I’m Stephen Fender. I live in the North Pennines in an old stone cottage that used to be a reading-room for lead miners. The hills around the cottage are populated by sheep, grouse and heather. It’s quite wonderful.
For some time now I’ve been fascinated by epistolary novels – those collections of letters, diary entries, and documents that like to pretend not to be novels. There’s something honest about their dishonesty. A letter admits it’s partial. A diary knows it’s biased. Truth, I suspect, hides in our texts like a fieldmouse in long grass. Our words are just fermented moments of experience, left to age in the cellar of memory until they’re ready to be uncorked and consumed.
The absurd interests me too. Not absurdity for its own sake, but the absurd as a lens, a way of seeing. Reality is strange enough without embellishment. A dentist playing Satie. A boomerang stick. A clock with arthritis. These things reveal more than realism ever could.
Diarium Absurdi is my ongoing novel, if a novel is what it turns out to be. It’s a diary that explores these preoccupations: the epistolary, the absurd, the hidden truths in fermented text. Each entry is a moment preserved, distorted, truthful in its lies.
I have also put Diarium Absurdi on a website - to make it more visually appealing and easier to follow - so why not take a look. It’s here » absurdi.ink
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