SWERVE

"The crack that runs through everything reaches across all time and space, travels jaggedly through all past and all potentiality. It is the slow fracture in the ice, the worm coring its way through the apple, coring the human heart. It is the following shadow." ~ Laird Barron

"Time is a ring. Everyone and everything gets squished under the wheel." ~ Laird Barron

"Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you."
~ Laird Barron

"Children are dying. That's a succinct summary of humankind, I'd say. Who needs tomes and volumes of history? Children are dying. The injustices of the world are hidden in those three words." ~ Steven Erickson

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

LIT LOUNGE ON 4 JULY

“From childhood’s hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"These bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.” ~ Algernon Blackwood

“How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?” ~ Dostoevsky

“Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and The Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.” ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To care only for well-being seems to me positively ill-bred. Whether it’s good or bad, it is sometimes very pleasant, too, to smash things.” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
~ Clive Barker

“Grief is the most solitary of all feelings. Grief isolates, and every ritual, every gesture, every embrace, is a hopeless effort to break through that isolation. None of it works. The forms crumble and dissolve. To face death is to stand alone.”
~ Steven Erikson

"There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it." ~ Steven Erikson

Reading event @ 8:00 pm on 17 April. Don’t miss it!

“Destiny has no beeper; Destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of ‘psst’ that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”
~ David Foster Wallace

Excited for THIS! #PalestineBookAwards

ONLINE READINGS 17 APRIL @ 8PM

So looking forward to your residency!

From the SWERVE web site https://www.swervemagazine.org/

Illustration by Nick Wonham printmaker and a poem by myself #poemforukraine

Some exciting news... I've been invited to Ireland for a writing residency by SWERVE (annual literary magazine / Lit Lounge / writing & art retreats). It will be the first time I've been a writer-in-residence.

SWERVE is making great strides with its beautiful journal @swervejournal.bsky.social

Thank you! ❤️

“Enlightenment isn’t necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.” ~ Laird Barron

“There is no such sense of solitude as that which we experience upon the silent and vast elevations of great mountains.”
~ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Colin Burrow · Ogres are cool: Grimm Tales The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed...

‘iIf you stop being a princess you become a kitchen maid. You can’t ever become a librarian or a tax collector.’

Colin Burrow on folk tales and the Brothers Grimm: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...