Part 12 Scrying ‘Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die’, wrote Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian, ‘it does not make the departure more easy, but ease is not what I seek.’ I think of this often. The room was hazy yellow with dreary sunlight. Rays of summer drifted lazily through the air. I’d been contemplating the window through which this light came through … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 13)
Part 8 Souvenirs The past is dangerously addictive. Nostalgia, especially second-hand nostalgia such as mine, often threatens to become an endless placebo in place of living. How alluring the past seems when we convince ourselves of having experienced it for a brief moment through culture and art. The ghost story writer M.R. James lived with this addiction to the past more than most. James famously … Continue reading Presence, or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 9)
Mothlight was released on the 7th of February and I’ve been going on about it on social media quite heavily. In spite of this, I wanted to post a quick update about the book and then generally leave the discussions surrounding it to official events and to other websites. The guys at Influx Press (Gary Budden, Kit Caless and Sanya Semakula) have been wonderful and … Continue reading Mothlight
Above is a short film made with Influx Press all about my next book, Mothlight. Running back and forth between London and Merseyside, the film features me waffling on a little and also revisiting the original locations up north that inspired the book. Also featured, for which I’m incredibly lucky, are some readings by my previous voice-over collaborator Paul Carmichael who lends his rich tones … Continue reading Mothlight (Film)
Herr Lehmann resembled Kafka. He looked less like Kafka at first but more like Kafka as I came to know him. He was Kafka-esque though not in that sense, the sense of being horrifyingly bureaucratic – which he was, though this is not the reason – but in the sense that his face seemed, for always, like Kafka yet imagined with slight errors. Herr Lehmann … Continue reading Fragments: Herr Lehmann’s Pond In Baden-Baden
And then we had lost each other within the trees. The moment slipped away as quickly as her shadow, passing onwards through the breeze. I craved the warmth of the Château Haut-Barr once more, leaves falling through the cracks in its walls, our souls simply kindling for the hungry fire to burn. But I was alone in the murk of trees, all of whom leaned … Continue reading Fragments: On A Hillside Near Château Haut-Barr
I’m very happy to say that my first fiction book has been taken by the wonderful guys at Influx Press. Mothlight is due to be released on the 7th of February 2019. I’ve spoken publically a few times about this book in the earlier stages of its writing and editing under its original title of “A Hauntography” but, with its new name (a nod towards … Continue reading Mothlight (Influx Press, 2019)
A few years ago, I was sat on a couch in Strasbourg reading essays by Teju Cole from the volume Known And Strange Things. It was night and I was alone, glancing up occasionally, as I often did when in my ex-partner’s flat, to stare at the city’s famous cathedral lit up at night. I was at the point of the book when Cole begins to … Continue reading Phantom Coincidence in W.G. Sebald’s “Remembered Triptych…”
For a recent symposium on Hauntology, I gave a paper on the links between the philosophy of hauntological ideas with the work and W.G. Sebald. The subject had been interesting me for a while, not least because the jump between the style of the former and the thematic ideas of the latter are the amalgamation that I’m currently aiming for in my own fiction writing. … Continue reading Interview: Grant Gee + James Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker) on W.G. Sebald + Hauntology
Celluloid Wicker Man 