The Art of Being Human

FableCroft is running a Kickstarter campaign for its first anthology in six years, The Art of Being Human. It’s wonderful to see another FableCroft collection coming together with Tehani Wessely’s usual wonderful creative drive, and an honour to be a part of it! You can make a pledge here and read about the work of other contributors here.

My story Among the faded woods is set in an alternate 1920s, where the Great War is over but the streets are full of ghosts and haunting has become a sickness to plague the living. Everyone knows two things – the dead don’t love you back, and the dead don’t talk. After a family tragedy, Laurel is the only survivor of the three Darthe daughters, but it turns out that perhaps her sisters do still have something they want to say.

This story is, of course, partially inspired by certain recent events.

When the pandemic started, the 2020s started to feel like their own alternate reality where anything could and would happen, a lumbering pageant of disasters with no end point in sight. In times of crisis, I comfort-read Agatha Christie murder mysteries, which is a rather odd habit because honestly they are not especially comforting books. The modern adaptations attempt to soften their edges with diverse casting and sensitive storytelling but the originals contain some of the worst possible opinions of the time periods in which they were written, and will make you rather want to commit a murder or two yourself. Christie’s first book was published in 1920 and her last posthumously in 1976. In sequence they portray a society in a state of constant, ungraceful change, where every step towards the future is met with indignation on behalf of a rose-tinted past, where a veneer of wealth and glamour is laid across an ocean of anxiety, resentment and violence. And yet there is something about Christie’s storytelling that gets its claws in you. The dead don’t rest quietly; they are always whispering under the dirt until the truth is told. In two separate Christies, there is a specific image that has stuck with me: a beautiful garden, and beneath it, two women buried in unmarked graves. But the garden gives it away. The plants grow wild there like the roses in a fairy tale, consuming their sleepers. Or perhaps it is closer to Arthurian legend, to the story of Vortigern. No walls can ever stand while built on this site of turmoil.

When I was first invited to write a story for The Art of Being Human, I wasn’t thinking about any of these things. I tossed around a few different ideas, none of which lit a spark. It was a rough time for me creatively, as it has been for a lot of people, to the point where I’ve started calling it the 2020s Burnout as a shorthand. And then I started thinking about ghosts. I began writing with a jumble of unclear ideas in mind. Spectacles, I thought, spectacles as protective equipment to ward off the eyes of the dead. Wards laid on people’s houses. Servants, of course, wearing spectacles at their employer’s discretion. The world building came easily but I didn’t really know what the story was about until I realised I was writing a mystery story. This is not like me at all. Usually I realise I’m writing a fairy tale. Among the faded woods came in stops and starts; I gradually uncovered the mystery myself as I was writing.

This wasn’t an easy story to write but I finished it at a time when finishing anything at all felt like a miracle. Throughout the height of the pandemic, I was still going to work every day, my routine practically unchanged while normality turned on its head in every direction. This story was, I suppose, an odd kind of an answer that sense of unreality – that I could still make art, in spite of it all. There is a special place in my heart for this story and for this book.

There is a Bertolt Brecht quote that I have seen doing the rounds over the past few years. “In the dark times will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” Thank you, Tehani, for the music.