Green Shoots

No matter how many years I live through I am always surprised by how I fail to remember the subtle details of spring. How for instance, it inhabits winter while winter is still alive and gradually overtakes and overcomes it from within. The seasons overlap in other words, and spring always seems the shortest one and most elusive to catch and define. Well, that’s enough musing for now.

There’s been a tide of new things in the door recently, with me in them, that being a quality I tend to like in things generally! Next week (Tuesday 21st February, 7pm) I will be speaking alongside Margaret Elphinstone, Mandy Haggith and D P Watt at the launch of our ‘quartet of quartets’: a book called Lost Eden, at the CCA in Glasgow. Lost Eden is published by Zagava, and is on a highly topical theme of the relationship of humanity to the natural world. My co-writers have produced some excellent work, and hearing such literary luminaries reflect on their craft should be an occasion to savour. 

Also on the book in-tray you can see the very beautiful new hardback anthology called ‘The Dusk’ from Side Real Press. I’m in there among the company of some of the leading lights of contemporary writers of the weird and mysterious, and I look forward to reading their work. My own story is called ‘She Sells Sunsets’ and is an allegory based on the Greek myth of the Daughters of Hesperus, nymphs of evening and sunset, who guarded the golden apples of Hera at the end of the world in the Garden of the Hesperides. It is also a contemporary metaphor for the effects of Multiple Sclerosis. Below are two examples of paintings inspired by the myth: The Hesperides by Arthur Rackham (1867 – 1939) and The Garden of_Hesperides by Ricciardo Meacci (1856 -1938). It was of course also a theme which fascinated my late brother the artist Ally Thompson.

Also just in (see below), is one of the best book covers I have ever seen, for the ‘Bang!” crime anthology edited by Andrew Hook and published by Headshot Press. That’s Andrew himself there with a gun in his hand and 1940’s noir detective outfit on. I’ve never seen myself as a crime writer or reader, but Andrew’s taste for the surreal seems to have stretched to include, like a lizard seizing a fly with its tongue, my peculiar offering called ‘Salamander’ about a detective who progressively discovers that both himself and the criminal he pursues are part of some immortal metaphor or syndrome that recurs in each generation. It’s set in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, somewhere I’ve not yet been, but have at least been published there. There’s various other things to report over coming months, but like the proverbial spring, I shall patiently abide for a few more weeks before daring to poke their tips up above the silent and all-knowing earth.