essays
Anxiety and the Writers I’ve Been Thinking of in a Time of Crisis…
3AM Magazine
“The best way for me to describe our current situation is through Heidegger’s maxim: ‘We are suspended in dread’. And for most of us, with this dread comes crippling anxiety.”
Hop Picking: Forging a Path on the Edgelands of Fiction
3AM Magazine
“The idea that we have risen above our preordained place in society, that we have broken ranks and are loosed upon the world, without reigns, or others’ guidance. What is it to feel unworthy? And what does waiting really mean? To be kept waiting? What are we waiting for?”
Ann Quin: A Peculiar Fish Without Fins (Blurring, Filth, and Smut. or, What Ann Quin Means to Me)
3AM Magazine
“Ann Quin has haunted me for the past nineteen or so years, intermittently it seems, sputtering in fits, highs and lows, present and real, always mysterious and elusive, shimmering in the background of my life. I’ve not always looked to her for inspiration — there are many, many others – but she has always been there if needed.”
Crackling Embers IV: Art’s Dirty Secret Redux
3AM Magazine
“From where I was sitting, in the second row, towards the centre, I could clearly see both the General Secretary and the Chief Philosopher standing at their assigned podium, side by side, before the projected INS insignia, the motto cras ingens iterabimus aequor clearly visible.”
Crackling Embers III: Post Booker Blues
3AM Magazine
“There’s a plethora of literary awards out there, too many to mention here. So, I’ll concentrate on just two home-grown, yet differing awards that I feel, without a need for pomp and ceremony, will hopefully unearth writing that is a little different.”
Crackling Embers II: The Hour of the Star
3AM Magazine
“Seventeen pages into Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star it is stated that “This book is a silence: an interrogation” – which makes perfect sense to me as I want Literature to ask me questions. I don’t want it to reveal itself to me, to be as polished and smooth as a pebble on a Devon beach. I want it to leave me guessing. Most of all I want it to possess voice.”
Personal Story: My Mother’s Last Words
The New Statesman
“We naturally obsess about the final words of those we love. These words cement themselves in our memory. But my mother’s don’t, even though I own them. My mother’s final words are in a box in the attic. I think about them a lot, because they’re unintelligible: a slanting scrawl across a page in a notepad. I’ve never been able to decipher them.”
HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Sponge!
“For all the noise and hullabaloo his fiction has generated in person Michel Houellebecq is, somewhat ironically, a rather quiet and unassuming individual who shuffles awkwardly into and out of crowded rooms surrounded by plumes of blue/grey cigarette smoke bellowing from his nostrils in that ever-so-French way, his belongings (cigarettes, lighter, notebook presumably) carried with him in a nondescript polythene bag.”
The Astonished Man
3AM Magazine
“Everybody needs a place to hide, it’s a natural instinct. We all need solace, to be away from everything – anything. It just so happens that I’m like most of you and some years ago now my particular place of sanctuary happened to be the French Literature aisle in the library at the University of Sussex.”