The Learned Pig

Art – Thinking – Nature – Writing

Tag: fiction

  • Pharmakeia

    Pharmakeia

    The Circe myth updated for the age of synthetic biology: disconcerting new writing by Erin Rogers, with accompanying art by John Stark.

  • The Look Away

    The Look Away

      Although I cannot see them, I know they are out there. Hare. Fox. Raven. Each waiting to play their part. – Richard Skelton, The Look Away     A sense of ominous foreboding pervades The Look Away, the debut novel from Richard Skelton, musician, poet, and co-founder, along with Autumn Richardson, of Corbel Stone…

  • Finley Styles

    Finley Styles

    Conceptual artist, painter and writer, Finley Styles, was born in Gosport, Hampshire, England on August 15, 1972. The son of market-trader parents, Styles proved academically gifted despite a shoddy school attendance record. From the age of twelve, he would regularly skip high school and, later, 6th form college to look after his parents’ market stall,…

  • Ishmael House

    Ishmael House

    Ishmael House stands along a small stretch of gravel road leading up a hill away from our town. A two-storey granite brick sentry that appears, alongside an old and dying ash tree as no more than an accent stretching out onto desolate sky. The boundary, not that it is needed, is a fence that seems…

  • Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    Shopping centres, caves and the fate of us all

    If you leave Nottingham train station and head towards the centre of the city, you will eventually come up against a large brown wall barricading the city. Actually it is the backside, or front (it’s hard to tell), of a shopping centre called Broadmarsh. Like a museum gift shop, the only way is through. I…

  • Things She Doesn’t Know

    Things She Doesn’t Know

    When she was growing up, Lily kept a list of things that she didn’t know. She was big on lists then – she liked knowing the top ten most valuable beanie babies, or the five most destructive earthquakes in history. She liked knowing things, and she liked not knowing things, and she wanted to keep…

  • Interview with a Wolf

    Interview with a Wolf

    Once upon a time, there was a magical fairy-tale world where marvellous and unbelievable events occurred and, as a general rule, everyone lived happily ever after, unless of course, you’re a wolf. In which case, these marvellous and unbelievable events were only marvellous in the sense of something to be wondered at, and unbelievable in…

  • Were

    Were

    We have been taught to believe that werewolves only change into their cursed form on full-moon nights, but perhaps – and this is speculation – on nights without full moons, the animal shape, which is the cursed form, still awakens within the werewolf, yet it cannot be seen, only sensed. Maybe werewolves spend any night…

  • Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

    Frankenstein: Before the Beginning

      Every thing must have a beginning… and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.     It was precisely two hundred years ago tonight that a very particular nightmare first appeared. In the early hours of 16 June 1816 – around 2:30am if a recent headline-grabbing astronomical…

  • Kaiku

    Kaiku

    Kaiku peeked through the kitchen window. The scene was empty – the Shaman was out. Kaiku went to the kitchen cupboard. Behind the pots and pans her fingers found a key. With great care she opened the door. The action made her shiver with excitement. The heavy door opened slowly. The room bathed in sunlight….

  • Lunch

    Lunch

    The man used to think that cars grew on trees. He imagined them growing like apples or lemons, weighing down the boughs of trees until they snapped and the cars settled slowly on the uneven dirt. He liked thinking this way. It was nice that the blue blush of the late afternoon sky in summer…