For some time now, I’ve been drawn to epistolary novels — those collections of letters, diary entries, and documents that seem to insist they aren’t novels at all. There’s an honesty to their dishonesty. A letter admits its partiality. A diary knows it’s biased. The thing is, truth doesn’t live in grand pronouncements, but hides in our texts like a fieldmouse in long grass.

What we write are fermented moments of experience — left to age in the cellar of memory until they’re ready to be uncorked, examined, and occasionally misunderstood.

The absurd interests me too. Not absurdity for its own sake, but the absurd as a way of seeing. Reality is strange enough without embellishment. A dentist playing Beethoven. A stuffed Victorian. A clock with arthritis. These small misalignments reveal more than realism ever could.

Diarium Absurdi is a record of these preoccupations. It takes the form of a diary — though whether it becomes a novel remains undecided. Each entry is a moment preserved, distorted, and kept. Truthful, perhaps, in its fiction.

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. Much of what I write is autobiographical. As all as I add is a pinch of magic.

A Note on Authorship

All writing published here is original work by me and forms part of an ongoing creative project. While the photographs that accompany entries are generated using image tools, the words, characters, and world of Diarium Absurdi are entirely my own.