l. lee lowe

Snow Leopard

photo courtesy of Snow Leopard Trust

My short story Snow Leopard is now available online.

Please note that the quotation in the text is from Mark Kurlansky’s book Salt.

Putting my head above the parapet

Thanks to Cally Philips for her comment, which makes me sound more daring than I am in this guest post.

photo acknowledgement

The quest for the e-weird

Writer and journalist Damien G. Walter has embarked on a courageous month-long quest to find independently published weird e-fiction.

However – and you are quite welcome to call me a naive fool for thinking this – I believe that in this festering compost heap of discarded dreams, the fertile seeds of human imagination must lie buried. In the thousands upon thousands of stories being independently published today there must surely be some worth reading, and at least a handful with the potential to be truly great. And so I’m taking up the gauntlet and heading forth on a quest, descending into the new digital underworld of the human imagination to see what I can find.

The man has got cahones – stamina too, I hope.

Ioan Hefin 2011

Corvus remains available as MP3 podcasts, narrated by the wonderful Welsh actor Ioan Hefin. I’m in the process of updating Ioan’s current biography on the Corvus title page – and eventually there’ll be some new photos too – but as a way of archiving previous information, each year I’ll post the past year’s text.

Here is what we said in 2011:

Ioan has worked as an actor, writer and director for over twenty years. His most recent works include a one-man show based on the life of Alfred Russel Wallace, which toured in Wales and Brazil last year and is scheduled for a performance in the Natural History Museum in London before the end of the year.

Bilingual in English and Welsh, Ioan has also played the part of Berian for the award winning ‘Pen Talar’ (Fiction Factory/S4C) and James for ‘Gwaith Cartref’ (Fiction Factory/S4C). He will be joining the cast of ‘Teulu’ (Boomerang/S4C) to play the role of Dafydd Wyn during the summer and autumn.

He has also appeared in two short films during 2011. ‘Nia’ (Stray Dog Cinema) was premiered during June and ‘I’ve seen Angels’ is currently in post-production.

He will also be returning to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time since 1986 to direct “Random’ for Quad Theatre Company.

In Ioan’s own words:

For me, 2010 has been one of those rare years where work has been plentiful, challenging, varied and very, very satisfying. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every minute because those sorts of years don’t come around very often in the acting world!

The one-man show about the life of Alfred Russel Wallace has been on the road again – and is heading to Rio de Janeiro before the end of July. The response has also prompted Theatr Na n’Og to adapt the script for a cast of three and will be performing for young people from South Wales between September and December in the Dylan Thomas Theatre in Swansea. Wallace is definitely my all-time hero and should be an ambassador for everyone in Wales – and every citizen of planet earth.

Over 6000 young people have also seen my adaptation of the ‘Gluscabi’ stories that toured in the spring.

I’ve been filming two new series for S4C’s Fiction Factory: ‘Pen Talar’ and ‘Gwaith Cartref’. They’re due for broadcast during the winter.

I returned to Trinity College in Carmarthen to direct a production with BA Acting students and hope to return there again next spring. They’re a wonderful group of students to work with.

The consistent project for the past year has been the serialisation of Corvus, and what a fantastic way to cap a memorable year. My main aim was to try and justify the quality of the text – I’m still in awe of the writing. I feel truly privileged to have been involved, and the experience is one that will remain with me forever. (I now realise why editors curse actors for going beyond one take!)

Merry-Go-Round

Merry-Go-Round Trailer from esther löwe on Vimeo.

The trailer for my daughter Esther’s latest film.

Magic moments

A link courtesy of my daughter, who writes: ‘Why I love making films. Exquisite use of music and tempo!’

In which I lay a judgement

I came to Glen Duncan because of I, Lucifer – not hard to guess why, and yes, it’s always a burden, a trial, an eye-opener, and of course a challenge to see what a wonderful writer has done with your current obsession(s) – and ever since turning that first page I’ve been on a Duncan reading spree. Technically both bold and accomplished, the man is even more of a whiz at voice. As far as I’m concerned, his characters don’t have to do anything as long as they keep talking.

In a break between Duncan novels, I’ve finally been reading Megan Whalen Turner’s A Conspiracy of Kings – fourth in the fantasy series and great fun if you like complex political intrigues and a dab hand at narration – and Roland Merullo’s The Talk-Funny Girl, which right at the outset has one of the most cogent descriptions in fiction of abuse’s legacy :

That girl [the narrator as a child in the New Hampshire hills] was not treated well, and when anyone is hurt like that – especially a child – the hurt burrows down inside and makes a kind of museum there, with images of the bad times displayed on every wall. Some people try to forget the museum exists and keep their mind occupied with drink or drugs or food, or by staying busy with work, or they chase one kind of excitement after another, while the memories fester there in the dark. I understand all that, and I don’t lay a judgment, as we used to say, over any of it. Some people use their own hurt as an excuse for hurting others, or for soaking in self-pity, or for a sharp anger that knifes up through the surface whenever something reminds them of what happened long ago. Some people spend their lives trying never to do what was done to them.

How many psychology texts has it taken to say what Merullo has managed to say in these few lines?

A Swedish Mortal Ghost

I’m thrilled to introduce you to Sabrina Mari Fagerheim, who is twenty years old, loves reading, and is completely blind. Music is one of her passions: she sings and plays guitar, piano, keyboard, guitalele (I had to google that one!), and harp.

Oh, and since Sabrina’s also partial to Mortal Ghost, she’s going to be translating it into Swedish for us!  Here’s what she calls a rough sample to start you off:

Jag, född av kött och ande, var varken

Jesse grävde efter vinbärsbullen han hade sparat från igårkväll, sedan skakade han ut sin sovsäck, rullade den till en kompakt rulle och stoppade den i sin ryggsäck, följt av bullen och hans vattenflaska.

Eventually there’ll be a separate section of the website devoted to her project.

Resurrection?

An appropriate title in more ways than one. I’m giving blogging another go after a rather a long hiatus – and then there’s my novel Luc, which indeed has something to do with resurrection as well. Progress is slow, terribly slow, because . . . well, because writing is painful and difficult, and the more I learn technically, the harder it seems to become. And then there’s this horrid translating I end up doing to earn a bit of money for the usual stuff you earn money for.

I’m currently writing a scene set near the Oberbaum Bridge in Berlin, shown above. Or a fantasy version of said bridge . . . 

Here’s how it looked ca. 1900:

Luc asks, where has Borofsky’s Molecule Man gone to? Good question. It was there last week while I was traipsing around in search of the perfect vantage point.

A recent interview

in which I look my most draconian. Read a conversation with the young Zimbabwean writer Tinashe Mushakavanhu, who asks the sort of questions I can probably answer better in fiction – or at least attempt to! The one issue I ought to have mentioned, but find hard to confront, is the nature of my own racism.

The noise of time

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches–and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perhaps in me someone very old still hears in the photographic mechanism the living sound of the wood.

–Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

And I love sentences.

Watershed

My short story Watershed has been published in Blackbird Magazine. You can read it here.