Liquid Geography

The editors of The New Quarterly, when first reviewing my story submissions, concluded, rightly or wrongly, that my work fell into the category of 'Magic Realism'. 'Magic Realism', as one editor proceeded to define, was the "seamless blending of the ineffable and the concrete". The 'ineffable' or 'other reality' part of this definition is at the core of many of the stories in this collection.





The stories in Liquid Geography could be categorized as 'backyard fiction', or even 'transformative realism'. They all, more or less, take place in and around a home environment and conclude by literally 'spilling outside'; differences between what is 'real' and is 'not real', what is present, past or future, disintegrate and blur away.





The characters who inhabit or appear in these stories, are invariably destined, in one way or another, to experience glimpses and encounters with heightened or altered moments of cognition. They are not necessarily characters who are spiritually evolved or wise in any sense; they are not characters who have consciously embarked upon a path of higher understanding. They are generally very ordinary individuals leading seemingly ordinary lives. What they discover, however, is that reality as they believe they know it, is a slippery path where the 'unreal', 'super-real' or even 'magical' may (and can) present itself at any given moment.





Whether the characters in question have initiated this shift through some psychic turmoil or trauma that alters his or her patterns of perception, or whether there is a hidden 'other reality' containing different truths, becomes merely a matter of definition, and therefore moot.