Wanting: Essay Fragments (Winner of the 2022 PNR prize for Creative Essaying at the University of Dundee)

Burden Goldilocks produces prophesied curls, Snow White becomes a pearly corpse, Thumbelina never grows beyond her moniker. “What’s my name?” The Queen speaks the legendary word and Rumpelstiltskin, crooked imp, boils. Hops on stilt-thin legs, hide splitting. Repel-stilt-skin. I gobble fairy-tales like chocolates, plump with self-appointed expertise. Evil girls pretend to be princesses, masquerade as Read More

Having and Being Had

In 2014, essayist Eula Biss took out a mortgage with her husband on a two-bedroom bungalow in Chicago. The experience made her uneasy. On the first page of Having and Being Had, Biss describes how a Mexican woman accompanied by four children, on seeing the front room of the bungalow was curtainless and empty, enquired if the room was available to rent. A moment of intense discomfort.

A Voyage at Anchor: A collage essay by Craig McLean

  Know my name A name is a fickle thing. For me, it’s a way for people to get my attention; for others, it is me. For my part, I don’t think of myself as ‘Craig’. I answer to it, but I don’t like it. I’ve heard it remarked that it is a ‘good Scottish Read More

Before I knocked

“Before I Knocked” – the title is from a Dylan Thomas poem – focuses on three images from the past: a postcard sent from California to Belfast in 1931; a photograph of two British soldiers in Jerusalem during World War II; and a family snapshot taken on an Irish beach in 1954. The essay unravels/imagines Read More