The Edgelands

a new experiment and an invitation to join me

The narratives I want to read are marginal, not mainstream: the voices we don’t get to hear, the unrecorded and undiscovered stories of how people navigate/d life. I am a margin-dweller too, and I’m currently exploring the edgelands between worlds; those that connect and divide both our experiences and our geographical areas.

Exploring placeness, dereliction, psychogeography, the othered and brutalised body, power systems, counter-mapping, belonging and community, and rural and urban walking (amongst other things) - and looking at my own marginal memories through the lens of stories and wisdoms I find in the archives of great thinkers and collectors such as Maria Popova and Richard Rohr, plus national and local archives too - I am starting this collection in an experimental attempt to make sense of The Edgelands. Subscribe here to receive my writing directly into your inbox, for ten weeks.

I will release one post per week on a Thursday morning, beginning February 24th. Themes will include:

• Alleyways: transitory bodies

• Psychogeography, thin places & otherworlds

• Asylums: a letter to my uncle

• M-otherhoods

• Pattern addiction & physical addiction - psychosis

• Shifting sands: between grief & laughter

• Broken people go to church on days that aren’t Sunday

• Borough boundaries, hostels & train tracks

• Sleep/wake dreamlands

• The blurred boundaries of mind & body - chronic pain & medical gaslighting

After that, I am not sure. I just hope that you come on a journey with me for ten weeks to begin with, at least. Maybe you’ll stay for whatever comes next, too. Subscribe here:

“In the end, the measure of our strength is in how we face the fact that we are simply human — mortal, vulnerable creatures of uncommon creativity and courage, body-minds born to die and to make meaning of our fragile existence not by clinging to the self but by practicing our various arts of unselfing: love, creative work, transcendent communion with the rest of nature.” ~ Maria Popova