From some unknown corner of the house, butterflies are emerging. I’ve liberated 4 this week. Frantically they fly towards the light. Meanwhile, I’ve been in a chrysalis of my own. Turned away from the world, writhing in chaos and conflict, evolving privately. Metamorphosing. I’m reading Perdido Street Station by China Miéville (at long last –… Continue reading Butterflies
Category: Musings
Dreaming Motifs
In my dreams, I find motifs from the day that follows just as frequently as those from the days that have passed. It keeps me remembering that time is not quite the straight line we want it to be. I use the word motif because to me it’s the theme, the inference, of dream events… Continue reading Dreaming Motifs
Fragments Have Been On My Mind
I Fragments have been on my mind. II I’ve been re-editing my first book Fragments of Perception: a task I knew needed doing but I’d been putting off. I knew it needed doing because it was written in 2016, which is before I gained experience in editing, and I had haunted recollections of exclamation marks… Continue reading Fragments Have Been On My Mind
Books by Women
“I’ve been reading books by women,” a friend told me over coffee. This was before the lockdown, before any of us knew the terms ‘furlough’ and ‘social distancing’. I’d never given much thought to the gender of whoever’s work I was reading, but these words sparked an urgent realisation. I only ever read books by… Continue reading Books by Women
Shifting Self/Problem of Time when Writing
The self is not a stable thing. Sure, there’s a sense of continuity, but our mindset, attitude and mood are constantly shifting; so much so, they can be barely recognisable from the inside given the space of a few days. If I look to my journal, some entries are verbose, some are whimsical, some are… Continue reading Shifting Self/Problem of Time when Writing
Within and Without
Do you ever find pieces of insight come in clusters, like the universe or your subconscious mind are trying to teach you something? Perhaps not synchronicity exactly; more that you’ve picked up on an idea that resonates and then begin noticing it in other places. I just finished reading Passages by Ann Quin. I found… Continue reading Within and Without
Between the Lines
After reading the essay The Art of the Paragraph by Elisa Gabbert in her collection The Word Pretty, I’ve come to ponder all those blank spaces between (and around) the lines. I’ve read several books recently that don’t offer the tab of space at the beginning of each paragraph, but instead leave a blank line… Continue reading Between the Lines
Writing About Nothing
I keep coming back to the opening line of Patti Smith’s M Train: “It’s not so easy writing about nothing”. It spins round and around in my head like a mantra: it has something to teach me. One of the things it brings to mind is that it’s actually quite easy to write about nothing,… Continue reading Writing About Nothing
The Journey So Far
When I started blogging in 2016, I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I wasn’t at all confident in my writing abilities or opinions, and I worried what friends and family would think of my weird little fragments and book reviews. So I created an anonymous site, Orchid’s Lantern, with a generic avatar and… Continue reading The Journey So Far
C.R. Dudley 