Shedding light on who we are, what we think, and why we care.
Our first issue is here!
B. Rae Grosz
Crystal Sidell
Moonlight Sonata: Or, How I Swim Through Dreams With You
Elle Boyd
Quinn Crook
Oliver Smith
Eternal Engines of Dreadful Will
Qualia Reed
C.R. Dudley
Uloma Ofole
Micah S. Vernon
Vanessa Guy
After listening to your feedback, and considering lessons learned from previous projects, we are pleased to announce a new format for submissions at Orchid’s Lantern. The website will now operate as a quarterly online journal, opening for set periods throughout the year, with a fresh theme every 3 months. There will then be an annual print journal, collecting all accepted submissions from the previous 12 months together with some brand new material from invited authors.
Our first theme is Dreams! Tell us your wildest. Explore the visions, the language, of sleep. Think surreal and peculiar; think repeating motifs and layered metaphor. Imagine a precognitive unconscious, paralysis, waking up in a different land… Surprise us. It’s up to you.
Full details can be found on our Submissions page.
Chris Beckett is an Arthur C Clarke award winning science fiction author. He’s published six (soon to be seven) novels and dozens of short stories, often focusing on ‘inner’ as opposed to ‘outer’ space. I caught up with him to chat about isolation, metaphysics, and tribalism in modern society.
Hi Chris, welcome to Writers on Lockdown! So, how are you faring in these strange times? Is isolation a help or a hindrance to your writing process?
I’ve been having difficulty moving my writing forward this last couple of months, but this often happens – I simply dry up and can’t seem to write anything – and it may have nothing to do with the lockdown. However I do think my ability to concentrate (never brilliant to be honest) is worse than usual.
When the real world is stranger and more engrossing than usual – and I am finding it engrossing – it is perhaps harder to focus on imagined worlds?
In my life generally, I’d say I am finding the lockdown more interesting than distressing. I’m used to spending a lot of time by myself at home, and in some ways the lockdown is providing a stimulus for me to find ways of keeping more in touch with some people than I usually would, which is nice.
I have a little granddaughter – she is 13 months old – and I’m very sad not to be able to spend time with her, as the plan had been (until this happened) that I would be looking after her for one day a week.
I’ve heard from several writers that their creativity is at a low point. I wonder if being engrossed in new situations is all part of ‘refilling the well’ of inspiration. Do you think we’ll see a different kind of fiction emerge on the other side of this?
I think that’s exactly right about ‘refilling the well’. We have to stock up on life in order to have anything to write about. And none of us have had many experiences which are completely comparable to this one. (In fact a lot of writers have had pretty quiet lives generally, I suspect). I’m sure new kinds of fiction will come out of this, but I really don’t know what. This virus has changed life for everyone, but in so many different ways.
I wanted to talk in particular about your recent novel, Beneath the World, a Sea, which is full of strong, surreal imagery, questions of the unconscious and philosophy of mind. When so many science fiction writers are focused on future technology, what made you turn inwards and address the nature of consciousness?
Continue reading “Writers on Lockdown: Chris Beckett”
I’ve done dream work for many years. I keep journals, both written and visual, to record symbols, factors and outcomes. I experiment with levels of lucidity. And I’ve become quite adept at interpreting dreams from a Jungian perspective.
Over time I’ve come to understand there are ordinary dreams, which feel like the processing of information, and then there are big dreams, which feel like they are saying: “Hey you! Sit up and listen. This is important.” Those dreams are the ones that seem to have an ‘otherness’ to them, as though what’s in the mind of the dreamer is being combined with something that resides far deeper than we normally go. For me, these are accompanied by an omnipresent glow, and the sense that a guide is communicating. Sometimes this type of dream is sporadic, but more often they come as a result of active scrying for information or probing the mystical.
Most recently I decided to experiment with tattvas in conjunction with dreaming to see if it would produce any insightful results, and since a few of your have expressed an interest in my ‘mind explorations’, I thought I’d share this one.
Tattvas
Tattvas are elements or aspects we can use to analyse reality, and feature in several eastern religions. In some traditions they are considered to be aspects of a deity, but in Hindu Tantrism they are seen as global energy tides as follows:
Akasa (Spirit Tattva) – symbolised by a black egg
Vayu (Air Tattva) – symbolised by a blue circle
Tejas (Fire Tattva) – symbolised by a red triangle
Apas (Water Tattva) – symbolised by a silver crescent
Prithvi (Earth Tattva) – symbolised by a yellow square
This version of tattvas was also adopted by The Golden Dawn in their mystical practices. In accordance with that tradition and its instruction on familiarisation with the symbols, I have done work with these in the past: I have a set of cards with each symbol on and every combination of two, and use them to meditate upon. For the dream experiment, I decided to begin with Prithvi: an arbitrary, or perhaps intuitive, choice. Continue reading “The Tattva Experiment: Dreaming Yellow Squares”
I leapt up, startled, in the dead of night. I’d been dreaming of the past again, and couldn’t be sure whether the sounds I heard were mental and menacing or real and benign.
“The bastard’s in here – get him!”
The words drifted up to the first floor room where I stood, and tapped on the window. I recognised them instantly as the words of my tormenter from high school. What were they doing ringing so lucid, invading the truth and the now that I wanted?
I took on a fighting stance, just as my teacher had instructed. Feet apart and equally weighted, knees bent. My twin was wrapped in sheets, cowering in the corner behind me. I will protect you, I thought. There was a reason the sword was left for us in this way. I gripped it tightly and focused upon the muscles and strength needed to maintain the posture it demanded. My breath became deep and purposeful.
The words continued to scratch at the window, desperate to get in and meet my ears full-on. They were squeezing through the frame… I turned to face them and swiped the sword through the air in one clean movement, cutting the threats in two. They fell away slowly like feathers until they were nowhere to be heard.
I couldn’t allow my to guard drop straight away, for next there was a creaking on the landing outside my room. Footfall on floorboards, or the house choking? I wasn’t taking any chances and brought the sword down once again, this time in the direction of the door. But then I had the sensation that someone was in the room, standing over me. Someone unearthly and monstrous. My eyes wide in the dark, I couldn’t quite make a figure out, and dry tears stung from the strain of trying. With nothing to lose, I took another slash with the blade out in front of me and felt something drop into a heap on the floor. My twin rejoined me then, and in exhaustion we fell backwards onto the bed as one. Back to the land of dreams.
When the morning light came, my thoughts had returned to normal. There was a gash in the reality between my bed and the wardrobe where I had struck something. It was like a tear in a canvas, but not so neat as to hide the in between. The in between was black and full of eyes that glared, pulling me in. Azrael, they whispered to my bones. I remembered what my teacher had said though: leave the wound well alone until it is healed.
There were more cuts all over the house: far more than I could remember making. As I left for work, I stepped over the biggest of them all on the doorstep: the place where a bad memory had once been. It was gaping wide and as I peered in I saw thousands of twinkling stars. I resisted the temptation to touch them and walked away.
All of the cuts healed over the coming few days and a tension I had carried for many years dropped from my shoulders. I could feel tall at last. Never again would I think of the bully’s words; from then on they existed only as pixelated impressions in the peripheries of my mind. That was when I knew I was truly ready for the next lesson my teacher had to give me.
*****
For more unusual, contemplative flash fiction, check out my book Fragments of Perception. Available now in e-book and paperback worldwide.
My heart beats hard inside its wet wrapping. Colours emerge; pink, red, and splashes of emerald green, but they are muted by those who behold them.
My heart sings in strange wave formations that would describe the nature of the quantum in no uncertain terms, could it only escape this plastic sheeting. Instead, these waves are refracted. They are thrust in all directions in dissonance, like the sound of an untuned piano key played over and over; a crude backing track to the stark wails of the human throat.
My heart rages. You may call it love, which is something akin to approaching a bear for a cute photo while it is growling out a warning. It wants to be free, not confined, and to love is to be attached.
My heart whimpers softly in the night, and I hear it in my dreams. But, instead of letting it loose to soar, I slay it anew each morning with my open eyelids and the offensive filter of ego that daylight brings. It makes distant, distorted cries as I bag it up, and I interpret it as the fluttering joy of life.
Words like ‘poor’ or thriving’ are not adequate in describing the state of the heart, for they suit only things a mind can judge. Still, whenever the question comes: how are you; how is your heart today? I use a word with even less importance, as though it were not even worth the effort of description: “OK,” I say. Because it is OK – isn’t it? Everything is surely OK.
*****
Have you ever wondered how future technology will affect the human psyche? What defines the line between imagination and reality? Whether it is possible to find spirituality in science? Check out my new book, Fragments of Perception, for 36 quirky, bite-sized stories to make you contemplate!
I was having coffee with a friend the other day, and of course I told her all about the book I am about publish. “Oh, but why not try to get a proper publishing deal before you do that?” she said. I told her I wasn’t interested in that route, and she quickly responded with “don’t put yourself down: you never know unless you try.” I assured her that this was a positive decision I was making, and nothing to do with being under-confident. Her response? “Well I suppose at least a proper publisher might see what you do and pick you up later.” My friend’s perspective is not an uncommon one; I have come across many others who think I am somehow selling myself short by ‘settling’ for publishing independently. So in this post I want to explain why it is my first choice to put my book out this way, without ever having sent off a single query letter.
She lies on her bed thinking of him and what they could have been. He was cruel to her, she knows, but she admires the reason why. She longs to tell him that the life he chose was what she wanted all along; to be released from norms and social expectations, to roam as free as a bird with no connections and only the present moment to worry about. He was no good for her, he had said, he would lead her astray. But she wanted to be led astray. She wanted the excuse to experience colour and exhilaration instead of greyish and uniform. Take me with you, she had begged, I understand, I do.
He rides faster and faster on his bike, thrilled by the roar of the engine beneath him and the sensation that everything is moving quickly through him. It takes the pain away. Pain can’t travel at 100mph like he can. If he were to slow down he’d be stuck with that thought yet again, that she is only ‘the one that got away’ because he pushed her. He longs to tell her that the life she chose was what he wanted all along; to be accepted by society, to settle in one place long enough to establish a true sense of self, to have a past and a future worth caring about.
In their separate dreams she and he will live, building new castles from the ghosts that haunt them, their silent screams resonating until the end when the tide catches up and takes them both for its own.
Heal my wounds?
Night after night I awake in that place; drenched in sweat, feeling a hundred years old. The walls around me are brown and peeling, etched with words that won’t stay, covered in blood that is rotting yet alive. The stench fills my eyes with tears, and the tears melt my leathery skin on contact. There are echoes around me of incomprehensible words spoken, sharp and hasty. They resonate in my skull, around and around. I am bound, yet there are no ropes and there are no chains…
Sometimes a rusty iron ring emerges from a wall as though it were soft, and I reach out for it. But I slip on the pool of blood beneath my feet and
I cannot regain myself and
I slide around, unable to grip and unable to stand or even to pull myself to my knees amongst the maggots. Yes, there are maggots now, ok? Continue reading “Fragments of Dark: George”
“So you definitely saw purple?” Hertz quizzed me back at the hotel.
“Yes. It was a big, fat, purple scream.”
“Interesting. I saw red. Ida?”
“Red,” Ida agreed.
“I knew we were right to name you Purple, it’s obviously the colour you see anything magical in.” Hertz seemed satisfied with his own judgement.
“Well it doesn’t matter now.” Ida dispelled his gloating with a flick of her wrist. “The question is what are we going to do? That poor woman was quite distressed. She recognised us.”
Orchid's Lantern 