writer | editor | artist
Personal writing challenge in which I attempt to write a new piece (almost) every day. Each one 200 words.
I spent Christmas night sleeping on the floor beside the guest bed in our friends’ home. At one point, in my sleep, I rolled towards the bed – towards you – and must have bumped it. You woke in a sleepy rage. Unwilling to hiss or roar in someone else’s home, you simply kicked me…
The story I am writing about you takes place during your fall. It begins at the top of that building in Manhattan, when you step off the roof, and ends when you reach the sidewalk. It begins with a recitation, and ends in silence. After your death, I fell silent. It might be more accurate…
The thing is, I was always afraid of leaving you. Do you remember the story about Lot’s wife, leaving Sodom? The angels took her and her daughters by the hand. They led them out of the city, towards the hills. She would have been safe if she hadn’t turned back. It was the turning back that…
Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros. ~ Khargavi?ana-sutra [the Rhinoceros Sutra] c.29 BCE Clara had once attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop,…
I am interested in usable truths. I am interested in food I can eat, water I can drink, and stories I can tell. I am interested in doorways and roads: leading in, leading out. I am interested in stones, particularly the stones that mark the path we must walk tonight. My mother has died, and her corpse…
After lunch, we wander along the foreshore of the lake. There’s a raised wooden path, shaded and cool. As we walk, she tells we how the lake formed. ‘Where the lake is now,’ she says, ‘used to a great valley full of trees. The local people used to come here and celebrate every three years, when…
Just outside the door to my office is the photocopier. Things have been like this since the refurbishment, and I don’t see them changing any time soon. At first, this was good: convenient. I can hear my printing running off, and if I need to photocopy something for a student visiting my office I can do…
She had, for some time, been considering the poem he wrote for her. This poem in which she did not recognise herself. It was true that she had worn black for many years; that she lived in mourning for some part of herself she could not name.In her own dreams, she was black like the…
Today – oh joy of joys! – a guest post from the inestimable Jane Bryony Rawson. Jane is the author of A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (published by Transit Lounge), which has most recently been shortlisted for the Most Underrrated Book Award 2014. Writing in The Australian, Ed Wright said, of…
On the afternoon of February second, you brought snowdrops into the house. Armfuls of them, their heads shyly drooping. Every empty jar in the house was filled with them. Then you set freshly-blessed candles on the tables and windowsills alongside the flowers. The scent of flowers and beeswax warmed the house.’They must burn all night,’ you said, shaking out the match’s…