Wells-Next-the-Sea

You could almost believe it is the summertime.

Steps into Shadow

Continuing my seemingly never-ending fascination with dodgy-looking stairwells.

Southtown: Great Yarmouth to Gorleston

The few miles walk from Yarmouth quay to Gorleston and back. A cold day, bright and clear followed by darkness and sleet. Many windows looked dark, the wind harsh.

The East Anglian Perambulator: MR James' 'Suffolk and Norfolk'

I live and wander in East Anglia. None of these are new, but these pictures are all of locations visited by ghost story master M R James in his ‘Suffolk and Norfolk: A Perambulation of the Two Counties with Notices of Their History and Their Ancient Buildings.’

Perhaps no overtly supernatural leanings, but hopefully a vibe of the landscape that impacted him so. All captions are taken from James’ wonderful guide.

"Aldeburgh...has a special charm for those who, like myself, have known it since childhood; but I do not find it easy to put that charm into words."

"The good town of Aylsham would make a convenient centre for exploring much of the country with which I have been dealing."

"The vast dead inland flats from Yarmouth are very impressive."

(Castle Acre): "...no finer ruin is to be found in Norfolk."

(Attleborough): "Here legend says that St. Edmund resided for a year, and learnt the Psalter..."

(Dunwich): "How much of this once populous city with ''fifty-two churches' is left at the moment I will not undertake to say."

"Of the many modern attractions of Lowestoft I need not speak."

(Norwich): "...I imagine that both this [panel] and the other at St Peter Mancroft belong to a Last Judgement."

"A merman was caught at Orford in the thirteenth century, and kept for some time."

"Walberswick, a haunt of artists, also had a very large church."

(Watton): "Undistinguished except that near it the death of the Babes in the Wood is located, in Wayland or Wailing Wood."

Autumn Afternoons

A cold afternoon walk along the cliffs at Weybourne. Golden hours, the cawing of birds, the crashing of waves.

"shore crumbles away"

shore crumbles away
thirteen crows caw at daybreak
the end of the world

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' - Shameless Self-Promotion Time!

A couple of days ago I published a short novel via Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. As a former bookseller I will always choose the beauty and sensuality of a physical book if given the chance: however, I do like the potential ebook publishing offers. Arty chapbooks aside, literature doesn't quite have its equivalent of the DIY culture of music and film: self-published works produced by dodgy vanity press companies often feel and look cheap and nasty. There's rarely the thrill of looking through the undiscovered: something I have actually experienced whilst browsing through listings of ebooks online. The market is still dominated by established authors and established publishing houses, and I can't see that changing any time soon, but it's cool to have the possibility of having mad, bizarre, original content up there in easy reach.



My book is called 'The Sinners of Crowsmere.' It's trim - about 13300 words - and I include about a dozen photographs, some from EastScapes and re-edited, some seeing the light for the first time. The blurb reads thus:

"A man is released from prison and returns to his coastal home town. Broken figures inhabit a decaying landscape. Curses and crows haunt the air.

As influenced by the transgressive writings of Dennis Cooper and Derek McCormack as the East Anglian ghost stories of M R James, The Sinners of Crowsmere is a bleakly skeletal novel about erosion, misogyny, folklore, old photographs, and half-remembered films."

The book's relationship to EastScapes is actually fairly strong - it started life as me attempting to put my photography into words, and sort of remained that way. As a reader, I'm not terribly interested in page-turning thrillers with complex plot and character interactions: I prefer things that are stranger, follow their own pace, wander off the track into the wilderness, sometimes returning, sometimes not. If this sounds like a preemptive defense of any criticism, well, I guess it kind of is - but it's also true. Authors I have found massively inspirational include the likes of Dennis Cooper, Derek McCormack, and Harmony Korine - all of whom dance to the beat of their own drum, and all of whom have crafted beautiful pieces of writings that at times seem so spare and slight they could at any moment fade into the nothingness.

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' is also, of course, about the East Anglian landscape, my usual obsessions all correct and present - coastal erosion, darkness beneath the surface of the landscape, M R Jamesian folklore, broken things. Its subtitle is 'A Fractured Novella,' and that's how I like to think of it: broken, oddly-shaped, a bit freaky. Hopefully like some of the images I stick up here.

'The Sinners of Crowsmere' can be seen here:

Buy The Sinners of Crowsmere here

Candle Flicker

Flickering candle-light in St Mary's Church, Great Yarmouth.

Orphans: EastScapes Rejects

For various reasons, I haven't been out with my camera much at all recently. Feels kind of cruddy neglecting one of my few creative outlets, though, so earlier I had a trawl through my hard drive and picked out a few pictures from the past couple of years or so that I never got round to publishing on here. They all sort of fell through the cracks - either I didn't feel they 'fit' in the series in which they were originally taken, or I didn't like them at the time.

I'll not give them any further context than that. Homeless pictures. Orphans.