‘I close my eyes and try to breathe but the end of the world is in my throat.’
— Anne De Marcken
There are silences to the summer: odd ones, ones I’m glad to be rid of now. The first leaves of autumn are falling and so are the gumnuts; and always right on my head when I take a walk. My cat has begun to dig her sharp bones into my chest and curl into me when I write in the evenings and I let her—I let her because I’ve never had a thing love me this carefully. I don’t know if it’s the romanticism of it all but something about the cooler weather really does make me feel better.
This has been a month of universal secrets, spiders, university assignments and philosophising. A month of both confusion and clarity: I’ve been trying to find true paths for myself instead of lingering in the limbo before resolution, but I think I’m there now. I’m jumping into April with a clean slate and a phone full of cat photos.
Through March I’ve been working hard on my own little novel and all it’s secrets are slowly unravelling themselves to me: thus here I expose myself as a pantser1 rather than a plotter. If in this slice of the aether you notice the oddities, the obsessions with space (literally; I got a tattoo of my favourite constellation) and time, then you may gain some semblance of what I’ve been working on, though I fear I may be making it sound cooler than it is.
I know It’s not quite the end of March yet, but I’m itching to post. I’m trying to stray from this urge though; I admit my bad habit on this blog is dumping two essays in a week in a frenzy of inspiration and then disappearing for two months when I cannot think of anything else to write about. Such is the writers way. But if you’ll forgive me for making ‘new years resolutions’ in month three then that’s what I’m doing here, but in the nature of the thing; don’t hold me to it, just hold me to trying.
But welcome to my new little series where each month I will collate an assortment of different things and offer them up on a plate for you to take a bite of! I wanted a chance to do something more informal every now and again. Plus if you’re reading this post on your computer then you’ll be able to experience the full growing pains upgrade! New colours, new fonts, new logo! I’ve been having a bit of fun with adobe, and now that I think I’ve come into myself as a writer on this platform I thought it was time to make sure that my little space on the internet reflected that.
I hope you’re well, and I hope you like the new format I’m trying out. I hope the cold is a comfort or a respite, or for my northern hemisphere readers (which is the majority of you actually!) that the new warmth is welcomed too.
I am a self proclaimed Giramondo super-fan, anything those little guys publish makes its way right into my hands. So this month of course one of my favourite reads was the newly released joint winner of The Novel Prize: It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over by Anne De Marcken. Considering I myself am writing a literary (pre?) apocalypse novel I was hungrily awaiting its debut. I could quote this thing to the ends of the earth, it’s certainly something of a Jenny Offill novel…but they’re zombies. Just the daily life of the sentient undead. I feel like I cannot sell it to you on that alone so I will take the chance to share my favourite quotes:
‘When I was alive, I imagined something redemptive about the end of the world. I thought it would be a kind of purification. Or at least a simplification. Rectification through reduction. I could picture the empty cities, the reclaimed land.
That was the future. This is now.
The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don't try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.’
‘Time inside of time. Things inside of things. The crow inside of me. The mouse in the belly of the trout. The belly of the girl on the golf course. Things that ache. Real things and unreal things. It is pointless to wish I had hunger back instead of this endless grief.’
The novel is just as full of humour as it is beauty and horror. There’s a dry snark Marcken takes to the end of the world, one that almost makes the thing comforting.
Outside of books, I’ve been toying with science in the writing of my novel—given it is speculative fiction—thus quantum theory was on the agenda this month! These are some wiki pages I’ve been enjoying a browse of, and a great lift off point for more research if you desire. I suppose it’s a bit of an insight into what themes my book will play with too. I also must say that I will take NO Wikipedia slander! I firmly believe it to be one of the modern marvels of the internet, and for all its pitfalls it’s an excellent tool for dipping a toe into the water of information and spring-boarding to other sources rather than drowning in confusion.
I’m sort of subconsciously treating this as a way of easing into the mammoth read on my booklist this year: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Or maybe it’s just me trying to put off actually beginning to read it. Not for any feelings of dread, in fact the opposite, I am excited and yet cruelly struck down by the sheer size of it. Seriously, I think the thing could kill someone. I’ll get there soon though, I know the anticipation will outweigh the hesitation.
It would not be a monthly wrap without a Pinterest board would it? See it here.
snakes, ladders and slides back down
i. dance in the summer dew, drunk and hungry for the amalgamation, then turn back time behind your eyes when the breeze begins to smell like salt and sulphur
ii. save old things from those kaleidoscopic days: shore-washed port shark eggs, tufts of seagrass and grandma's conch shells
iii. miss—somehow—the huntsmen you'd both find in firewood piles
iv. try to remember how it felt to grow taller and bigger and louder
v. realise you are no longer a child, and you haven't been one in a very long time
I suppose I leave you here at the close of March. I have high hopes for April, especially regarding this space. Let me know what your March favourites were too! I’ll see you soon x
for all you lovely non-writers (I think I may envy you), a pantser is a ‘discovery’ writer. This word refers to someone who ‘flies by the seat of their pants’ when writing a novel rather than one who plots their story ahead of writing it. My teachers often lament me for doing this, but neither way is inherently ‘better’ than the other.