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Old Memories Murmured in Dreams: Young Love Poetry

May 20, 2024

An old joke claims that thirty years of marriage is when she wonders what happened to the guy she married, while he wonders what happened to the girl he didn’t marry. There’s something special about young love, and poetry themed around this concept has certain unique features as well.

The most important element is of course relevant to rosy retrospection. Young love – our first romantic interactions in teenagehood and early adulthood – might be beautiful, meaningful, and exhilarating, but it’s also confusing, painful, scary, and sometimes dark and destructive.

No sane person would ever want to go through that more than once!

But that’s the beauty of art: It allows us to safely experience and reflect on feelings, thoughts, and states of mind that we wouldn’t want to experience in “reality”.

So I decided – on a whim, basically – to put together Old Memories Murmured in Dreams, a poetry collection focusing on young love. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure we can call it poetry – I tend to see it more like my Medēn art project; something between poetry and prose.

In any case, if we want to call it poetry for simplicity’s sake, it’s poetry from a naïve, young-adult perspective, but with intriguing darkness. Hey, it’s me; what did you expect!

young love poetry; cover art for Old Memories Murmured in Dreams
Cover art, made by yours truly
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The Storytelling Cat – or, OK, I Lied

February 19, 2024

Last December I said I’d likely never write another novel. And what did I start doing before a month had passed? Writing another novel. Never say never and all that. The story of how this novel, The Storytelling Cat, came to be would make for an interesting essay on creativity and art in itself.

Later in this post I’ll explain more about the creation process, together with info on how to get the novel – a free download is of course available – but for now there’s something intriguing you should know: This book is unlike any other I’ve written; there’s a lot of peculiarity involved.

That the protagonist is a cat with human knowledge is the least odd thing about this book.

The storytelling cat book cover
The cover of The Storytelling Cat is one of my favorites (of my own books, that is), though I’m not objective. You see, I painted it myself!
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Shape-shifting in Nimona: Metaphor and the Subconscious

February 12, 2024

Nimona is an animated film based on the graphic novel by ND Stevenson. It features “a girl” (more of this in a while) who can shape-shift into any form, from whales to gorillas and from little boys to emulating other people. As I explore in this post, shape-shifting in Nimona is a metaphor that reveals something about the role of the subconscious in the creative process.

You see, there are some metadata you need to know – if you aren’t familiar with ND Stevenson already: The first one is that he identifies as transmasculine/bigender. The second, that Stevenson was apparently unaware about his gender identity before Nimona:

There are times in my life where I feel like everybody knew what my deal was before I did, and this is one of them. But it would be years before I started to see that in myself. I guess I planted the seeds without realizing.

Time

Is that really possible? Can an author create such strong symbolism – as shape-shifting is for gender identity – without consciously realizing it? We know that books often write themselves, but as we’ll see in this post, symbolism is even more powerful, its focus more sharp, when it comes to subconscious meanings.

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

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