By John Reppion
I was lucky enough to grow up on the borderland of the
modern world; the South-West tip of Liverpool where a haunted Tudor mansion
house and the grave of a giant were as easily reached as the abandoned synthetic
resins factory and boarded up secondary school I spent so many of pre and early
teenage days hanging round. All of these places already had their stories but
all of us added our own layers of narrative and meaning just by being there. I
became fascinated with the idea of being able to physically enter a story at a
young age, although I never thought of it quite in that way. I just knew I
wanted to be near the enormous grave of The Childe of Hale surrounded by
crumbling skull-and-crossboned tombstones, to stand in awe before the mammoth,
and to my young mind wholly terrifying, Liverpool Anglican Cathedral. These
places were gateways to the trans-mundane; ‘thin places’ where the barrier
between the natural and the supernatural, between the now and the past, seemed
permeable. In these places I was able to walk on and in and through history,
through stories, and to commune with the characters from those narratives.
Since I began my writing career in 2003 this idea of
narrative embedded in locations has been a big part of my work whether it be my
fiction, or my essay and article writing. To some extent all this culminated in
April 2016 when I put on a one day event here in Liverpool entitled Spirits of Place.
Myself and eight guest speakers met at Calderstones Mansion house, in the heart
of Liverpool’s Calderstones Park, and gave a series of talks on topics ranging
from archaeology, to literature, to history, to magick. Every talk took its cue
from the location – many delving back as far as the neolithic tomb whose
remains lend their name to the park itself. The event was a success and I was
asked by Daily Grail Publishing if I’d be interested in turning Spirits of
Place into a book. I was, of course, excited by the idea but soon realised that
the book would need to be a completely different beast to the event.
I took the core concept and broadened the scope. Instead of
pinning down one specific location, I decided it would be more interesting to
open the book up completely, allowing contributors to write about anywhere in
the world (indeed, in the case of futurist Mark
Pesce, about the virtual world). I admit that I am a white, middle-aged
Englishman, but even so I felt that it would also be nice to hear from people
other than that group which is perhaps somewhat over represented in this
particular field. Likewise, I felt that London was a city whose psychogeography
has already been tackled amply elsewhere. With these few guidelines in place I
drew up a list of writers who I thought could offer some interesting and unique
perspectives on the intersection between landscape and narrative.
One of those writers was Kristine Ong Muslim: an author,
poet and translator who still lives in the same rural town in Maguindanao,
southern Philippines, where she grew up. Her piece in the book is entitled “Agonies
and Enchantments” and deals with the spirits – metaphorical and otherwise –
of her childhood as much as anything. Recently I emailed to
ask her about her choice of subject matter and the way she handled it.
“In a remote small town such as
the one I’ve been living in for most of my life, the family unit accurately
represents the condensed version of an interlocking, often times dysfunctional,
aggregated whole. It helps that when Western colonial influence infiltrated an
area such as ours, the infiltration was minimal, thus some indigenous practices
survived to this day. There was also relatively less bastardization and
demonization of certain pagan beliefs. In this little town, almost everyone
knows each other. Almost everyone knows whose husband is screwing another
person’s wife, who you can turn to if you need ‘magic water’ to make someone
stop falling in love, and so on and so forth. So when I wrote about my family
and childhood, I am effectively writing about the entire small community in
this part of the world.”
Spirits of Place also features essays from: Alan Moore,
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo, Warren Ellis, Gazelle Amber Valentine, Iain Sinclair,
Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Vajra Chandrasekera, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Dr. Joanne
Parker, and Damien Williams. It is available to order now from spiritsofplace.com
Bio:
Bio:
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