I am on a hunt.
For genre, for references.
You all know I write about landscape. In my own words, landscape that takes you to the foggy edge where normal transforms into paranormal.
I have only one writer who inspired me–Algernon Blackwood. He showed respect for the observable landscape. He also felt another side of landscape–its power. Its indefinable power that, in a fleeting second, can overwhelm.
I don’t copy him. But my experience in the landscape is similar. Tangier Gardens is about a young man just making his first discoveries beyond the foggy edge of normal. Nature is like that–if you let it.
If we look at nature, in a traditional sense, we see it as a source of human inspiration.
What about landscape? Landscape is the canvas upon which nature sits.
What about landscape architecture? Now that is confusing. It is a modern profession, that in my opinion, mistakenly moves natural elements around, often losing the traditional inspirational quality of nature. Failure.
So, in Tangier Gardens, the young man, CJ, tries to find how he, as a student of landscape architecture, can impart the inspiration of nature into his landscape design. Difficult. Tons of adminstrative regulations that bind nature into some kind of measurable pop experience. Not fun or helpful.
So I turn to a Algernon Blackwood aficionado, Eugene Thacker, who writes about Blackwood’s approach to nature and landscape:
If we are to call Blackwood a naturalist, then we must do so with caution, for his sublime awe before the mysteries of nature is always coupled with an acute awareness of the indifference of what we dutifully tag as “nature.” His novella, “The Willows”, suggests something different. Perhaps what we call the “supernatural” is simply the nature either we don’t see or don’t comprehend. It is the site of myth, religion, metaphysics—and perhaps of science as well. The strangest or “weirdest” understanding of nature is given to us not from ancient superstitions but from modern science. Perhaps the natural is supernatural, and vice-versa.
https://lithub.com/how-algernon-blackwood-turned-nature-into-sublime-horror/
If you would like to see my take on nature via the landscape, read Tangier Gardens.
Tangier Gardens ebook is FREE TODAY. Get it!!!
And if you know of contemporary authors in the same vein, please include them in your comment.
And lastly genre: after you have read Tangier Gardens, tell me what genre you think it fits.
