UNFURL: PORTRAIT OF ANOTHER WORLD
"The great dials of Natural Philosophie may turn this way or that, but the supreme answer goes unpublished: Is Life inevitable under the correct conditions, or is it but fluke? And what pincer guides this realisation of Potential?"
This speculative, science-fictional pamphlet of fragmentary and experimental tales depicting another world was published by The Braag in September 2023. Copies are available through The Braag's online store here.
THRONEMAKER
"Two wurms were carved above the throne-room door, entwined in a fight to the death. Their tails slithered down the jambs, coiled and flickering. Claws and fangs flurried in the vaulted shadows."
This folkloric fantasy tale about craft and labour was published by Carmina Magazine in September 2023. Read the story here.
A BAPTISM
"Follow the irrigation ditch beyond the railway line and you come to a thicket of willow trees. Between them the hem of a chain-link fence has been pulled upward, like a hand sweeping something under a rug. You can slide through this gap. The dirt beneath has been worn smooth by generations of trespassers. "
You can read this short story, published by Gastropoda in March 2023, here.
MULCH
"Neighbourhood kids started calling it Mulch. Its eyes were eggshells. Its great, bowed back was a mound of grass-clippings from the vast lawn of 12 Royal Avenue. Its mouth was the smiling curve of a shredded bicycle innertube."
This work of flash fiction was published in the inaugural issue of Carmen et Error from The Braag in November 2021, and can be read here.
EASTER MONDAY, 1360
"…The cursed beast had dragged Ham miles from the column. Nothing could restrain the creature as it pounded the freezing sod, driven by wind and hail across the plain, tripping and screeching over abandoned fields. Ham had seen dozens of panicked horses in a trampling mass, slamming down their riders, braining them with their hooves."
A dark tale of violence, prejudice and natural disaster set against the backdrop of the Hundred Years' War, this short story was published in Provenance Journal in October 2021. Read it here.
fragments
"…a miller called Hana was carrying two sacks of grain on her back when the deva fell from the sky. The deva fell so hard that the ground rippled, throwing Hana off her feet like a cat flung from a duvet. Both sacks of grain exploded."
My first chapbook of speculative, fantastical flash fiction was released August 2021. Copies are available to purchase via etsy, or in-store at Travelling Man (Newcastle, York, Manchester) and Good Press Gallery (Glasgow).
Spirelark
"A flight of gulls swept over Dog Bank, King Street. They cried over the Tyne. River of many moods, now pearlescent and dreamy, as if rendered by a computer."
This short story was published by The Fiction Pool in January 2020. You can read it here.
Concerning the Wilderness Concept
"...wilderness images have a long-standing mythic power which cannot be discounted"
Thorn Issue 2 took 'Wilderness' as its theme. Arising from my thesis research, I wrote a short piece of (theoretically dense) creative non-fiction, which you can read here.
Academic Work
I studied at Lancaster University and Durham University, attaining a BA (Hons) in English Literature with a minor in Creative Writing, and an MAR in English Studies. During my time at Lancaster, I was awarded two portfolio prizes in Creative Writing. At Durham University, I produced a thesis on cultural representations of wilderness, and the manner in which these reveal the ecological attitudes of different societies at different times. This thesis can be read here.
Priory
The priory stood five miles north of Barza. Like the town it had been abandoned. The prefecture had folded a decade and a half ago, the peasantry leaving on the road north. All the governors and marshals and other civil servants had gone. The monks had gone and so had the merchants. The doctors and lawyers. The clerks and the writers. The prefecture was inhabited by none but the destitute.
The road to the priory was subsumed by undergrowth and young saplings. Despite its broken windows and leaking roof, the building was still robust, which was why a waif had chosen it for her home. She slept in a monk’s cell in the cloister behind the chapel. She cleared the well-cover of brambles so that she could draw up water to drink, to pour into a stone bathtub for a cold wash. She set snares for rabbits in the surrounding woods. Through the winter she kept a fire lit in the old kitchen and dozed, cocooned in moth-eaten piles of clothes.
The summer was intensely warm, and the child retreated into the innermost shade of the chapel. The world browned and shrivelled outside the broken windows. The heat came winding through the shattered panels in boiling serpents of air. She fled from them into the deep, cool dark of a crypt beneath the building. She explored narrow passages walled with urns, sarcophagi, disembodied skulls stacked atop each other. During the night she found candles in the monk’s quarters. She took them with her to explore that subterranean world. She discovered caverns with carved stalactites and mirror-pools. She found stores of heretical texts and pornographic images. There was an antechamber deep beneath the chapel which stank of sulphur. Inside she discovered a strange creature.
It was an ungainly being, the size of a calf, with six tiny vestigial limbs. It called itself Asphodel. It wound itself about a column and subsisted from dust and liquids dripping from the chamber’s vaulted ceiling. Light hurt Asphodel’s eyes, so when they spoke the child set her candle down in the tunnel beyond and they talked in the dark.
Asphodel told the girl that it had seeped its way through the dirt and the rocks into that chamber years ago; that it was part of a race lying dormant in the core of the world which crept their way surfaceward with the advent of hard times. Whether it was a harbinger or a catalyst of this change Asphodel did not know. What it did know was that the worst hour was yet to come. When that occurred, the creature would blossom upon the planet’s surface like a spring flower erupting from the bulb – or the worm which had burrowed into a gestating plant, ready to tear itself loose.
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