Alan Garner’s grandfather told him that, under Alderley Edge, a king lay in an enchanted sleep with one hundred and forty-nine knights, watched over by a wizard until the time came for them to wake and fight in the world’s last battle…
Category: Reading
Deeper Into The Woods
On The Fox’s Tower at Writing.ie.
At the beginning of The Fox’s Tower, a girl called Willow looks out of her bedroom window and sees her dad talking to foxes in the back garden in the middle of the night. As she watches, a huge, wolf-like monster appears and carries him away…
Wolf Stories
Wolves had lived in Ireland for 25,000 years but they could not survive their persecution by the humans… An essay on wolves and Wolfstongue at the Honest Ulsterman.
Honest Ulsterman
‘… a conversation emerged that returned on several occasions to the themes of communication and representation, their inevitable failures and the persistent, urgent necessity to pursue some form of apotheosis through language. We talked. We waited. No conclusions.’
David Haughey asked me a lot of in-depth, insightful questions in this interview in the latest edition of The Honest Ulsterman.
Unmapped
Books pile up by the desk as you work on a project. They’re research or inspiration, or talismanic, or just fortuitous. You look for what connects them. Their separate outlines begin to merge and soon they form a single imaginary map. This map has a small empty space at the centre. Somewhere in that space is the book you’re trying to write.
Sam Thompson 