This city, this big sprawling dream of a city, mighty and misunderstood Los Angeles, is often defined in terms of tired cliches and sweeping generalizations. Soul-less and a-historical L.A., they say. A city where nobody walks, they lie. A far-reaching enigma going on for miles and miles, they all nod and agree, baffled. Continue reading “L.A. Lust by Yanina Spizzirri”
Journeys, physical, spiritual and psychological, are at the centre of each of my works. The idea of leaving and arriving – or transcending – inspires me to create. Continue reading “Journeys, art by Jodie Day”
We wandered the streets
Pointing out our childhood
Every detail that remains
A teenaged memory Continue reading “This Place is Ours by Hazel Warren”
And once we’ve reached the bridge, we stop.
I have seen the native fellaheen* cross on bikes and motorbikes,
phones in their back pockets,
blasting music that hits like sudden hail in the country stillness,
bites,
and echoes away. Continue reading “Walking Westward, Toward Jerusalem, Across The Jordan Valley by Aiya Sakr”
Douglas, Arizona, is a border town.
I pull up outside the Gadsden Hotel around 10.15am after driving down State Highway 191 from an overnight stay in Willcox. The road follows the line of the Dragoon Mountains, where, in the 1860s, the Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise took refuge with two hundred of his people and for ten years waged a guerrilla war against the US army Continue reading “Who’d Pick A Fight With Lee Marvin? by David Dragon”
In Casablanca you will expect buildings to be white, based solely on the city’s name, which translates to ‘white house’. But there will hardly be a truly white building in sight. How odd is it to call a city a house? Once you spend a little time in Casablanca, it will make perfect sense. Continue reading “In Casablanca by Ganzeer”
“When you change the bed sheets, keep your mouth shut – you don’t want to breathe in other people’s dead skin.” Continue reading “Skin by Olga Dermott-Bond”
Mulure Mike is an award-winning Kenyan social entrepreneur, film-maker and musician. Born in the rural town of Siaya in 1986, and raised in Kericho, he moved at a young age to Nairobi. He ended up in the city’s notorious slum, Kibera, the largest in Africa. But it was, in his words, “a blessing in disguise.” There he met someone who owned video equipment and who offered to teach him how to use it. Continue reading “Mulure Mike: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
When he died, they covered his tracks and made him hard to trace. Eighty years on, he’s the talk of a frontier town. Philosopher, critic, storyteller, Jew. A father who never knew his granddaughters, born later to an exiled son in London. Continue reading “This Is Not A Memorial, And Other Stories Of Remembrance by Alan Nance”
When I was nine, I dreamed of going to Mars. I dreamed of being swept away to fantastical lands. I dreamed of joining David at Groosham Grange, and travelling with Sarah in her quest to the Goblin City. I’m still a dreamer, but I no longer dream of escape. The ordinary and the fantastical inhabit the same world. There are ghosts, vampires, goblins, cyborgs, and aliens round every corner, lurking down every close. There are mermaids and krakens in the ocean, dragons in the sky. Continue reading “Dreaming St. Conan’s Kirk by Ever Dundas”
Do the flyswatters know
that inside the belly of unheard voices
every hummingbird started off as
a bug? That a drop of our blood could drink
sunshine & become white sand beckoning the seas
& the oceans that eat up our feet to the knees
& make us dissolve in that forgotteness? Continue reading “Arrival As A Form Of Departure: the lamentation of an immigrant by Bola Opaleke”
“A frontier region… the resort of brigands and bandits”
– Sir Clifford Darby, from The Medieval Fenland
Two summers ago I walked coast to coast across England and Wales, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast. The idea was to etch a furrow in the map along a route that traced familiar haunts and places of personal significance. My aim was to rekindle the memory of places I once knew in East Anglia and the Midlands; join up the dots, to connect all the places along the way with a line made by walking – a pagan pilgrimage, if you like, a personal songline. Continue reading “The Tyranny of the Horizon by Laurence Mitchell”
There’s a five-mile block in the northernmost part of Prenzlauer Berg that I haunted during my last weeks in Berlin. Within this five-mile block, I allowed myself to fade in and out of memories – I let past and present mingle surreptitiously. I chose it in the exact breath it chose me. Even knowing what writing my memoirs would mean, I had no idea the gravity, but each time I got too lost or too overwhelmed, one man was there to encourage me forward. Continue reading “On Becoming A Storyteller: A Berlin Memoir by Jessica Ciccarelli”
“…I miss the possibility of Buenos Aires. And by missing its possibility I can miss my own hometown without the uncomfortable bits, without all the impossibilities, the proximities, the complexities and familiarities. The parts that can hurt.”
Fernando Sdrigotti is a writer, editor and occasional translator. Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1977, he was expelled by the economic crash of 2001. He lived in Dublin and Paris before settling in London in the early noughties. Continue reading “Fernando Sdrigotti: In Conversation with C.C. O’Hanlon”
Why Would I Fantasise?
I am not a philosopher.
You came to me in a dream.
Already, I digress.
Subject + verb + object (direct).
You and your syntax.
You are a verb that requires many objects.
I . Want. To. Break. That. Continue reading “Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Four Poems by Sam Lou Talbot”
In 1976, Larry Buttrose, an Australian playwright and poet, journeyed to Deya, on the Spanish island of Majorca, to seek out the then 81-year-old British poet, author and classicist, Robert Graves, renowned for his historical novels, notably I, Claudius and Claudius The God, a memoir, Goodbye To All That, and a ‘speculative study of poetic inspiration’, The White Goddess.
I stepped out onto the steep cobbled street outside the Villa Verde. I had arrived at the hostel’s door in the wilting afternoon heat of the day before, after having taken the overnight ferry from Barcelona, and the bus up from Palma, along with the locals in breeches and headscarves carrying bound, clucking chickens on their laps. Continue reading “Meeting Robert Graves by Larry Buttrose”
A mural of a massive wave
painted on a concrete wall
can’t provoke a disaster,
can it? Fenced off so no one
can smut it with graffiti,
this careful reproduction
Continue reading “Under A Wave Off Kanagawa by William Doreski”
I started work on The Catskills Dream series after creating the first collage – The Catskills Visitor.
I’d visited New York several times but on one visit, I became intrigued by an area well to the north of it, known as the Catskills. I didn’t go there but I began to research it: stories of the old Borscht Belt, the summer circuit for Jewish entertainers, abandoned hotels and motels, retired lives, old secrets, broken promises.
Continue reading “The Catskills Dream by Anna Louise Simpson”
Mayfield Road
I wander Dudley streets – old canals and factories. All faces are sad now. I take a road I’ve never been down before. Continue reading “In Dudley by R.M. Francis”
15:20 backlit wisps and railroad tracks in the sky. flashes of starlings’ wingtips. I look at the river too long, and now see it every time I blink. Continue reading “Writing A Winter Sunset by Oliver Cable”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 