Q&A: Rod Moody-Corbett, Hides
In Malcolm Lowry’s last letter to David Markson (dispatched about a week before Lowry’s death), he offers the young Markson the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever read: “Do you know which stars are which and what bird is flying over your head and what flower blossoming? If you don’t the anguish of not knowing is a very valid field for the artist. Moreover when you learn something it’s a good thing to repossess the position of your original ignorance.” By which I understand Lowry to mean basically this: good to own the app that tells you what shrub is what, what redstart warbles where, but better, artistically, to reinhabit a noticing uncluttered by the most graspable fact.
Rod Moody-Corbett interviewed by 3:AM‘s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.
Something Stinks
I’d always prided myself on my sense of direction, my ability to compass the obscurest circuits and cityscapes, but it occurred to me that I had no idea where we stood in relation to our cabin, or where—gazing down the beach, admiring its spiny issuings and swirls—we’d docked. This minor disorientation asserted a strange terror over me. It was akin to the episodes of sleep paralysis I experienced with disturbing frequency as a boy—immobile, encradled in the thick paralysis of REM sleep, my mind utterly awake to its imprisonment. In the darkness of those nights faces formed in my room. I would see a tall laughing man with a skinny black moustache who would look at me and, the instant our eyes locked, suddenly stop laughing; or else a dark shape that somewhat resembled my grandmother: the stern bulk of her skull feeling its way over my blanket, across my chest, the weight of its breath, or my own, hissing. I would try to speak, to ward these apparitions away from my unshifting limbs, but my lips wouldn’t summon a word. Time, it seemed, was my only salve. But there would be no apparitions here, no delusive visitors.
Read an extract from Rod Moody-Corbett‘s Hides.