Days 5 & 6 Up and on the road early, the highlight of today was the Vršič Pass in Slovenia, which offered exhilarating views of the Julian Alps, as well as many nail-biting hairpin bends. The road threaded its way around the mountains and into the Soča Valley. All of it was breathtakingly stunning. We stopped to … Continue reading The Long Road Home from Dracula: Italy…
Day 4 We made good progress packing up and got on the road for our long drive to Slovenia. However, fate had other plans. Not even twenty minutes into the journey, in the middle of forest with no phone signal, the dreaded engine oil warning light flashed up on the dashboard. Three hours later, we … Continue reading The Long Road Home from Dracula: Slovenia…
Day 3 One final stop-off in Romania to see Corvin Castle, which translates as Raven Castle, and then we were on our way towards Hungary. Along the way, we passed a graveyard unlike anything I’d ever seen. It went on for miles, packed tightly with graves. I joked to my husband that you’d need to … Continue reading The Long Road Home from Dracula: Hungary…
Days 1 & 2 I flew to Bucharest, via Amsterdam, to meet my husband, who was waiting for me with our car and roof tent. From there, we headed towards the Bran area for our first evening. We got caught up in spells of roadwork traffic, but it gave us plenty of time to take … Continue reading The Long Road Home from Dracula: Romania…
September marks the beginning of The Season of Scares, and this year’s first autumnal theme is Lost Places. I’ve always been drawn to places that feel as though they’ve slipped slightly out of the present; old roads, forgotten buildings, ruined castles, villages tucked away beyond the beaten path. All of the places that are layered with history and … Continue reading The Season of Scares…
Some stories announce themselves dramatically, Emergence doesn’t. Its horror arrives through the slow recognition that something long submerged has begun to press upward. Triggered by a chain of events. What interested me most while writing Emergence wasn’t the actual ‘monster’ in isolation, but the conditions that allowed it to surface. The way personal history, suppressed grief and inherited unease … Continue reading Visual Residue: Emergence…
August brings us the Sturgeon Moon, named by Native Americans after the time of year when sturgeon were most readily caught in the Great Lakes. Like many traditional full moon names, you’ve probably noticed it isn’t really about the moon at all, it’s about paying attention to other stuff. Long before smart phones – even … Continue reading The Sturgeon Moon…
Last week’s solar eclipse stirred an unexpected memory. As I stood outside in my garden watching daylight briefly change – albeit not as dramatically as I’d expected – I realised I was standing in almost the same place I’d been during the eclipse of the 1990s. Back then, though, I wasn’t at home. I was … Continue reading The Places That Keep Us…
An experimental narrative that dismantles the comforting illusion that memory acts as a reliable record. In truth, no two people remember the same dead person because memory is not an observation, it’s a distortion. Schema shows us that the most powerful hauntings are those we write ourselves through belief and repetition. The man who lived and … Continue reading Schema…
I spent the weekend off-grid camping on a farm in Northumberland, tucked between woodland and fields beside an old barn that now belongs to barn owls. On the first evening, a farmer’s combine harvester became a dark silhouette against an amber sky. A modern vision… yet somehow timeless. On the second evening, when the crops … Continue reading The Land Remembers…
R. H. DIXON 