Purchase links to details and purchase links for your favorite retailer by clicking this link. https://bookswelove.net/stirling-reed/
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.”
.jpg)
