The Dark Reflection

I’m working on a writing project. Last week, I spent time interviewing the subject I’m writing about, and this person took me right back to childhood. I do this on the podcast because you start to see patterns, threads running between the person I sit with today, and the reasons why, why not, and small brush strokes around the edges.

Anyway, this person recounted sneaking into an idyllic building, up in some hills, and finding some old, original books from a bygone era, spending hours upon hours alone studying them. Reading every faded, aged page, soaking up the knowledge.

As he did this, I had to police my inner child, who shrieked with juvenile laughter. What had occurred to me was my own version of this. My subject and I are very close in age, and while my imagined version of these secret reading sessions is probably wildly exaggerated in its sheer splendour, it still set the stage for my mucky underbelly equivalent.

In my first published story story (Soft Play in It’s OKAY zine issue #1), I recalled how my gang of friends and I spent a large portion of our childhoods on a defunct, decaying wool mill, around which the last people to walk its yawning corridors – two security guards – would give us a tour around. On these tours, some of us would quietly splinter off and roam the nooks and doorways to see what we could see. One time we discovered a Morrison’s supermarket carrier bag full of porn magazines, and would then return to it for as long as we could during these tours.

It was grim, dried out, dog-eared and so pre internet, and when juxtaposed with my writing subjects more romantic experience, a great illustration of the contrast between people’s roots, how the culture and economy of the day is the context we do not choose, but must navigate.

Does this every change? I don’t think so. Creativity is always subject to context, and I try not to overthink what that has enabled and thwarted in my own experience of it.