LAUNCH READING (ONLINE)
Timothy Thornton
with Ellen Dillon, Huw Lemmey, and Eley Williams
Hosted by Burley Fisher Books
Thursday 16 May, 7pm BST
REGISTER HERE
A promotional post this time, which I should say, for new readers (hello!) is vanishingly rare from me.
I’m incredibly proud of this book. It is pretty strange, and I’ve worked very hard on it. I think it is good. I think it is the best thing I have done.
Also, its publication opens a space for me, emotionally, to make a number of changes which are a long time coming. For instance!!! This is the last post I’ll do under these names: the substack’s, and mine. I’m soon changing both — after four years, and thirty-seven years, respectively. (Your next inbox from me will be from a substack named ‘The Abrupt Cliffs’.)
The former is really on a whim, because I am bored of the old name, because it reminds me of the state I was in when I chose it, and because I never really knew what ‘HORSES NOISE’ was about anyway, other than that it pertained to something, someone, from… well, from a different lifetime.
The latter, my own name — this was one of many big changes I promised myself for when I got sober. I’ve been in recovery since January 1st. The new name arrived, by chance, right before I got sober. Perfect timing, I would have been a fool to ignore it. Some people have called my by the new name for four months already, and every single time they do, I feel absolutely euphoric. I’ve decided it is time to make the switch.
Candles and Water, like Shapeshifting (poetry, Feb 2024 from RunAmok — reviewed here by Luke Roberts) was written entirely under the relentless crush of addiction. They might be the last books I ever put my old name on — I genuinely don’t know. That’ll be a decision. Maybe I’ll keep the old name as a pseudonym. Is that something people do? (If anyone reading has handled a similar situation — I’d love to hear any advice, I genuinely would…)
Below is a short excerpt from Candles and Water.
Best wishes, everyone. Thank you for being a reader of this substack.
Maybe see you on the 16th!
Candles and Water is a queer pillow book: a document of wreckage, haunting, and survival.
This collection is made of fictions and diaries, dreams and lists, lies and ghost stories. Its fragments and filaments are lonely, joyous, enraged, sickly, and lost; and when they crystallize around a single voice, it is by way of healing from grief and recovery from addiction.
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‘Candles and Water risks everything, daring to explore powerful vulnerabilities, yearning, and unabashed hope. Elusiveness and the whisperings of shadows inhabit these pages, always illuminated and burnished by the voice of a poet.’
— Thomas Glave, author of Among The Bloodpeople
‘Timothy Thornton's Candles and Water is a rare and transformational book, haunting, beautiful and watchful. Writing that follows its brush like Sei Shōnagon.’
— David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights On
‘These radical, scattered shards of life and sensation… come to a whole, coalescing like bioluminescence… witty, dark, profound, devastating. One long séance with a fellow human soul.’
— Philip Hoare, author of RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR
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Paperback
347pp
ISBN: 9781739364991
READERS
Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. His work was in Volume 2 of the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has published eleven books of poetry with small presses. He organised two series of reading and performance nights in Brighton: evenly and perversely and WHAT YOU NEED. He has composed and performed scores for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre.
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Ellen Dillon is a poet and teacher from Limerick, Ireland. Her latest books are Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel (HVTN Press, 2003) and tentatives (Pamenar Press, 2023). Previous books look at Irish history from the perspective of butter (Butter Intervention, Veer 2, 2022), the teaching life of Stéphane Mallarmé (Morsel May Sleep, Sublunary Editions, 2021), and Stephen Malkmus's guitar (Sonnets to Malkmus, Sad Press, 2019). She is currently working on a novel in prose poems called A Whale Called Milieu.
Huw Lemmey (b. 1986) is a novelist, artist and critic living in Barcelona. He is the author of four books, including Bad Gays: A Homosexual History and Unknown Language, and his debut film, Ungentle, was released in 2022. He writes on sex, culture, history and cities for numerous magazines and journals including Frieze and Architectural Review. As an artist and filmmaker, his work has appeared at numerous international institutions and film festivals.
Eley Williams’ short fiction appears in anthologies including The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, Pilot Press’ Modern Queer Poets, and Liberating the Canon edited by Isabel Waidner. Her debut Attrib. And Other Stories won the James Tait Back Memorial Prize for fiction, with a second collection of short stories Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good forthcoming in 2024.
back cover: Keith Vaughan, ‘Boy Holding Up Fishing Net’ (1939)
from Candles and Water — Chapter 63, ‘The sea’
Last night I went to the beach. For the first time in forever, to the very edge of the sea. It was riddled with ghosts, and I was perturbed by it: I felt tense, on guard, unsettled, almost upset, and not sure where to look, nor for how long, like a cat on bonfire night.
The tide must have been going out, because just before the sea began, a ridge of pebbles kept back a long, thin, shallow lagoon, stretching as far east as you could see, whose surface was completely still, such that it reflected the moonlight unbroken, in a bright haunted strip.
A man not fifteen yards away was performing some kind of magic, limbs flailing; he seemed to be becoming something else. I had come to this part of town to suck dick, but that route through the bushes had seemed uncharacteristically deserted, and I had quickly found the ghostly sea itself too compelling to resist. Yet immediately it frightened me, and very soon I found it impossible to stay.
Being back on the land — by which I just mean no longer on the beach, but it really had felt like being out at sea — I felt immediately better, and far, far safer —that’s it, that’s the word, I had felt unsafe — yet I kept looking seaward as I walked.
A large grey shape was visible, back on the beach, obscure and difficult to see, but seemingly a person. It was so motionless, every single time I looked back, that I found myself fixing my gaze on it as I walked. It was inhumanly still. For a minute I walked without taking my eyes off it.
It can’t have been a person. It must have been part of the architecture of whatever that object was nearby, some sort of shed. Immediately as I made this decision the figure raised its left arm to its face. A single movement, and a new pose held. The shock of it was enough to make me gasp out loud. From then on, I walked quicker.
I love the sea. I have always trusted it, and believed in it as some sort of final sanctuary. And over the years it has been very good to me. But on this occasion, I was not welcome. It was extraordinary to feel with such vividness and such certainty that the sea did not want me there, that I was being warned.
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Great name!