Featured Author - Reed Stirling

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Reed Stirling, my alter ego, lives in Cowichan Bay, BC, and writes when not painting landscapes (see below) travelling or

or taking coffee at The Drumroaster, a local café where physics and metaphysics clash daily. Before retiring and taking up writing novels as a past time, I taught English Literature. Joyce Carol Oates oversaw my M.A. thesis. Several talented students of mine have gone on to become successful award-winning writers.

My wife and I built a log home in the hills of southern Vancouver Island [view photo], and survived totally off the grid for twenty-five years during which time the rooms in that house filled up with books, thousands of student essays were graded, and innumerable cords of firewood were split.

Literary output — Shades Of Persephone, published in 2019, is a literary mystery set in Greece. Lighting The Lamp, a fictional memoir, was published in March 2020. A third novel is presently undergoing revision. Shorter work has appeared over the years in a variety of publications including Hackwriters Magazine, Dis(s)ent, The Danforth Review, Fickle Muses, The Fieldstone Review, Humanist Perspectives, and StepAway Magazine.

Intrigue is my primary interest, with romantic entanglement an integral part of the action. Allusions to mythology, art, literature, philosophy, and religion underpin plot development. Irony is pervasive. I sit down to write every day and try to leave the desk having achieved at least a workable page. Frequently what comes of my effort amounts to no more than a serviceable paragraph, a single sentence, or a metaphor that might work in a context yet to be imagined.

Favourite authors —

John Banville, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins

James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemmingway, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles

 from Shades of Persephone

 Magalee De Bellefeuille. A woman others dressed in dreams, photographed, painted, prayed to, lusted after, called whore and fell in love with. She’ll rip your heart out, man! An unwelcome caveat at that time, humbling then, humbling now. And yet, how easily with the winking of an eye or the pulling of a leg could she attribute to me the ego of a fool. I prefer to dwell on the adulation.

Manolis, blue smoke above his head: “I tell you what I think, Steven. You have made of Magalee an ikon, and desire only to pray.”

Damen Van Raamsdonk, the artist, sought salvation through Magalee, but only on canvas could he capture and hold his own perceptions of her. In his sanity, she was his muse; in his madness, she was his demon, a sluttish succubus slinking around on the dark edge of atavistic fantasy. I appreciated Damien's genius, understood his aesthetic needs, but was horrified by his instincts.

                With the words Die Magdalee, Trüger acknowledged a state of grace he could not attain. He objectified Magalee. He framed her in a caption. He was able then in a devious flip of logic to soil her elevated image, to smash it, to profane it. He called her whore: he attributed to this idol of his own imagining all manner of behaviour becoming to one he wanted to, but could not, get his hands on.

In unrequited fits, I had shared Trüger’s sentiments, and found his innuendo made Magalee all the more attractive. What I lacked in pure pagan apprehension, I made up for with a perverse pleasure in visualizing the supple thigh of beauty exposed to his shadowy lights. She therefore became darker, more alluring, and so even more unattainable. This inadvertent betrayal I would attempt to rectify, to sanctify rather, with poetic sentimentality…

Barefoot, all leg and supple thigh, Magalee slowly enters the stream, and with cupped hands curls out water over her head. She screams with delight. Cicadas cease chirring, only to break out immediately in heightened frenzy.

She is quickly soaked, her t-shirt but a veil, her raven hair glistening with silvery tongues, her body therefore like a statue carved out of white mountain water and defined as graphically as desire itself. And then, with a laugh that deceives as readily as the willing mind believes, she splashes me repeatedly with cool liquid light.

Forever Magalee! Mischievous nymph. Renoir girl, naked in the dappled light. In the seething of this moment, the water is a caress.

                “Take me,” I hear her say, but I know the words are my own, Pan proposed, long sublimated, still unvoiced. She becomes Medusa the Beautiful, mortal, but she who empowers stones with being, capable at any time of turning my thoughts into words. In the cup of her moulded hands, hands that have touched the matrix, hands as delicate as immortality, she offers me water to drink…

               

                Over Akrotiri, wisps of her image now streak the evening sky like lines of haiku.

Reviews (Amazon):

               

                Excellent read

               

                Compelling

               

                skilfully weaves elements of mythology, Shakespearean tragedy and historical allusion to create a novel that is both intriguing and satisfying

               

                wonderful, magical Crete in the early ‘80s charms and enhances the mystery

                excellent mystery for fans of Greek mythology

from Lighting the Lamp

The more I engage in this identity search, the more I labour in a chronological arrangement of factual recall, the more I grow aware of static thrumming behind the scenes that I evoke, a subjective electromagnetic radiation, so to say, informing the background of my narrative with a species of tension stretched between past events and my recollection of them. The spectrum thus engendered ranges from humorous self-effacement to guilty self-reproach.

But truthful accounting. What to make of it? Total fabrication, I fear, may result in any effort to animate memory when significant events from decades past hide among the vagaries of time like participants in a game of blindman’s bluff. Memories can fracture and fragment. Misremembering may deflate the import of a specific childhood event, a first confession where guilt now has an incomprehensible context, for instance, or a bee sting, or on your seventh birthday getting your eye blackened by the neighbourhood bully. Then again, misremembering can conflate two or more innocent enough disinclinations on the part of a fair-haired friend into a single blockbuster put-down where the adolescent’s broken heart lies not in halves but in millions of pieces. Putting into words today what happened years ago requires disciplined deliberation. A nuanced articulation is hardly the equivalent of an adrenalin rush. How does one examine with any kind of accuracy the scar tissue of past emotion?

What’s more, can one’s heart beat melodiously? Or nerves shatter? Does disappointment droop or sag? Anger boil more than clench its fists?

Semantic refinement can distract endlessly if veracity is really the object of the exercise. Recollections can roam chimera-like in distant locations where the light of today’s understanding is faint. Narrative truth is a complex matter even with the aid of varying perspectives. How to record in a convincing manner disturbing or contrarian points of view and not be accused of being a hateful bigot?

Okay, fine. I’m dealing with all that.

Memory: acts of the mind aligning imagination, exaggeration, and artifice. You grasp today what eluded you yesterday and call it truth, though in the process you certainly do fabricate, falsify, or lie absolutely…

As sunlight breaks out of the darkness above Mount Tzouhalem, I am reminded of mythical Orpheus emerging from the world of shades, lyre in hand, having ascended through Stygian tracks, where the past follows along at a distance and falls back into oblivion. And after the subterraneous gloom and the loss, the light, of course, the immense light. Orpheus reborn crossing the threshold, Orpheus on the rebound, striding along in contemporary dress and climbing the steps of a temple adorned with life-size friezes of voyage and discovery, and where Jason, his one-time captain, points to the horizon, while Medea looks on having dipped the proffered silver goblet into her Cauldron of Regeneration. Proceeding into the world of intimate connections and transient appearances, Orpheus contemplates, in the web of endless possibilities that his mind weaves, the meaning of finality. His exit is not pretty, but it is poetic, and it is memorable. The lyre he holds against his chest will contribute nightly to the music of the spheres.

Review (Amazon):

                Insightful & revealing

 From the wharves of BC’s Cowichan Bay to the Old Port of Montreal and back again, protagonist and narrator Terry Burke uncovers and records lost chapters in his personal history… Steeped in new-found but essential truth, he undergoes a form of rebirth allowing a more authentic self to emerge...

 Among myriad themes in this all-encompassing work, two in particular draw the informed reader deeper into the narrative: the Socratic declaration that “the unexamined life is not worth living” and the alarming justification of mythical Medea that “the woman scorned is the woman reborn.”