welcome/the homecoming

Well here it is.

Finally ditched the Telstra blog. Was doing my head in. Couldn't handle it any longer.

A friend of mine just bought me a hardcover copy of The Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, illustrated by Dave McKean. It’s a beautiful book about Halloween/a haunting. How come I didn’t know about this before? I’ve read it through once and will need to sit with it for a while now. There is a strangeness to the language which is not easy to swallow but altogether captivating, the reason I will keep coming back to it.

Short stories are built (among other things) upon language use and the art of revelation. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. If you’ve got those two working for you then you’re on your way I reckon. Singing My Sister Down by Margo Lanagan comes to mind here… one of my all time favourites.

I’ve had a few short stories published but plays and poems have been my strength to date. I can see the time coming though when I get back there… tempted by prose amid a desert of sales!

Some lines from The Homecoming…

Silently she stood stiff as a great loaf of nile bread…

Their laughter was a cave of winds…

Uncle Einar, last of all, kettledrummed the air as he descended, laughing at some half-remembered death, perhaps his own, until he lay in the longest box of all…