writer | editor | artist
(lines from the 2015 film, Joy) there is a gun on the table the only other person in the room got here from hard work patience and humility only one of you can prevail only one of you is like a gas leak silently killing us do you pick up the gun? pick up the…
For Rebecca Jessen Once upon a time I promised to tell you a story about the past (you are going to write about the future). At the film screening, a woman says that this film will never be shown again. It is showing signs of magenta drift. In the future, it will not be (though…
Before the sun and night and the blue sea, I vow To stand faithfully by all that is brave and beautiful; To seek adventure and having discovered aught of wonder, or delight, of merriment or loveliness, To share it freely with my comrades, the Band of Happy Rowers. [1] I told my mother that I…
‘Libussa’ is one of the tales related/retold by Johann Karl August Musäus, and first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle. It was published in Carlyle’s three-volume publication Translations from the German (1827). The tale below is a transcription of Carlyle’s translation (not one of my own translations). The tale was part of Musäus’s 1728 collection Volksmärchen der Deutschen (German folktales). Musäus drew heavily…
In my 2013 speculative fiction novel, Rupetta (2013), Henri, a history student, completes a small thesis after undertaking research into the lives of a pair of women know as the Salt Lane Witches. This post provides a few little tidbits of the intertextual backstory that went into the (re)writing of those characters and their (fairy) tale. The ‘Salt Lane Witches’ name…
At a recent conference on excess and desire in twentieth- and twenty-first century women’s writing, one of the presenters quoted from Natalie Kon-Yu’s 2016 essay, in Overland, ‘A testicular hit-list of literary big cats‘. In particular, she quoted from the section in which Kon-Yu describes the depiction of Jake Whyte’s gender in Evie Wyld’s Miles…
ADULT CONTENT WARNING: The following post contains images of nudity. And art. Recently, I attended an excellent conference on the theme of excess and desire in contemporary women’s writing. One of the papers I attended included an analysis of Kim Kardashian’s nude IWD (International Women’s Day) selfie of 2016, using Sartre’s model of the three…
Recently, I posted my personal mixtape of fairytale and folklore selections: an eccentric list of fairy tales, folktales and other works, inspired (in the collating) by the eccentric collecting and publishing strategies of Andrew Lang. The list includes the poem/song below, which was included in The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians. Norman…
Recently, Gyspy Thornton blogged about the notion of fairy-tale mixtapes, an idea borrowed from Adam Hoffman’s discussion of Andrew Lang, and how to conceptualise the eccentric array of works pulled together in Lang’s coloured fairy tale collections. The always sparkly and scholarly Rebecca-Anne do Rozario blogged her fairy-tale mixtape here. The idea is to take inspiration from…
Our father coming in from the garden, or us going out to stand in the weedy patch of rhubarb and watch him cut, with a knife we were sure grew bloodier with each cut, the long pink stalks. The exact gesture with which he gathered the poisonous leaves in one hand and cut with the…