see you on the path. Bring a song. It is not getting dark.
Walk well!
. . .
(The above is an extract from William Parsons’ forthcoming book, The S.O.N.G. of Pilgrimage.)
. . .
William Parsons has worked in British Pilgrimage since 2004. He spent his twenties as a wandering minstrel, in his thirties he founded the British Pilgrimage Trust, and in his forties he returned to freelance pilgrimage with a focus on writing. His work has reached most UK newspapers, TV channels and radio stations. He even got pilgrimage into Vogue. William lives in Glastonbury where he guerrilla plants Holy Thorns.
There is a moment in the film version of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water when the main character, Graham, gets off the MacBraynes’ bus and for the first time looks across the Firth of Lorne towards Mull in the distance.
Ben Buie, Sgùrr Dearg, Dùn da Ghaoithe are all there in front of him, each a distant grace note to something that isn’t there anymore. Of course the movie takes vast liberties with both the book and indeed the story of Gavin Maxwell himself but somehow for me, with that scene, it all gets forgotten.
And so I watch the grass as it gets moved by the wind
and the sound of it
And I think of us there in Fishnish all those years later
The sweetness of that sound on Aird a’Mhorain.
Traigh Iar
and I think of those landscapes now that we’re not there,
the spaces where we used to be.
Your presence as it shifts into abstraction
and distant thought now
the space between you and me and the lines that I draw.
. . .
Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Brian McHenry is an artist and illustrator whose work has appeared in various publications — including The New Yorker — and featured on record covers, books, and even the odd beer can. He currently lives on the north-east coast of Ireland with his two children. His recent combines elements of portraiture, symbolism, and abstraction to explore the physical and emotional landscape of remembering.
Midway through the event, a woman seated in the front row of the audience asked the panel of four authors, all of whom had made an appearance for the purpose of promoting their recently published travelogues, if they could explain in simple terms how their notion of travel differed from what most ordinary folk called holidays. Nothing is more difficult than to be simple, but the elitist charge implicit in her question, one that was somehow rendered more pointed by her affected pleasantness, laid another layer of complexity. The moment demanded deflection by way of a pithy response — l’espirit de l’escalier might have suggested a poignant quote from Ibn Battuta or something whimsical from Rabelais. Instead the panel, with a tad too much haste, dug themselves into a defensive trench, and in the process shovelled dirt on what they ill-advisedly and repeatedly referred to as common tourism. And they wouldn’t stop digging.
Conversations erupted throughout the room but eventually settled into silence, and no indication was given that the audience would assist her in pushing the panel off its platform, if indeed that was her intention. That being said, it most likely nudged it a little; peering through the newly created cracks in the edifice, the panel’s itinerant forays and desultory wanderings would have appeared to some people as lofty peregrinations wrapped in pompous superiority…or thoughts to that effect. Their somewhat clumsy efforts to enumerate the differences between what they get up to and what everyone else does would not have helped in that determination. On the other hand, some would have interpreted her question as self-aggrandising, one motivated by conceit, point-scoring and the desire for audience adulation. Either way, the nourishing conversations that were until that moment shared between the panel of authors and what felt like a roomful of friends, now a breathing mass of strangers, failed to revive.
Possessing an air of originality, mystery and spirited adventure, the mention of travel arouses more curiosity than that of the humble holiday, and there can be little doubt that by describing oneself as a travel writer rather than a holiday writer one gathers greater cachet. Yet it often seems that, at core, there is no difference between them. Indeed, the travel writers sharing the podium might easily have described their journeys as holidays. After all, three were promoting books about relatively short stays in what many would deem holiday destinations, including a fortnight in Paris, three weeks in a wine-growing region of France, and a month in Tuscany. Only one took a longer and more varied route, that resulting from an unplanned year of backpacking.
Putting it this way perhaps challenges their street cred, yet many philosophers, among them Seneca and Thoreau, were greatly inspired by the odd holiday, during which they created notable works of reflection on nature, on the human condition, and on life’s meaning or purpose. The same is true of literature. Agatha Christie developed the idea for a well-known detective mystery whilst on a leisure cruise down the Nile. Virginia Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse whilst on vacation on the Isle of Skye, and Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April was inspired by a month-long holiday to the Italian Riviera. The list goes on. In the end what matters most are the stories, and to this one might add a degree of self-discovery.
. . .
Old Cathy used to come into our house to wash her money. Though she scrubbed the stairs of every last one of them, and had done so for years, ours was the only flat in a long street of tall black-sooted tenements where she could come and go as she pleased. She even had a key. Some people would rinse out and refill her bucket, but she would have to remain at the doorstep, door closed. To be fair, Old Cathy wasn’t one for conversation, and in fact blanked most people, but that wasn’t the only reason people covered their doors. For much of her life she lived between the mental asylum, as it was then known, and the street, and when that information got around the neighbourhood by the usual whispering campaign people kept a watchful eye. During the time our family knew Old Cathy she had secured permanent residency in a Salvation Army hostel not far from where we lived: a small room with an iron-framed bed, a chair, a cabinet, and a cross on an otherwise bare white wall. Visitors were not allowed, but we visited anyway, my sister and me, and whilst some residents occasionally looked at us with suspicion, neither the warden nor anyone else ever refused entry.
My sister always firmly insisted that if anyone were to question us I should stay silent and let her do the talking. When neighbours or anyone else asked questions she generally cut in to finish my sentences in ways I could never anticipate. Three years my senior but in reality much older, I guess my sister would have been around eleven or twelve when we visited Old Cathy. She doted on us, and was always steady and sunny, but I doubt if many people saw that side. She just kept her head down as she scrubbed the stairs, her metal bucket echoing in the close as it clanked down each step, then reached back up to draw intricate floral patterns with white chalk on the margins of every step. This was a common custom in our neighbourhood, an area that outsiders called slums, but unlike Old Cathy most women just chalked a quick zig-zag or squiggle. Either way they only lasted a day at best.
A woman notorious for malicious gossip once stopped us to ask if our dad knew that our mother allowed a pauper lunatic to wander in and out of our house when he was at work (he worked almost all the time). We of course knew who she meant, but as instructed I buttoned up. I would have liked to have said that we loved Old Cathy, who was one of the kindest people on Earth, and that not only did she visit us, we visited her; but as my sister later reminded me she would most likely have called the police and had her thrown out of her residence and into the street. Adults were a different breed, and I dreaded the thought of mingling with them. Even at the early stages of adulthood most people showed signs of becoming distinctly unpleasant. I think Old Cathy felt the same way.
This was a time when mothers who took to their bed for days or weeks or maybe even months were generally considered to be indolent rather than depressed, a time when postpartum depression was for the most part unknown, and a time when having a stillbirth — regardless of the sadness, guilt and anxiety that were at heart a cry for help — was hushed up as a shameful failure. Mrs Bogus, a pathologically nosey upstairs neighbour of ours — listening at the letterbox, she fell into our hall one time when my dad opened the door on his way to work — stopped me and my sister on the stair to ask if my mother was still lying in her bed. She called her a lazy article, jolting her miserable mongrel on a choke chain before briskly walking on. No one ever explained to me the meaning of article, but I got the gist. Just ignore her, my sister said, and don’t repeat what she said to anyone. I didn’t have to: everyone seemed to know that my mum had sunk under the covers and let the house go to hell. It even got around the school.
For the best part my sister looked after things at home, organising clothes, tidying up, making meals, but after a while things began to slip there too, and the mess just piled up. We made a space on the sofa between heaps of clothes and coat hangers and ate cereal from the box. On one occasion we heard our mum mumble to herself that she wanted to cut her throat, and I was told never to repeat that either, not to anyone, not even to dad — especially dad! She didn’t mean it, my sister insisted, but I couldn’t quite dismiss the possibility. For all their promises to the contrary, adults were notoriously unpredictable. My friend’s sister killed herself over a stupid fiancé, the mother of a boy at my school was murdered by his dad — just one punch, they said, whilst she was doing the ironing — someone sunk an axe into someone’s front door, another put a petrol bomb through a letterbox, men filled with rage and hearts of hate fought to the death outside pubs, and psychopathic razor gangs roamed the streets and alleyways. No adult could be trusted entirely.
We came home from school one day to find all the mirrors in the house had been smashed — why mirrors? — and immediately I wondered if my mum had taken a shard of glass to her throat. I envisaged it. My sister made me wait in the hall until she checked out the bedroom. Mum was sobbing under the blankets, but otherwise okay. Old Cathy was there, calm and calming, picking up the pieces. She would have known worse, and most likely understood the situation better than anyone. For several weeks no stairs were washed as Old Cathy stepped in as our femme de ménage, arriving before we went to school, and leaving in the evening. Between those hours she did the shopping, made breakfast and prepared dinner, looked after my mum, washed clothes, tidied the house, and even found time to play board games with us — she was a master at draughts. In time, when my mother got back into harness, Old Cathy got back down on her kneeling mat to scrub and chalk the tenement stair, the distinctive sound of her metal bucket once more echoing in the close as it clanked on each step. Thereafter she would rinse out her bucket, brushes and money in our small scullery whilst the kettle boiled before settling down to sit with my mum, gazing into the embers in silence.
. . .
For some people, travel writers are escape artists sharing their secrets on how to break loose from sameness. Others live to wander, to find stillness in motion, and perhaps by chance to find missing parts of the story that made them who they are. It was whilst perched on a doorstep under a hot sun in Tamil Nadu that Old Cathy, for the first time since childhood, wandered into my thoughts. I was watching a woman take great care to create a kolam at the entrance to her home, a decorative chalk circle with floral designs that is said to bring good luck and prosperity to the occupants. The drawings are walked on, scuffed and washed out every day, and whilst illustrations and meanings vary, each in their own way presage the transience of our existence and the impermanence of all things. The process was hypnotic. With eyes squeezed shut I remembered Old Cathy with head bowed drawing similar floral patterns with her piece of chalk on the steps to our door, and for a moment that door opened. The long journey to India had led me back to the start, and perhaps, after all, that was the point.
. . .
In addition to teaching psychology in universities, adult education and colleges across the UK, Paul Tritschler has managed organisations within the fields of brain injury, sensory impairment, mental health and community activism. He has written for a variety of magazines, including Aeon, Psychology Review, Bella Caledonia, Counterpunch and Open Democracy.
There are people with real names and there are those who will never know such a thing. Those with real names have had them called out loud in the valley of their soul. Those people are not the property of weeping angels. I have an angel assigned solely to weep by me day and night. The river of an angels tears is a damned thing. A cursed dash of the darkest rapids. The creatures that swim there! Winged eels with electric teeth. Octopi in buttonhole suits. They see my faded scales. I sit by their mirror smoking. I am unafraid of damnation. Such a thing was foretold for me. There are those with addresses and amalgamations of numbers and streets they know for some time. I have never known anything for long. It isn’t my way. There are those who have something they may call home and it may be bad or it may be good but they are not tied to it by invisible ribbons or bows. They will have seen it. They will have slept in it. Their feet understand they must return their owner to there and so that is where they go. The bones of my feet ache. They resent shoes. They resent places. They want to return to the river. There are those that are vouched for by others who have known them since they were a drunken night, or since an uncle danced in a way that his not yet conceived a nephew would later copy his particular show of movement (or lack of) whichever it may be. There are those who are defended by mother to suspicious father. There are those who have people who know them. There are those who sit with those they know under to the glare of nurses inspection. When they stand before teachers and bus drivers and the tyranny of all other children there are those who are in some way vouched for and then there are those that are not. No concept of what it means to truly know their face in another eyes, or to actually have the right to even a few letters they should be recognised by. Or perhaps another human who knows them for more than a second or a day. Raised by people paid to keep them for a contracted time. There are those who feel death may be their only truthful companion. They have a longing to return at all times. Even when they do not know where that place might be exactly — that they could return to. So they do not! There are those who are considered suspicious by nearly all who encounter them on some deep and primal level. Like foundlings, or fairies, or any other being who arrives unknown — their presence can incite revulsion or cruelty or pity at best. If lucky their presence might even incite care. They are an open wound. Lacking the kind of a skin that can protect from bacteria. Devoid of layers. They pass without concealment. Those who will never have the right to a name! I am of those. Somehow always assumed to be guilty, unworthy, most certainly contagious. We must be contained. I gave you kindness, what did you take from me? That’s what they often say. It is not often kindness that they have given. The things they have done would render the river of the damned even more impenetrable than it already is. They will always deny it. What they did, they will always blame the one to whom it has been done to. Always! I never met one of them or they or those kinds who would not say I was a liar, they said it to themselves, they said it to everyone else but most hideously — they said it repeatedly for their entire lives to me — so here is my lie, you may read it as truth but it would not be, it would be more than truth, it would be certainty. To those who will also not-be-named I must point out — I did not believe them then and I do not now. I know words. I know terrors. I know monsters. The truth of irrevocable realities — do not belong to them: cannot be named by them: cannot be contained by them — truth is the most garish of foundlings, it is the eternal spirit companion of weeping angels. This is my imprint. It belongs to me.
. . .
Dr Jenni Fagan is an award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist, poet and artist.Published in global translations the author of four fiction novels, one non-fiction memoir, eight poetry collections, exhibitions, adaptations and with another two new fiction novels due out next year.She has won The Gordon Burn Prize 2025, was a Granta Best of British Novelist (a once in a decade accolade), Scottish Author of the Year and has been on lists from The Women’s Prize, BBC International Short Story Prize, The Sunday Times, Encore and more. Fagan has worked extensively with vulnerable groups including those in prison, and the care system where she herself grew up. Described as The Patron Saint of Literary Street Urchins, Fagan’s work responds to the centre always from the margins and without compromise.
Dancing on the Silk Razor was born out of a discussion I had with my friend Dan Wechsler. We were contemplating various writing work we’d done when younger, and he mentioned there was a first line for a story he’d always wanted to pursue but had never quite been able to. I asked what it was and he replied, “Somebody had been stealing Harold Solomon’s ideas.” I liked it immediately; it had the kind of lead in I relish, and although it wasn’t my normal way of working, I asked if he’d object if I tried running with it. He said to go for it. And like often happens with the right catalyst, a written story poured straight onto the page.
Although the writing took a prose form, from the start I had the notion of it also being a film. So, with extremely limited funds but some phenomenal, longstanding collaborators who were game, we shot the whole thing in four days on 35mm with about a 1.5. to 1 shooting ratio running around New York City. It was a great challenge and a great time.
The narration is really the main performance, and we wanted to find someone for it who could really elevate the film. We felt Wallace Shawn would be perfect, and as a writer might particularly appreciate the role. We sent him the piece and he liked it and agreed to do voice-over. But this was still the COVID era and regrettably I came down with a case right before the recording session. I directed via Zoom but it was excruciating not to be there in person. Fortunately, Wally completely got the tone and humor and, with the kind of thorough preparation every director hopes for, nailed it on the first take.
I’ve taken to calling this a multiform work, as I feel it can be equally a written piece and a film. And I’ve since been working on a series of new pieces in the same vein, with iterations that co-exist across mediums. All, however, begin in primary form as the written word.
. . .
Written, Directed and Edited by: D.W. Young Narrator: Wallace Shawn Harold Solomon: Dan Wechsler Producers:Judith Mizrachy, Dan Wechsler, D.W. Young Cinematographer: Arlene Muller Composer: David Ullmann
. . .
D.W. Young is a New York City-based filmmaker and writer. His two most recent feature films are the documentaries Uncropped (2024), about Village Voice photographer James Hamilton and the heyday of alternative print journalism, and The Booksellers (2020).
Watercress abundant, pooled, fed by a freshwater stream that leaks a channel, a winding furrow carving an arc across the sands. Joining the Atlantic salt waters. Diluted.
Conas ta tu a stor? How’re you love? Bhfuil tusa ann? Are you here? Where are you?
Under the rocks……..caught in the weed………….? A remnant of yourself…. a fragment, flotsam, tiny bones bleached out over time.
First child, the one and only first, spent in the sands and carried away unseen.
Pause, sigh, and breathe. Slow. Clearing. In and out breaths. Fuck it …
The stream’s absorbed when it reaches the sea. Red standing stones guard the shoreline. Dug in, bulk undiminished through the years. Smooth blank faces peppered with tiny lives. Living creatures in spiraling whorls, paint-box colours distinct from the rest with their blend of muddy greys, blacks and browns. The discreet, minding their own business ones.
Keeping to the low formation, leaning into these sentinels, pushing up hard. Limpets impress their determination into my back, encouraging them to leave their marks on my skin, through the layers of time and guilt. Tiny bruises, kissed into my shell.
Cá bhfuil tu mo stor, where are you my love? Still here? Shape shifting your small self, half formed baba deas, lovely baba? Or have you vanished into mists of salt water and weed? Níl fhios agam, I don’t know, may never know.
Sins for which I alone hold no charge, spoken in my head. Not then, had no clue back then.
Busy in the kiddish world of long summers, heat hazed early mornings blended into same grey days. School and holidays, home and here, the Red Strand. First beach out of Clonakilty, Cloich na Coillte, stone castle of the woods.
The brother, older but no wiser through the passage of summers, collects the tiny vivid shells under instruction from his know it all little sister. All through our early rising summers for as long as it pleases him. Mostly in the absence of anyone else. (He’d prefer the other boys, tardy, sleeping-in boys, almost always with a ball).
We sort the shells into currency for our long playing games, oblivious to any lives inside the whirly chambers. Red, yellow and green defining value, same as fruit pastilles or wine gums;sticky pleasures. Flavours imparted by the power of suggestion.
In truth they all tasted much the same, the richer the colour the more they’re desired, sweeties and shells. No truth to either.
He is obliging, patient and generous, prepared to share a vision of the day, playing shop? Or being rich for our new life ahead. Content til he gets a better offer……at least til then.
A big brother like no other, he is dark to my fair, tall where I am slight, brave while I am cautious. Protective and free running altogether in one certain self. His infectious self-belief sweeps us into his limitless foolhardy world and we’re away. Climbing rock faces, out of windows and trees, into danger without looking back. Running for miles with no sense of the dinner time clock. It chimes without our ears to mind it. Into trouble over and over he brought me, with no regrets.
Not true, baba deas. My one regret. The original sin.
Hours we spend under the towering protection of this headland. Obscured from view by the remains of an over-ground tunnel. Giant concrete slabs scattered about, fallen, impotent, discarded. Marooned in the sands.
A hidey hole, a place of travel from one gloomy tunnel end to the other, between the stream and the sea.
Fresh water and salt, fishing in both, crazy laughter and messing, all the way to tears and squabbles on rare days, high days and holidays, tense sort of days.
Status Quo, the quo, ruled the roost for his whole gang, while we, the girls, follow the Bay City Rollers. Uniform in our tartan trousers, Baby love, oh baby love, skimming our thighs cutting into our vain attempt to hold the boys attention. All the while loving our idols, the special one, he who holds our gaze on the telly. A band member for all the seasons of our pre-teen crushes.
Teenage years we return to the Red Strand with beer and tents. The sea is the place to be rather than the shore. Trailing friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, cousins once from overseas, to share the magic that no longer exists. Red Strand’s too full of childhood and original sin. Better beaches round the corner, further along the coast, closer to the shore life of pubs, craic and caravan parks.
All these places we never saw as children, never knew were there, so determined was this family not to mix with the noisy ones, the drunken ones. The families that might know us from life at home ones. The sleeping in, lying in their beds half the day ones.
Mothers and fathers equally corrupt longside their offspring, in the gospel of our English origins. They lined up daily at the chip van for their tea. We ate freshly caught mackerel with bread and butter, the food of the Gods, and so it was. Free, from the sea.
We ate mussels plucked from the rocks. Sometimes lobsters, captured in pots thrown off the shore. Squealing their way from blue black to bright scarlet in a pot alive with boiling water, delicious, with butter dripping from our chins, stinking of garlic. No one ate that stuff, famine food still reeking of the sea but we did. Set apart, positioned above, looking down, while trying to squeeze in.
We were blessed, apparently.
The beach welcomed us back annually, sharing its curves, a safe return into the familiar crook of embracing rocks. The concrete tunnel sheltering our comings and goings from year to year, constant, never-changing. The strand,, our part in it, had a rhythm, a ritual of its own making. It bent slightly each year as we grew up, new faces appeared, alongside the familiar caravans.
Softly whispered voices, rememberings from the sea, in the sand dunes, where courting couples played out their pleasure. Mostly undiscovered, known by all and avoided, quietly sidelined. Not allowed, and still they were always there. Bless me father for I have sinned. Curled up in warm grasses on heated sand that threatened collapse without the tough spines that held it altogether.
All through the early Summers a man ploughed his way, twice a day from the dizzy height of the headland, traveling from his smallholding, along a narrow sunken track. He trailed a donkey and a jennet down onto the strand, on a single rope. Their arrival a Mr Whippy of excitement in the day trippers, our prior knowledge fattening our superior position. Privileged with familiarity, without names, we are known to each other. The donkey man and us, the regulars.
Some days I follow them on their return pilgrimage through the steep channel, the sharp, dry grass nicking my bare shoulders, a minor penance, a small offering. I daydream a change of identity, assuming a place in their holy family on the homeward climb. Shifting from child to blessed mother, to partner and devoted animal whisperer. The donkey man never seems to notice my presence or acknowledge it at any rate.
Codladh samh, sleep safe, a stor, love, where ever you are, under the deep sand or washed clean among the creatures that flow back and forth, in and out of the tides. Three hail Marys and one our father the regular gift for telling lies. How could you not tell lies when caught between the father and the son. I have no idea, only one idea possesses my mind, escape and protection.
First love learned at the foot of the should be protector and corrupt for ever after while nuns whispering lies and responsibility into the shell like of every girl child and what would they know about it anyway? Brides of Christ, be lady-like, be Marylike the impossible mantra, the ideal that will never be matched.
They can’t control themselves, they confide, it’s up to ye to take control, female pleasure, unknown, unspoken.
Is it any wonder a stór beag, my small love, my tiny not fully hatched firstborn that you were conceived and lost on the shore of my innocence. Bless me father, I don’t fucking think so, thank you very much and goodnight.
Transformation, a daily event as the sea wipes out the story of the sand and shore. Washing and rinsing rocks and strand in a matter of hours, filling and emptying the pools closest to the rushing waters.
Anemones, the most tantalising transubstantiation of all. Still to this day, a miracle. Brown jelly mounds stranded in the air of low tide become flowering tendrils of soft pinks submerged in the salt water. Waving gently, they invite touch, dipping a finger into a shallow pool and softly, softly stroking the water closest to the fleshy petals. Too close, they fold themselves in, abruptly resuming their impenetrable personae. Still here, always here, since the beginning of time. Stuck fast to their ways.
Echoing through the years, on every return I pay homage to their beauty hidden in the dark brownness of the rock pools, discomfited in the air heavy world.
Tabhair aire, take care, precious one, watch out for the sidewards crabs lurking out of sight among the weed. Sharp little nipping pincers, painful beyond belief to the unwary, bi curamach, be careful, mind your little fingers and toes.
A fully grown woman this visit, kneeling in a hollow scraped out of the sand. Lost but keeping watch on the tide, inching closer and closer, washing clean its own. Soothing the grains with the patterns of waves, licking into the holes dug out with plastic reds and yellows. Further out to sea, waves churn up the red sandstone rocks lining the basin of the strand. Fractured thoughts coming and going rolling back and forth, testing the present with the past, seeking out long gone shapes amongst the weed, carried and tossed, lifted along the breadth of the curve.
Nothing clear, no single sound, a rag bag of rattling stones to hang from my feet. Uneasy flickerings in the corner of an eye. Glimpses of the jennet’s flashing whites and straining head. His unpredictable nature printed in my memory, a familiar refrain, a chord that echoes in my pulse. He was half donkey and half horse, we said, the mixture of breeding, his magic. Also his devilish power, tempting fate with its unnaturalness.
The water, freezing, has reached me, frothing at my knees and trickles begin to fill the spaces around and between my legs, my feet folded into the dugout. How long could I last? The cold drove me out half way between head and toes, intimate with my belly. Enough already. This time.
. . .
Inter-disciplinary artist Liz Cullinane is a storyteller in words and pictures. Her Belfast based practice is rooted in community activism, theatre design and film collaborations with poets and musicians. Liz’s academic research on early 20th century Irish women artists focusses on Mary Swanzy (1882-1978). Published by the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), she has innovated a digital opera on Swanzy. Recent exhibitions & writing reflect her engagement with the Achill Island landscape in Mayo.
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