In writing about it I discovered that I couldn’t separate the historical context from the themes of the piece. You’ll have to bear with me as we take a labyrinthine jaunt through colonial history with the voices of my ancestors—both sets—muttering in our ears. Part history, part essay on writing craft, part love letter, part contrition; my hope is that you come away with an appreciation for why stories should approach difficult, complex topics and the value in failure when writing them. In particular, I hope it demonstrates why Gothic literature is such an adept device for exploring the grime in the cellars of our inheritance.2

Part I: The History

First published in Lallans 93 in 2018, “Tasmanian Devil” was originally written in Scots, an Anglic and sister language to English,3 and drafted in a rush of focus over the course of a night. At the time I had recently moved to Scotland and my Scottish family, especially my grandparents, were at the forefront of my mind. For some reason this compelled me to write a story in a language that both of them spoke—even if they didn’t know it.

My grandparents were born on the cusp of the ‘Greatest’ and the ‘Silent’ Generations. Like many Scots before them, they were taught that their every day speech, with its unique diction, grammar, and idioms was improper and broken; that the English spoken in Edinburgh’s meadows was better than the Patter4 found in Glasgow’s Pollok scheme5—a language that 500 years ago was the lingua franca of the then independent kingdom of Scotland. Until we shared a settee and a pot of tea in 2017, my granny still believed her beautiful brogue was ‘just slang.’

It’s a tale many of us have heard before. Some half–cocked justification pulled from the grab bag of prejudice that infects a culture. The illness is often terminal, ending in what linguists call linguicide. The total death of a language. Anyone familiar with the horrors of Canada’s residential schools will recognize the blueprint as part of a broader cultural genocide—and today we only have to look to Tibet to see it in real time.67

Growing up in middle England and then middle Europe, Scots was a language I only heard in the barest fragments. It’s also not a language I speak. I’ve listened to it, I’ve read it, and I’ve even written in it, but beyond the odd word or phrase8 it doesn’t come naturally to me, and I’ve never known it in its proper context—spoken with others. In fact, I owe a huge amount to various poets, authors, and academics, but especially to Dr. Duncan Sneddon9 for educating me. In hindsight, the state of the early draft I shared with him makes me cringe, but he never once rebuked me for my ignorance and instead pointed me to the resources that ultimately made it publishable.

So what does any of this have to do with Tasmania?

Prior to writing my story, I’d been reading about the colonization of Tasmania, the large island off the south coast of Australia, formerly known to Europeans as Van Diemen’s Land10 and I was struck by an image of indigenous Tasmanians in contemporary Victorian dress.11

It stuck with me because it’s not dissimilar from the old family photographs handed down on my English side, but what little I knew of Truganini (seated right above) was that she fought against her colonizers. As a result, I wondered what her relationship to this photograph was—the posing, the expressions, the clothing—were they voluntary? Were they coerced? How much agency did she have in how and why she was photographed and where these photos went?

I’ll leave her actual context to better writers, historians, and Tasmanians who have written about how Truganini was mythologized and politicized in everything from paintings to newspapers. Nonetheless, she was the seed planted in Scottish mud that allowed the short story, “Tasmanian Devil,” to grow.

Part II: The Craft

In an ambitiously Mary Shelly fashion, I wanted my reader to see how our main antagonist, the Tasmanian maid, was made into a monster, not by scientific hubris or nature, but colonial thought.

As a young writer with his first finished short story, my vainglorious aim for this piece was to capture the dissociated relationship between those who promote colonial violence, those who carry it out, and those who survive it. In order of appearance:

Colonial Power

The enfranchised and empowered individuals in the upper echelons of the British empire who are anthropocentric, paternalistic, and entitled, and in their own eyes, ‘civilized’ and ‘non–violent.’ Their hands always have to remain clean and are thusly aloof and absent from the realities which they rule over. They are represented in the story by Simeon Abney, who is their agent.

Second Class Citizens

The ‘beneficiaries’ of colonialism—whether the Scottish landed class or the mai–baap of Indian Sepoy regiments—who committed atrocities on behalf of the Empire because of the promise of elevated status, economic security, salvation, coercion, etc. The people worth ‘civilizing,’ according to colonial ideology. In this case, John Murdoch and the men in his service,12 who do the dirty work of colonialism as justified by the bigotry they’ve internalized.

Third Class ‘Savages’

The bodies that are valorized by their sacrifice to a ‘greater good’ and used for the labours of colonial goals or entirely erased to get to their land, resources, or even just access to neighbouring territories. Bodies—because, due to the shape of their skulls, their minds are incapable of civility, apparently.13 In this case, represented by our Tasmanian maid, she’s used as a scapegoat for the misogynistic myth of feminine purity and the feelings of a grieving, zealous, bigoted, and emotionally immature farmer who wields power over her.

The story’s conclusion resounds well because it’s an end to the onslaught of these dynamics. The ‘devil’ having wrought ruin across Murdoch’s homestead (whether the devil of his own nature or a vengeful maid’s, is open to interpretation) leaves a Taz–like trail of destruction14 for Abney to discover and disclose in his opening letter. As with any half–decent horror story, there’s a final doubt left behind; the obvious one is the question of the maid’s whereabouts, but if we sit with the conclusion, I find the question of what the absent and unaccountable overlords will do in her wake to be far more interesting—and sinister.

The Good

I’m not a trumpet player but I’ll do my best to blow my own here:

In form, “Tasmanian Devil” captures the atmosphere and tone of 19th–century Gothic horror. The epistolary style is consistent with both the genre and period and sets narrative tension immediately through Simeon Abney’s formal English voice and the use of his epistolary as a frame narrative. It’s clear and concise and temporally declarative—Abney is writing from the aftermath of what’s recorded, petitioning an authority of some sort (we’re left to assume it’s a constabulary or a local landlord, for example) to manage the situation. His tone and diction tell us he’s upper class or at least educated. Brief as it is, it establishes a hierarchy of class.

I don’t need to opine on the arbitrary idiocy of racism to you, dear reader, but to a 19th–century audience, it would also establish a hierarchy of race. You could turn to basically any phrenology text from the era to ‘explain it,’15 but personally, I always remember reading an 1860s article from the British press that referred to the amount of Irish people in Canada as a testament to ‘fecundity of the Celtic race’ [derogatory].16 In the Victorian era, the Scottish were held in a similar standing: Caucasian but lesser than Anglo–Saxon and Aryan craniums. Celts were a ‘race.’17

The third tier in the story’s internal hierarchy is then revealed by Murdoch, a landed Scottish farmer, when he hires a maid in Perth on a feeing day.18 Murdoch’s voice is completely distinct from Abney’s and affirms the class difference, but more importantly establishes two specific relationships: the first, to a racialized domestic servant who remains unnamed, and McNab, his housekeeper. These women are our antagonists and tragic heroes.19

Murdoch’s resentment for these women is plain in his account of the events, and his prejudiced and unreliable perspective asserts itself right out of the gate. Fundamentally, Murdoch refuses to believe that his own daughter would be sexually attracted to a stable hand and furthermore that she would go behind his back, climbing from her bedroom window in the night, in order to consummate her attraction—this denies Murdoch a logical reason for her death and his grief when he discovers her body impaled on the gate post a few feet from the front door of the farm house. McNab is his voice of reason, the Tasmanian maid his scapegoat.

This limited and unreliable perspective floods the account with doubt and implicitly asks the reader to decide what has actually happened.

As a premise and structure, I think this works well. The voices are strong and distinct, matching both the conversational and epistolary tones; the imagery is genre appropriate and submerged in atmosphere and setting cues; and the narrative is non–linear, dicing the chronology of events, and clearly communicates Murdoch’s warped state of mind.

Thematically, I can see the power dynamics that I wanted in the text, but most importantly, even through the eyes of a bigot, twisted by slander, steeped in violence, and without even a name to humanize her, we root for the Tasmanian maid and her survival. In particular, I wanted my reader to ask the same questions about her that I did on seeing Truganini and her companions’ portrait—how did an Aboriginal woman from a penal colony a world away end up here? What agency did she have in it? What does survival demand of her?

The Bad

From naval gazing to nautical disaster:

If I were to summarize the good, I’d say my intentions were noble but—while intention is fundamental to the creation of any art and improving your craft—the execution is what matters to your audience. It’s a common salve offered to new artists—at the start, your ambition is greater than your ability.20

At the craft level I think “Tasmanian Devil” suffers from an issue of brevity vs. complexity. Like many writers, the biggest skill I was lacking when I began was editorial. I remember being completely adrift when trying to decide what parts of the story to cut and condense, what parts to expand or highlight, and which to preserve. This is only made harder in pieces, like “Tasmanian Devil,” which are highly stylized because if I were to cut every superfluous adjective or phrase then I’d risk losing the atmosphere, the flow of natural language, the voice, and subsequently Murdoch as a character.

That said, a decade of experience later, here’s three of the recommendations I’d make for this story:

1. Choose what needs repeating

Any repetition that doesn’t highlight a change in a setting, remind your reader of an important and soon–to–be–relevant detail, or belong as a foundational part of the form (e.g., Ground–hog Day always has to start the same way) is a candidate for the chopping block. Exceptions to this are fairly obvious—names, for instance. Without the repetition of character names in “Tasmanian Devil,” my reader would be even more disoriented, as the cast is introduced at a rapid pace and is already familiar to the narrator making his descriptions minimal.

One of the partial successes of “Tasmanian Devil” is the use of epithets—Murdoch consistently uses descriptive nouns and occupational titles to refer to the members of his household. For instance, Murdoch refers to “the Kyles lass” when justifying why he went to Perth to hire a maid. Though Ms. Kyles doesn’t figure anywhere else in the plot, she serves the superficial purpose of establishing a vacancy on Murdoch’s farm which our Tasmanian maid can fill but more importantly tells the reader about Murdoch’s attitude to his ‘lessers.’ Any subtlety is shattered when he adds “pregnant hoor,” but this articulates another key component of Murdoch’s character; Murdoch is a misogynist and severe toward any woman involved in impropriety (as he defines it) and he has no fear of judgement or reprisal for this opinion which tells the reader about the social norms and the power dynamics at play. Most importantly, it explains why he so easily rejects McNab’s account of his daughter’s fall. Thus, the epithet stays.

I call it a partial success because this technique—while excellent for establishing voice and relational dynamics between characters—is a double–edged–sword. Use it to excess, and your characters are hard for your reader to track. Introduce a lot of characters, a lot of epithets or kennings, and other complex narrative elements, and your reader is now spending more energy trying to identify the bodies in the shipwreck rather than appreciating how the ship was wrecked in the first place.

I’ll readily admit that I like obfuscated narratives and unreliable narrators. This story is actually one of three I wrote in this style; an account from an extremely subjective narrator that’s intended to be a puzzle.21 The idea is that the reader can pick it apart to discover what actually happened and be rewarded for rereading it (remember my ambition vs. ability statement at the beginning?). Where this story stumbles is exactly that shipwreck metaphor—if the obfuscation and lack of clarity don’t serve the right purpose then the reader isn’t asking the questions you want them to; they’re engaging with the form, not the content. At best, a curious reader will misdirect their investigative energy; at worst you’ll piss them off and lose your audience. Typically, you want your prose to be as easy to follow as possible. To quote Kurt Vonnegut, pity the reader.22

This is just one example. I’ll let you spot the other instances where it would have been simpler to just use the characters’ names. Something that’s relevant to my second recommendation:

2. Condense, pronounce, or remove characters

Condensing a character can mean reducing their role or, better yet, taking two secondary characters and fusing them into one. Often, this results in a more complex and nuanced character that is easier for your reader to recognize because—without expanding the story—their role in the story expands.

In the case of “the Kyles lass,” instead of dismissing her from Murdoch’s farm, I could have indicated that her pregnancy was affecting her duties, and so Murdoch hired the Tasmanian maid to pick up the slack. It’s logical that with winter bearing down (the story is set in November), Murdoch would want the house in order. Importantly, this would mean I could have condensed Ms. Kyles with ‘the scullery maid,’ who is a flat character and only serves to escalate the plot; she only significantly appears twice, once as a witness, and again as a victim, in two separate scenes. She is a device for Murdoch to justify his version of events. Murdoch notes that she doesn’t like her Tasmanian counterpart, that she doesn’t speak in defense of her counterpart during the beating and ‘interrogation,’ and then describes her death when she bursts into his office, “ravin and assailed by demon unseen.”

As a character, there are many reasons the scullery maid could have disliked the woman she was working side by side with, the most banal being bigotry, but it’s never disclosed in the story. If she was Ms. Kyles, the reason would be obvious. Ms. Kyles could view the Tasmanian maid as her competition and her replacement in Murdoch’s household. Her end would then contribute the death of a pregnant woman to the body count, which, crude as it is, fits with the genre and mounting horror. More interestingly, it would add another layer of unreliability to Murdoch; as it is written, Murdoch believes that witchcraft and demonic possession are the cause of her death, and that he was somehow the target of malevolent forces. With barely any changes to the text, if it were Ms. Kyles, the crisis would fit the symptoms of pre–eclampsia.23 With a few extra lines, it would be easy to prompt the reader toward that condition, or at least indicate that it could be a medical crisis relating to her pregnancy rather than poisoning or the supernatural.

By condensing Ms. Kyles and the scullery maid into one character and removing the scullery maid entirely, Ms. Kyles would be a more pronounced and memorable for my reader. The result is a more fully formed character, more interesting character relationships, greater clarity as to character motivations, and a more impactful character death. And ultimately, the story would just be easier to follow.

You could do a similar exercise with Lithgow and Masters, or even Lithgow and the stable hand, to put the character relationships even further through the wringer. I’ll let you imagine what it would mean if the man sent to capture the Tasmanian maid was also the man accused of consorting with his employer’s daughter.

Either way, they’re a missed opportunity (or two)—you can’t win ‘em all.

3. Serve your themes in the edit

In Edinburgh, one of several brilliant writers who educated me was Allyson Stack, American lit scholar and novelist. To paraphrase something she often repeated, ‘When theme walks into the room, acknowledge it, and then get back to writing.’ I think this speaks to a broader phenomenon in the craft—writing and editing are two different exercises. In the act of creation we want to get into, or as close to, a flow state as possible, to create fluidly without self–editing, to sit down at 10pm and by the early hours of the morning have recorded the racist diatribe of a vindictive 19th–century Scottish farmer. Well… ‘want’ might be the wrong word.

Regardless, I think Allyson’s statement is great and applies especially if you are more of a gardener than an architect when it comes to how you plan and create your art.24 With the focus on the act of writing, it’d be easy to miss what Allyson’s statement says about editing. Whether it arrives in your first idea, during the plotting, or as you sit at your desk, generally speaking, theme is a distraction while writing. Writing to a theme makes you less immersed in the details of causality, motivation, and character—as talented as some writers are at it, it’s hard to create a well–rounded, interesting figure if they’re just a walking bit of symbolism. Tread lightly if you’re tempted to follow that path. There, there be caricatures—that said, if you want to see how an expert uses caricatures and stereotypes brilliantly I can’t recommend Paul Beatty’s The Sellout enough.

That’s all to say, theme finds its home in the edit. Once you have your story its theme tends to crystallize and allow you to see the piece through it. Now you know what the story is, you can make sure you know what it’s about.

When I was editing “Tasmanian Devil,” I hadn’t come to this useful conclusion yet. To my horror, it turns out you can’t just wake up good at something like editing. Talent is a nice word that covers up a whole bunch of nose–to–the–grindstone labour and the combined quirks of an individual’s voice as sculpted by their lived experience. (How disgusting.)

In retrospect, one way I would edit “Tasmanian Devil” to better serve its themes would be in the framing narrative. As mentioned, I was trying to capture colonialist hierarchies, with the colonialist superior represented by Simeon Abney. Again, Abney’s letter makes great strides in setting up and concluding the story, but where it doesn’t go far enough is in demonstrating the context in which the story takes place. With a few more details, as a reader, we’d know what kind of authority Simeon is appealing to and subsequently why he’s more concerned about the hearsay around what happened on Murdoch’s farm and the whereabouts of the Tasmanian maid than the bloodbath itself. It would add weight to what isn’t in his letters; he doesn’t condemn Murdoch’s unlawful killing of his housekeeper, McNab, and he doesn’t mention justice for the victims. What he could mention is lost crop yield,25 or tax levies, or a prediction that finding new tenants for the land would be difficult. Any of those would clarify the goals of the empowered and the dehumanization at play beneath them, all without breaking their glaring absence from direct involvement with the people and events of the story.

While I’m speaking about the framing narrative, this also applies to Murdoch’s letter—I could have done more to develop his relationship with Abney, pointed to Murdoch’s devotion to the Church of Scotland, and hinted at both what Murdoch has gained and what he’s lost by trying to assimilate into English culture. Like the contemporary jackeen in Ireland,26 it would solidify Murdoch as a man who has internalized the narratives of his oppressor, adding weight to his actions. I wanted his violence to be more than just pulp horror. I wanted the reader to see how Murdoch is handed and raised in a callous ideology from above and how he becomes its inflection point, converting it into brute violence. His daughter’s death is only the catalyst. The Tasmanian maid, our Truganini analogue, had already been stripped of her humanity before the story began, but he’s the one to make her monstrous. As it stands, I think Murdoch reads much more simply as the empowered, not the shit–shoveler of the powerful.

This is how editing shapes meaning. Specifically in this instance, this is how developmental editing shapes meaning. I could go on about line or structural editing ‘til the sun dies, so those are topics for another day, but the aim of this process is to bridge that gap between ambition and ability, theme and content. As artists, we’re always chasing an impossible ideal; a few of us are lucky enough to spend a lifetime seeing how close it to we can get.

Ultimately, any piece of writing, fiction or non–fiction, is going to have its particular needs, so I always have a caveat for every writer I talk to: there are exceptions to every rule, and, annoyingly, when someone violates a big rule and, impossibly, their narratives still work, that’s where fame, fortune, and Ferrero Rocher lie. The trick is getting everything else in your piece right. Have a gander at Italo Calvino’s work, and you’ll see exactly what I mean. What a bastard.27

The Ugly

“Tasmanian Devil” is ugly in a lot of ways. It’s clogged with gory imagery, delusional reasoning, and prejudice. It’d be disingenuous not to acknowledge that that’s also what makes it a compelling read—at least to fans of Gothic horror.

I’m not a believer in literary purity or the idea that every story needs subtlety or deep meaning. Pulp has its place, and splatterpunk has its niche. That doesn’t absolve an author of responsibility for what they portray—this is the intersection of theme and content.

The difference between an incisive critique and regurgitating insensitive and damaging stereotypes is less about what is portrayed than how. I trust my readers to find the subtext in “Tasmanian Devil,” and see through John Murdoch’s version of the story, but the use of a person of colour as a plot device, dehumanized and voiceless—even if she is arguably empowered or vindicated in the end—will probably never sit right with me. It feels too adjacent to what critics have dubbed trauma–porn, especially as seen in slavery narratives, where the narrative shifts focus from a character’s inner world to the events of the trauma itself and weaponizes it to garner a cheap emotional response. We never hear the maid’s perspective, see her growth, her collapse, or her resilience, and given my failure to communicate my high–minded point about colonialism in the story, the use of her suffering is ugly, fictional as it is. Even this far into the essay, the fact that I didn’t—and can’t—name her still pains me.

Part III: The Other History

I’ve talked about the inspiration for the character of the Tasmanian maid, I’ve waxed poetic about my Scottish heritage, but my English heritage is equally relevant. There are lots of things I love about English culture and Yorkshire, where my ancestors thrived, but in this case, it’s the things I don’t love that matter. The fraught and contorting threads of colonial privilege—the inspiration for Murdoch, my bigot.

What material history survives from my English ancestors indicates that they were generally politically conservative, community oriented, parochial, and unendingly white. First millers, then accountants, they were pillars in a small community near Sheffield and rarely traveled further afield than Leeds. It’s impossible to say to what extent they as individuals benefited from Britain’s empire; they weren’t nobility, spice traders, or politicians. The only certainty we can have is that they did.

The most salient figure I had to draw from is actually not English but Belgian.

My great–grandmother, Iren, escaped Antwerp during the First World War and married into the English side of the family. I know the most about her because my great–grandfather was much older and died when my grandmother was still a child, whereas Iren lived into her nineties, and the stories about her were oft repeated. Fascinating as they are, classism, xenophobia, sexism, and a general snobbery play prominent roles and ran rampant among her generation. These malfeasant qualities irreparably damaged her children, my grandmother and her siblings. For decades, my grandmother and her sister barely spoke, and I don’t even know the names of her older half–siblings or their genders. All I can confirm is that a key part of the estrangement was to do with money and status.

Of all the tragedies bred by bigotry, the smallest is that those perpetuating it are crippled, but it’s a tragedy nonetheless. It erects a wall between them and their neighbour, it cuts them off from experience, support, camaraderie, beauty, and growth, and all at the expense of those least deserving of it, those they hold power over. It is the loneliest existence someone can adopt without any material change in the world around them.

It’s a quirk of causality then, that thanks to all of this, I exist—and subsequently so does Murdoch:

According to family lore, when the German Empire invaded Belgium in August of 1914, my great–great–grandfather, Iren’s father, was a key individual in the railway networks. If that sounds vague, I’ve never been sure whether he was an owner or a manager or what, just that switch keys may have been involved and that the corresponding rail infrastructure was essential to the German war effort. Iren’s father refused to cooperate with the invaders, which forced him into hiding. There are several anecdotes passed down to me about this period, but I believe any family would have run given what happened to Iren’s grandmother; late middle–aged at the time, she had thigh–length hair, which in the 19th–century fashion may rarely—if ever—have been cut. German officers tied it to the back of a horse cart, and she was dragged through the streets until it was torn from her scalp.

Iren was a child at the time and, along with her mother, was smuggled out of Belgium in the bilge of a Dutch cheese boat. They took only what they could carry, paying for passage with jewelry, and she went from a spoilt Belgian girl to a displaced refugee in England.28 She couldn’t stand the smell of Edam for the rest of her life.

It’d take more research to know what happened in the interim years, but by adulthood, she was an attractive European woman who spoke French, English, and Flemish and was known in posh circles for her skill as a pianist and as a socialite. She regained her former lifestyle and social status when she married (and possibly black–widowed) two rich older men (much older), the first of whom was the descendant of those millers I mentioned—and my great–grandfather.

The jewelry that she carried to buy her way out of Belgium and rebuild her life in England was never entirely sold or traded. The pieces survived as brooches and engagement rings. We can’t know the providence of each one—which are gifts from English suitors and husbands29 and which aren’t—but Antwerp was and remains today the centre of the European diamond trade, so even the English jewels may have come via Belgium.

Belgium has no naturally occurring diamond mines. Instead, using its long–established reputation for skilled artisans, Antwerp positioned itself as a hub for jewelers, profiting on the influx of diamonds from colonial India. When gold and diamonds were discovered in South Africa, they were the first port of call (almost literally), and by the 20th–century wealth flowed in torrents from South Africa and the Congo basin to Belgium. The Congo had already been ravaged by King Leopold II of Belgium for rubber and ivory by 1908, killing as many as ten million Congolese in the process,30 when it was taken over by the Belgian state and diamonds were discovered. The history of South Africa is more complex but similarly blood–soaked by Dutch and British greed. It begs the question, who had to die for the diamonds that saved my great–grandmother Iren’s life?

My point isn’t to condemn a little girl for using something as trivial as jewelry to escape violence. That isn’t a child’s fault. My point is to demonstrate what I didn’t in “Tasmanian Devil”: the complexity of colonial hierarchies, and how they harm and corrupt with no regard for those at the bottom, even as they endow privilege . They are inherently unstable and unforgiving. In refugee crises, it’s typically not the poor who escape; it’s those who have resources to sacrifice.

German imperialism led to trauma that entrenched the snobbery that Iren was brought up with. The privilege that allowed this mode of thought was itself a product of imperialism and the wealth brought to Belgium and Britain by colonialists; in her, it blossomed as abject fear of poverty and ‘lower’ people, it became a defense mechanism supported by the fertile ground of a deeply classist Britain. I can’t speculate as to how it affected her well–being but I know it stunted her emotions and it isolated her children in the mire of respectability and the tyranny of keeping up appearances. I wish I had written records from the staff that worked in her household to know how it affected those under her authority.

Of all the anecdotes that stick with me about her, the one that resurfaces most often actually isn’t her airing some horrific opinion or committing an egregious act of entitlement; it’s that one morning, standing in the living room doorway, she announced to my preteen grandmother, “You’d better come upstairs, dear, your father has just died at the breakfast table.”

Iren didn’t comfort her daughter. She turned around and walked away. Her husband was significantly older than her, and his heart had just failed, so to be sympathetic, I’ll attribute it to shock, but her behaviour wasn’t that of an emotionally healthy person. It also isn’t inconsistent with every other anecdote about her that I’ve been told.

It was easy then to graft typically masculine aggression and brazen prejudice onto this kind of example; John Murdoch emerges from it as a hard, imperious man with delusional expectations of strength that he applies to everyone around him, including himself. His reaction to grief isn’t one of expressive heartbreak; it’s denial. He isn’t Iren; he’s an amalgam of what I imagine was both inflicted by and on Iren, a paragon of the ideologies that shaped her life. Both a perpetrator and a victim.

It’s a short leap from these concrete characters to the themes of “Tasmanian Devil”—and yes, characters, because in reality I was too young to know the real Iren by the time she died.

On a grander scale, the three European states that figure in Iren’s story—Germany, Belgium, and Britain—were also collaborators in one of modern history’s most notorious genocides, but it wasn’t their citizens that paid the price. It was Rwandans and Burundians. Both Germany and Belgium deployed racial pseudoscience for their own gain in Rwanda, progressively dividing the people into fixed ‘races’ and destroying social mobility in the process.

The Tutsi minority ethnic group was elevated, and prejudices against the Hutu, their countrymen, were enshrined in law. In 1994, the Hutu majority government and the militias they inspired slaughtered a million Tutsi in only a hundred days. There was little of the state machinery seen in Nazi–Germany; it was not systematized and quantified, it was simply an orgy of misogynistic violence and murder, one which went unchecked. The post–imperial United Kingdom denied that it was a genocide, allowing it to skirt its obligation to intervene under the 1948 genocide convention.

The colonial powers didn’t plan this; they just set the conditions for it to happen, elevating with one hand and dehumanizing with the other. The Hutu were made into second–class citizens and subsequently, just like John Murdoch, made monsters of the Tutsi and then themselves.

Isn’t that the ultimate question of Gothic literature—who is the true monster?
Its novelty shatters under the weight of real–world monstrosity, especially when we see it on a daily basis, perpetuated by the same governments that purport to represent us. Good literature often imparts these lessons without the muddying of real world events or conversely, isolates a concrete place and time in the narrative, leaving commentary to the metatext.31 In many ways, it is a constructive way of digesting difficult inheritances.

In respect to “Tasmanian Devil,” nothing I’ve done with it is particularly evil or virtuous. The tale is another symptom of my artistic preoccupation with self–deception. My personal discomfort with it is born from putting a visceral and grim story out into the world that probably didn’t need to be there, and giving a voice to opinions I find abhorrent. It represents my fears about humanity, not my hopes, and it’s written in a minority language that could be used to express far more beautiful things. It’s a discomfort that I need to make peace with. Or, more accurately, a discomfort I need to welcome. If I, or anyone else, find themselves feeling comfortable with it—that’s where the trouble starts.

Part IV: Hope

This nightmare of a historical review and craft essay is here because I hope that others can learn something from my first publication and offset the gloom it brings to the table. In the same vein, I hope that one day journals and publications will be interested in the work I do that’s hopeful, just as much as the macabre exorcisms of a disturbed mind. That remains to be seen, but despite my publication history (and current events), I am hopeful.

Truganini, pictured above, was not the last Tasmanian. Some 400 Aboriginal Tasmanians survived the colonial genocide, and though we can’t account for everything that was lost, today they number in the thousands, and the Tasmanian Aboriginal language (palawa kani) is being reconstructed for generations to come.

In Scotland, a third of the population—more than 1.5 million people—speak Scots, and alongside English, Gàidhlig, and British Sign Language, it’s now recognized as one of Scotland’s official languages.32

Neither Scots nor Tasmania’s palawa kani have met that final death. I’ll refer you to the incredible work of Sophia Smith–Galer if you want to understand more about linguicide and why it matters, and to hear her specifically discuss Scots, check out her conversation with Scots poet Len Pennie. If you’d like a gentler entry into Scots and to read some childhood classics, see what the Itchy Coo has available.33 On the off chance one of my linguist friends is reading this, go look up Bungi, an endangered post–creole dialect of English that features a combination of French, English, Scots, Gaelic, Norn, Cree, and Ojibwe, and is (or was) spoken by the Red River Métis in Canada—and then text me because I want to know more about it.

As for “Tasmanian Devil,” to succeed, I needed it to be worth wading through the muck, let alone have my readers willingly plunge back in in order to better understand it. Older and wiser, I can see where I went wrong. It might not be a masterpiece of Gothic horror, but it’s definitely horrific, so while it’s a failure, I’m happy I failed.

My English grandma, daughter of Iren, died suddenly in the winter of 2023, but not before my mother managed to get her and her sister talking again. On the day of her funeral, I met cousins I didn’t know I had, and my mum has continued to check on my great aunt and keep in touch with her formerly estranged family. With my grandma’s passing, we’ll never know what exactly caused the rift between her and her sister, but in all our years of opening rifts, we human beings have learned a lot about building bridges as well—and I hope we all have examples like my mum to show us how to do it. More to the point, my mother was who taught me how to talk to anyone, and that regardless of class, creed, or colour we all deserve decency and dignity—all in direct contradiction of the ideologies she inherited.

As for my Scottish granny, she died this year, 2026, at the ripe old age of ninety–nine, only a few weeks from her hundredth birthday. I don’t know what she thought of her language in the end—or even how much she spoke it, given that her children are English—but her language lives on, and I’m certain she knew it wasn’t slang.

Perhaps that’s what Gothic literature offers us. The darkness, but also the candle to light our way out.

Translated from Scots by the author.

This version is meant to supplement this article on writing craft.

For the oreeginal Scots leed storie cleek here.

Content warnings: 1

Dear Sir,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. I wish this in part for it bears tidings of the gravest import and utmost gravity. I fear in my explanations that I would digress or muddle such details as I possess so I shall scrawl no further; the materials I have included shall speak for themselves, though it is a gruesome account I feel bound that the magistrates must hear it. Know that these are the words of John Murdoch and that, though he writes as he speaks, he is a most honourable and pious man. He resides only a little to the east; it is a place of loneliness and mist and I fear it now plays host to more than grouse and crow.

I await her, I know her scent on the air. This house is besieged by the blackest of souls. I am compelled to write this account lest the truth of the matter be known only to God as I am his honest witness. The devil conspires to ruin this farm and in his fashion he sends his servants as the unassuming and the obedient – that is how foulness comes and lives within the walls. She took my child from me.

The day the devil came to me – it was a wretched day of drizzle and I was crabby from saddle-soreness from the ride to Perth. In my weakness, I took on that wretched maid. The hiring day didn’t fare well and Mrs. McNab nagged at the need to fill the place of the Kyles lass, pregnant whore. I agreed to the hire just to steel away that housekeeper’s lurid tongue. Such an insidious exchange, to take advantage of my distraction, I didn’t bother to see the girl for what she was; no maid, not even just foreign scum. Aye, she was the only lass available to hire that day and in my haste I brought Beelzebub into my home.

Twas not long before my daughter lay, back arched, beneath the black alder. It was me who hefted my poor girl from a gate post, impaled like the son of God himself, though it wasn’t a roman who drove iron through my child’s fair flesh. It was the fall from her chamber window – a fall is what McNab would have me believe.

My child was pushed from the sill by that blackguard maid. As I stood crusted with the blood of my kin that accursed housekeeper spoke in defence of the maid! She would have me believe that my daughter was a cheap whore, vaulting from the sill to lie with the stable hand as I lay sleeping in ignorance – she, in a bed of hay, mounted like the horses! I struck McNab to the dirt for her insolence, and such did she deserve it.

I should have seen it, it was long past the first sign.

That kitchen maid was welcome from the start; a maid rarely took so well to a household as she. McNab treated her well for a petty servant, far better than what she deserved as a peasant, and more still for a negress.

All but Lithgow took curiosity in her exotic features, that such a marked body could work and speak our tongue in civil Scotland. I suppose the civil are taken by a sick fascination to look upon the savage, all the easier a savage right dressed and donning our customs. Aye, but Lithgow saw her for what she was, a wolf clothed in wool. Ever a loyal servant, a righteous man, he saw her as a bitch to tame. That’s why he was first to go.

I dragged that soulless thicklip to the hitching post and beat her with all the ire of holy vengeance, with the might of God I brought her to the gates of hell and near enough sent her to her maker. It was Lithgow that halted me. The murderer had said nothing, no confession, the same silence of that drizzle ridden day that she darkened my door. I saw Lithgow’s look and knew to let her live. Even now she hid the real malevolent beast within and so I had the whimpering McNab make sure she wouldn’t bleed to death and left the savage tied to yon post.

I had done right, even the waifish scullery maid at the door held a look of satisfaction, she saw the corruption oozing from the negress. Do not heed McNab’s prattle about maid’s jealousy; she and all know I did right by my child and right by God. I did so for three days and nights. Each night, come nightfall, I took the duty upon myself to compel her confession and drove my knuckles raw but she gave nought up. I said plain, if the devil holds your tongue then show me you’re a murderer.

It was only time between me and the truth; the cold November air pressed in on the yard and I took a dram of whiskey knowing I had done right.

The third night came and I stood with McNab in my study, watching as an unholy fog descended. I was strong in my conviction, I had seen the first sign, the wretch in the yard had been compelled to speak: you want, you shall have.

As the mist took her, I knew by morning I’d have my confession. Like the good old days of King James, lash the witch to the post and you shall have your justice. So confident a fool I was that I held the devil at my mercy but when the sun rose and fog burnt away the post stood empty.

No one of my house would betray me so, McNab asserted as much from her stammering gob, no one but her, but I had her by my side all night to be sure. Her words were pathetic, she said it was no fault of the servants and my clinging to superstition was condemnable and weak.

Only a fool would mistake piety for superstition. I hated her but by the grace of God I had to forgive her as she was a woman and couldn’t be held to such a standard of reserve when the devil roamed. The Tasman savage had broken free through devilry, it was certain.

Lithgow took to the chase as a loyal man at arms, he drove the hounds on the hunt but the search was to no avail. He never came back. That night, shots were heard about the thicket on the river but come morning only one wretched mongrel came back to my kennel.

In his absence days past and the house quieted beneath my rage, till the true horrors began.

First that scullery maid was taken ill, I can’t remember the girls’ name but I remember the racket she made while I waited to sup. McNab said she’d coughed and taken a fever before spewing vilely out in the vegetable gardens. It was no illness, it was possession – she burst into my study in the dead of night, eyes without colour, all pupil and whites, raving and assailed by demon unseen. McNab and Masters had stormed after her, blathering of illness and apologies. Take her to the church with haste I thought but it was too late; the girl fell to the ground and convulsed with much violence. Failed in her effort to murder me, the poor lass’ soul was taken as she grew still and was dead soon after the possession ended.

The next was the stable hand, a murder that not even McNab could claim was a misadventure. Steps from my door was where we found him. He was strung from the stable rafters, floating in the reek, hauled above by a span of iron wire wrapped around his throat some number of times. The wires – they had cut deeply from his hanging weight and so emerged from a black chasm beneath his vein ridden countenance; like the shanks of some great spider wrenching outward from within his gullet.

McNab wouldn’t cross the threshold, no one would! This gore still hangs spectral from my stable rafters! I knew it was the she-devil though; the dead youth had said he knew nothing of the foulest murder but he had been at his duties that night, the very youth McNab would have had me believe was tupping my sweet lass. This evidenced that he knew and feared the savage as she was accused; he held his tongue but it was not a true enough silence for that murderer. As he was a witness to savagery he became its effigy.

It was a stormy night when Masters came to me in my chambers. In the flurry of wind and rain the sound distorted in my house and Masters stood close to me that I might hear him over the din. He told me that the cook had vanished, the other stable hands had flown, the horses let loose, and all at the will of McNab.

It was then I saw the painting for the frame; that pestilent besom had made her final act to strip all my defences from me! I rewarded Masters – dismissing him to wherever he thought to go. I leapt from my place and burst through the house. Each creek of beam and floorboard sang treachery, moaned of hidden malice.

I sprung the first door with force and scattered what lay beyond me; a mess of furnishings, left by man and maid with haste, no consideration for free movement within a place besieged. In my anger I had struck a chair from my path, across the table, taking flagon and food to the floor as it flew. As I looked at the greying meat, cast from the platter and doused in the filth of the hearth, I knew to calm myself, let quiet soothe my beating heart, to hark to padded foot on stone, to find the draft at my neck – so if door or window swung I would have known.

That damned woman must’ve creeped in witch-made silence.

I heard nothing and had trod the length of the house; it wasn’t till in the kitchens, I saw the print of a sole among the mess strewn about the flagstones. I followed – my mettle steeled by the bitter taste of judas’ kiss – and there she was. Listening.

McNab sat in the kitchen passage with the gall of a dutiful woman, not the Satan-sure wench she was. Her immodest guise of innocence stoked a fire beneath me and before she could make to stand I caught her by the hair and wrenched her from her seat. It was a racket of scrabbling that followed me down the passage but it wasn’t until I cast her from the door that she began her heathen wailing. She could not stop me with such screeching, nor with her false tears, dirtied with the rain and mud, wretched as she was.

I knew no compassion for her.

It was on the great stone step of my house, in the wailing tempest, I roared out into the night, to the she-devil: your friend is gone, you’ll not possess another… whore of Satan! I gasped a lungful of jagged air and I drew my clasp knife. Swift and sure, I bled McNab upon the stone.

No longer is there a devil in these walls.

That’s everything as it stands. I’m sorry for the blots and the ink – I’ve had the last of my whiskey and the gun over my knee makes for an encumbered hand. I am here, forsaken, alone in the face of ill. You must carry the justice of my actions further afield. The negress comes and at her heel Lucifer himself, I’m sure of it. You wee English bastards may not have the stomach for such things – I know it’ll be you who finds this, Abney, should the she-devil take me – but you must tell that I uncovered the monster that was in that damned transported youth. If shot does not take her I’ll set on her with my dirk and the fury for my slain child. I’m laughing at the thought of it, that bitch’ll see her handiwork, step over the corpse of her thrall, McNab; I’ll have justice for my

It ends abrupt. I have contained this by my best efforts but rumour is surely rife in the village. I fear that were we to allow these writings to go out into the world that this she-devil may become a terrible figure, martyred in the mists about Murdoch’s lands. I defer to your good judgement. As for the provenance of this letter please know it is exactly as I found it, I will say no more of where and how it was retrieved. I cannot bring myself to record the scene I came upon in word and ink for I fear that the very spirit of it should creep through the blotter and wreak havoc upon those I hold close – I shall say only this of that house; it was a painting in entrails.

Yours truly,

Simeon Abney

This storie haes been lichtlie eeditit frae the oreeginal and is mint tae eik oot this craft artikle.

For the English translation of “Tasmanian Devil,” click here.

Infeor Vaarin:1

Dear Sir,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. I wish this in part for it bears tidings of the gravest import and utmost gravity. I fear in my explanations that I would digress or muddle such details as I possess so I shall scrawl no further; the materials I have included shall speak for themselves, though it is a gruesome account I feel bound that the law must hear it. Know that these are the words of John Murdoch and that, though he writes as he speaks, he is a most honourable and pious man. He resides only a little to the east; it is a place of loneliness and mist and I fear it now plays host to more than grouse and crow.

*

I await her, I ken her scent an the air. This hoose is besiegit by the blackest o souls. I am compellit tae scrive this accoont lest the truth o the matter be kent only tae God as I am his honest witness. The deil conspires tae ruin this ferm an in his fashion he sends his servands as the unassumin an the obedient – that is hoo foolness cams an lives ithin the walls. She took ma bairn frae me.

The day the deil cam tae me – it wis a wretchit day o smirr an I wis crabbit frae saddle-soreness gien me by the ride tae Perth. In ma weakness, I took on that wretchit maid. The feein day hadna faurt me weell an Mrs. McNab naggit at a need tae fill the place o the Kyles lass, pregnant hoor. I gid ma nod for the hire just tae steel away that hoosekeeper’s lurid tongue. Sicna insidious exchange, tae tak advantage o ma distraction, I did nae fash tae see the girl for whit she was; no maid, no even just furrin scuff. Ay, she wis the only lass for feein that day an in ma haste I broucht Beelzebub into ma hame.

Twis nae lang afore ma dauchter lay, back archit, aneath the black alder. It wis me who heftit ma poor gilpey frae a gate post, impalit like the son o God himsel, tho it wisna a roman who drove iron through ma bairn’s fair flesh. It wis the fa frae her chamber windae – a fa is whit McNab widha haed me believe.

Ma bairn wis pusht frae the sill by that blackguard maid. As I stand crustit wi the blood o ma kin that accursit hoosekeeper spake in defense o the maid! She wid hae me ken that ma dauchter wis a cheap hoor, vaultin frae the sill tae lie wi the stable hand as I lay sleepin in ignorance – she in a bed o hay, moontit like the horses! I struck McNab tae the dirt for all her insolence, an sic did she deser it.

I should hae seen it, it wis lang by the first sign.

That kitchie-dame wis walcome frae the start; a maid rarely took sae weell tae a hoosehold as she. McNab treatit her weell for a petty servand, far mair weell as whit she deserved as a peasant, an mair still for a negress.

All but Lithgow took curiosity in her exotic features, that sicna markit body could work an speak our tongue in civil Scotland. I suppose the civil are taen by a seek fascination tae look upon the savage, all the easier a savage richt dressed an donnin our customs. Ay but Lithgow saw her for whit she wis, a wolf clothit in wool. Ever a ghillie, a richteous man, he saw her as a bitch tae cuddum. That’s why he wis first tae go.

I draggit that soulless thicklip tae the hitchin post an beat her wi all the ire o holy vengeance, wi the micht o God I broucht her tae the gates o hell an near enouch sent her tae her maker. It wis Lithgow that haltit me. The murderer haed said nethin, no confession, the same seelence o that smirr ridden day that she daurkent ma door. I saw Lithgow’s look an kent tae let it live. Even nou she hid the real malevolent beast ithin an sae I haed the whimperin McNab make sure she wid nae bleed tae death an left the savage tied tae yon post.

I haed done richt, even the waifish scullery maid at the door held a look o satisfaction, she see’d the corruption oozin frae the negress. Do nae heed McNab’s prattle aboot maid’s jealousy; she an all ken I did richt by ma bairn an richt by God. I did sae for three days an nichts. Each nicht, come nichtfa, I took the duty upon masel tae compel her confession an drove ma knuckles raw but she gid noucht. I said plain, if the deil holds yer tongue then show me ye’re a murderer.

It wis only time atween me an truith; the cauld November air presst in on the yard and I took a dram kenning I haed done richt.

The third nicht cam an I stood wi McNab in ma study, watchin as an unholy fog descendit. I wis strang in ma conviction, I haed seen the first sign, the wretch in the yard haed been compellt tae speak: you want, you shall have.

As the mist tak her, I kent by morn I’d hae ma confession. Like the guid old days o King James, lash the witch tae the post an you shall hae yer justice. Sae confident a fool I wis that I held the deil at ma mercy but whan the sun rose an fog brent awa the post stood tuim.

Naen o ma hoose wid betray me so, McNab assertit as much frae her stammerin gob, naen but her, but I haed her by ma side all nicht tae be siccar. Her wirds were pathetic, she said it wis no fault o the servands an ma clingin tae superstition wis condemnable an weak.

Only a gowk wid misken piety for superstition. I hatit her but by the grace o God I haed tae forgive her as she wis a woman an couldna be held tae sicna standard o reserve whan the deil roamed. The Tasman savage haed win frae through deilry, it wis certaint.

Lithgow tak tae the chase as a loyal man at arms, he drove the hoonds on the hunt but the search wis tae no avail. He never cam back. That nicht, piteuch were heard aboot the shaw on the river but cam mornin anely ane wretchit mongrel cam agin tae ma kennel.

In his absence days past and the hoose quietit aneath ma rage, till the true horrors began.

First that scullery maid wis taen ill, I can nae mind the lass’ name but I mind the strushie she made while I waitit tae sup. McNab said she haed hawstit an taen a fever afore spewin vilely oot in the kale yard. It wis nae illness, it wis possession – she burst intae ma study in the dead o nicht, eyes athoot colour, all pupil an whites, ravin an assailit by demon unseen. McNab an Masters haed stormit after her, blatherin o illness an apologies. Tak her tae the kirk wi haste I thoucht but it wis too ahint; the lass fell tae the grund an convulsed wi muckle violence. Failed in her mynt tae murder me, the poor lass’ soul wis taen as she grew still an wis deid soon after possession endit.

The next wis the stable hand, a murder that no even McNab could claim wis a mishanter. Steps frae ma door, wis whaur we foond him. He wis strung frae the stable rachters, floatin in the reek, haulit abune by a span o iron weir broucht aboot his thrapple some number o times. The wiers – deeply they haed cut frae his hingin weicht an sae emergit frae a black chasm aneath his vein ridden coontenance; like the shanks o some muckle spider wrenchin ootward frae ithin his gullet.

McNab widna cross the threshold, naen wid! This gore still hings spectral frae ma stable rachters at the nou! I kent it wis the she-deil tho; the deid youth haed said he kent nethin o the foulest murder but he haed been at his duties that nicht, the very youth McNab wid hae haed me believe wis tuppin ma sweet lass. This evidencit he kent an feart the savage as she wis fautit; he held his tongue but it wis nae a true enouch seelence for that murderer. As he wis a witness tae savagery he hae becam its effigy.

It wis a watherfu nicht wan Masters came tae me in ma chambers. In the flurry o wind an rain the soond distortit in ma hoose an Masters stood close tae me that I micht hear him over the din. He telt me that the cook wis vanisht, the ither stable hands haed flewn, the horses let loose, an all at the will o McNab.

It wis then I saw the paintin frae the frame; that pestilent besom haed made her final act tae strip all ma defenses frae me! I rewardit Masters – dismissin him tae whauriver he thoucht tae go. I leapt frae ma place an burst through the hoose. Each creek o bauk an fluirboard sang treachery, soucht o hidden malice.

The first door I sprung wi poust an scaitert whit lay beyond me; a mess o furnishin, left by man an maid wi haste, no mind for the free movement ithin a place besiegit. In ma anger I haed strack a chair frae ma path, athort the table, takin flagon an food tae the fluir as it flew. As I looked at the greyin meat, cast frae the platter an dousit in the filth o the hearth, I kent tae caum masel, let quate soothe ma beatin heart, tae hark tae paddit foot an stone, tae find the draft at ma neck – sae if door or windae swung I wid o kent.

That damned woman must’ve creepit in witch-made seelence.

I harkit nocht an haed trod the length o the hoose; it wisna till in the kitchens, I saw the print o a sole among the grush strawn aboot the plainstane. I follit – ma mettle steelit by the callor taste o judas’ kiss – an there she wis. Harkenin.

McNab sat in the kitchen passage wi the gall o a dutifu woman, nae the Satan-sure wench she was. Her haurd-neckit guise o innocence stoked a fire aneath me an afore she could make tae stand I caucht her by the hair an wrenchit her frae her seat. It wis a ricket o scrabblin that follit me doon the passage but it wisna until I casten her frae the door that she began her heathen cruin. She could nae stop me wi sic skirlin, nae wi her fause tears, draigelt wi the rain an clabber, wrechit as she wis.

I kent nae rue an her.

It wis on the great stone step o ma hoose, in the wailin tempest, I rairt oot into the nicht, tae the she-deil: your friend is gane, you’ll nae possess anither… hoor o satan! I pecht a lungful o jaggit air an I drew ma jockteleg. Swith an shuir, I bled McNab upon the stone.

Nae noo is there a deil in these walls.

That’s aw as it bides. I’m sairy for the spairge an the ink – I’ve haed the last o ma whiskey an the gun ower ma knee makes for an encumbert hand. I am here, forhoued, alane in the face o ill. Ye must cairy the justice o ma actions further afield. The negress cams an at her heel Lucifer himsel, I’m sure o it. You wee English bastard may nae hae the stamack for sic thins – I ken it’ll be you who finds this, Abney, should the she-deil tak me – but you must tell that I unkivert the monster that wis in that damned transportit youth. If shot does nae tak her I’ll set on her wi ma dirk an the fury for ma slain Bairn. I’m lauchin at the thoucht o it, that bitch’ll see her handiwork, step ower the corpse o her thrall, McNab; I’ll hae justice for ma

*

It ends abrupt. I have contained this by my best efforts but rumour is surely rife in the village. I fear that were we to allow these writings to go out into the world that this she-devil may become a terrible figure, martyred in the mists about Murdoch’s lands. I defer to your good judgement. As for the provenance of this letter please know it is exactly as I found it, I will say no more of where and how it was retrieved. I cannot bring myself to record the scene I came upon in word and ink for I fear that the very spirit of it should creep through the blotter and wreak havoc upon those I hold close – I shall say only this of that house; it was a painting in entrails.

Yours truly,

Simeon Abney

The form is intended to embody the absurdity, contradiction, and impossibility of trying to write an emotionally honest ode through a fascist lens. Its premise is that fascism precludes the appreciation of beauty. It’s my attempt to inhabit the ideology in poetry rather than react to it, writing it for what it is – dogsh*t dehumanizing nonsense.

With that, I want to make a humble offering to anyone else who takes refuge in poetry – a lyric-engine that you can pull apart, play with, or completely ignore; a form that is as frustrating and ridiculous as all the authoritarians besieging your time and energy. Fascists Verbing Noun.

(For most other varieties of siege, I recommend a Molotov Cocktail)2.

The Form

The Fascists Verbing Noun poetic form is designed to be a sort of ode, an ugly monorhyme in rough 4554 or 5665 syllabic verse with an awkward resolution of 7 syllables (5 + 3 separated by a comma). Stanzas 3 and 4 follow the same monorhyme but lead with a variant of the ode’s subject – elucidating more about the subject and its context – before returning to the norm in stanza 5. For those who understand the technicalities better than me, without syllabic verse, the metre is arbitrary and mixed but in experimenting further I’ve found I tend to favour dactyls and trochees for an appropriately militaristic or incantational feel.

With the repetitive rhyme scheme this results in a structure that looks something like: AXXA AXXA BXXB CXXC AXXA (where X denotes non-repeating phrases/rhyme); optionally, the rhyme can be broken on the last line for greater dissonance. This structure is then peppered with nonsense words, onomatopoeia, and intentional misspellings or malapropism.

Ultimately, if form, metre, and other arbitrary rules feel like yet another assault on your freewill, you can always just read one or more of the poems, get the general vibe, and go tear up some scrap paper with anti-fascist free verse poetry3 – or better yet, join a march4.

Vive la résistance.

Vermeersch has gone on to release Shared Universe (2020), a greatest hits compilation fattened on new material, and with his next collection, NMLCT, set to be released in September, I thought our discussion was worth resurrecting. Vermeersch, also a prolific visual artist, continues to be a significant voice in Canadian poetry. He was one of three judges for the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize and—as well as teaching at Sheridan College—is the senior editor at Wolsak & Wynn’s literary imprint, Buckrider Books.

Revisiting our discussion of Self-Defence, his creative process, and poetry in translation, it’s vexing to see that our anxieties about the future haven’t changed but, seven years later, we’re still anxious and still here:

Original interview, Sept. 2018. Edited for Clarity.

With six poetry books and several major editorial credits, has everything gone to plan since your first chapbook publication in 1999? Given some omnipotence, how would you change things, if at all?

The word “plan” suggests premeditation to a degree that I don’t believe could possibly apply to the direction my creative work has taken in the past twenty years. “Has everything unfolded as you might have hoped?” is perhaps a question that’s easier to answer. To that question I would have to answer in the affirmative. I’ve read too many time travel stories to even think about changing the past, but my next project [Shared Universe] is supposed to be a book of new and selected poems, so I will finally get the opportunity to omit some poems I’m no longer fond of.

You stated in a 2011 interview that you no longer painted anymore but you’ve returned to it since then. Was it just a matter of finding time for your craft or was it a reconciliation and renewed interest?

It was the fortunate discovery of a large quantity of high quality oil paints in a cookie tin at a garage sale in 2014. I estimate there was about $400 worth of paint in that tin. I asked how much they wanted for them, and I was told two dollars. How could I pass that up? I took those tubes of paint home and churned out my first canvas since 1999. I’ve been making visual art fairly steadily, in a variety of media, ever since.

There seems to be themes and consistencies with your recent artwork and your recent writing. Is it a marriage you’ve been happy to foster? How does your painting inform your poetry?

My recent writing has benefitted from my return to painting in several ways, but I believe the biggest influences have been subject matter and tone. I’m visually preoccupied with the fantastic, and the tone is colourful and adventurous. I think this has had an enormous influence on the aesthetics of the poems of my most recent book, and I think it has been a good for my work overall.

Is the cold-war aesthetic a product of this? Or a happy coincidence of nuclear holocaust thoughts, words, and pigments?

There’s certainly a correlation, though I may be still working out exactly how all the pieces fit together, and that thought process factors into the creative work I am working on now. Just as the inspiration I took from the origins of human societies in my book The Reinvention of the Human Hand lead to my work on apocalyptic themes and ends of human societies in Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something. In the present book, I am definitely interested in Space Age-era futurism – all that optimistic World of Tomorrow stuff, themes I have also explored in my visual work – and how that stands at odd with the pessimistic dystopian pre-occupations of the era that followed the Space Age (and which continues today). My next works are already building on what Self-Defence sets up for them. It’s not really a conscious on-going project, but rather a natural evolution of my own creative interests.

Anxiety about the political and socio-economic situation internationally is rife; where do you take solace in our ante-apocalyptic world?

Fascism is resurgent. Proud, boastful ignoramuses are rising to power with alarming regularity. The world seems increasingly disdainful of intelligence, compassion, creativity and dignity. So… I take solace in democracy, in the generosity of community, in intelligence, compassion, creativity and dignity wherever I find them. Where the world seems to lack imagination and sinks into contemptuousness and spite, I take solace in the potential of the human imagination.

Self-Defence courts and presents doom and despair, particularly in its caustic nursery rhymes, yet there is a continuous thread of hope. How do you walk this line?

“Self-Defence” is meant to offer narratives of survival, at least fragments of them. That was meant to poison the well of dystopias with an elixir of hope, however dilute.

How do I walk the line? Trial and error. Rewriting and revision. There might be any number of wrong ways to approach the poem until you hit upon the needed tone, until you get the balance just right. It takes patience and a willingness to wander away from your initial impulses. The right move is almost never the first move.

You have previously said that conceptual poetry can prophesy or proselytize; how do you feel your style is influenced by the prophetic or biblical (or otherwise eschatological)?

Did I say that? I think I have known some adherents of conceptual writing to be given to proselytizing: “the lyric is obsolete” and that kind of dogmatic gack. For myself, I see conceptualism as merely another tool in the toolbox of poem-making. I use it when it’s useful to do so. Since The Reinvention of the Human Hand, I have been interested in prophecy as a literary form/theme. I explored it a little more during my MFA studies, and that became Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something. Poems like “Magog” in that book and “The Prophets Want to Know if They Are Close” in [Self Defence] are inspired by the ecstatic writings of self-described prophets and mystics like Nostradamus, Marguerite Porete, Edgar Cayce, and John of Patmos.

Conversely, how is it influenced by the speculative and science fiction?

What could be more speculative than prophecy? I see it as another form of fantasy literature or science fiction. The Book of Revelation? Thor: Ragnarok? To-MAY-to / to-MAH-to. When I am writing about visions of the future, the entire corpus of future-envisioning literature, divine pretentions or no, is a potential thematic or aesthetic model.

Your 2014 book, Don’t Let It End Like This Tell Them I Said Something, in its very title overtly conjures discussions of responsibility and Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy is explicit in its instructiveness, its proactivity. What is it that you want your poems to call for or inspire in their readers?

Let me give you some background on these titles, and perhaps something like an answer to your question will emerge. “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something” were the (perhaps apocryphal) final words of Pancho Villa and were used in a poem of mine that was a cento composed of famous or apocryphal last words. I used it as the title of that book because the statement itself refers to both endings (death / extinction / eschatology) and speech (language / communication), and those were the central thematic and material concerns of that book, respectively.

I first used the title “Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy” for a painting of toy laser guns I did in 2014 – I was interested in the idea of the utility of harmlessness, and harmless weapons in particular. I used it again for a poem that mentioned plastic laser guns, and then for the entire book. As I mentioned at [the launch of Self-Defence], I consider the current resurgence of anti-intellectualism, neo-fascism and anti-democracy to be something of a Great Regression. Compared to the Great Depression, which was an economic collapse, the Great Regression is a collapse of (as I mentioned above) intelligence, compassion, creativity and dignity. Curiosity (the desire to know) and imagination (the capacity to create) are the two greatest characteristics of the human mind, and these are the best defences against a regressive society. I wanted my book to reflect that idea.

Do you feel that your poems should ask something of their audience? Should they stand in isolation as statements or something for passive viewership?

I think my poems can do a lot of different things. They can be lyrical or rhetorical or meditative or enactive or conceptual or material, or some combination of these ways of being a poem. So there are lots of things they can ask of a reader or a listener, but there isn’t one thing that they all ask of the audience other than to be considered. Then it’s up to the reader to decide how to react to that consideration.

Self-Defence for the Brave and Happy also features a ‘translation’/retelling of a Herman de Coninck poem – why in particular this poem, and what was your compass in preserving the integrity of it as you drew it in a new form?

I’m not fluent in any other languages, so I don’t get to call myself a translator, nor do I have special insight into the practice of translation. I wanted to make a version of de Coninck’s poem because I liked it, and because I wanted to explore Flemish poetry because it’s a part of my family heritage that I’ve often felt cut-off from. My father was born in Belgium, but I never learned to speak or read Dutch or Flemish. Years ago, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer had been teaching herself Flemish and helped me with the literal translation of de Coninck’s poem, but my version takes enormous liberties with de Coninck’s form. His is free-verse, loose and loopy, while mine (in this iteration) has been tightly arranged (like all the other poems in the final section of the book) into the shape of a sonnet. I put it in this collection because I felt that it fit well thematically and aesthetically with the rest of the book; it’s sombre and funny, doomed yet hopeful, political and fanciful, and it has a car designed for going to the moon. It just fit right in.

How your involvement in VERSschmuggel, ReVERSible, RéVERSible[1] affected your perspective on poetic translations? Did it in part inspire the former?

It gave me some experience in working with interpreters and collaborating with other poets in order to produce translations. Beyond that, I have no special skill or expertise in this area, but it is something I might like to explore further in the future.

Is it the responsibility of the brave and happy to defend themselves?

Only if they wish to remain that way.

Vermeersch’s latest collection, NMLCT, comes out on September 2nd, 2025, via ECW Press and promises another step forward into the mythic, hallucinatory, and digitized verse of the 21st century.

[1] The Haus Für Poesie (Berlin, Germany) is a poetry collective that fosters international collaboration between poets and hosts multilingual poetry events. VERSschmuggle is the resultant publication that collects poems in German and the national languages of the collaborating nation; for Canada, this coalesced as a trilingual poetry anthology in German, English, and French, VERSschmuggel, ReVERSible, RéVERSible, published in 2021.