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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

In the middle of a summer when I am still a half-child, Mum tells me that this is the time of year when Bà Ngoại (my grandmother) always takes to praying loudly, eating little, turning up the volume on her taped Buddhist chants I ask why I never noticed You wouldn’t, Mum says She hides it from the children I ask what is wrong Without thinking, she replies, The ghosts are free When I ask what she means, Mum pauses, remembering that this is one fear she can choose to save me from She returns with one of her favourite warnings Don’t dig in too much — something she also says to stop me from scratching mosquito bites, or when I ask her to translate an old song she finds too sad   It is one of the rare times when Mum, Bà Ngoại and I are all together at Bà Ngoại’s house in Greater London, and Mum wants us to stay happy Bà Ngoại lives under a flight path, and so the distant howl of aeroplanes overlays every sound in the house — the recorded monk chants, the singing bowl Bà Ngoại taps after praying, her sudden giggles   Mum hands me a bowl of microwaved porridge and tells me to take it to Bà Ngoại She’ll eat if you’re the one to give it, she says And remember to speak to her gently   *   Mum lets go of the ghost story in fragments She finds a picture of a man in red robes standing on two lotuses, with a ball of yellow light behind his head In one hand, he holds a golden staff, and in the other, a big blue orb This is Địa Tạng Vương Bồ Tát, Mum says She pauses to find the right translation The Buddha of the underworld   Like many of the stories Mum tells me, it starts with a suffering woman This one had a son, Mục-kiền-liên — a young monk Unable to afford anything else, the woman made

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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feature

October 2012

Film: Palestinian Airlines

Eddie Wrey

feature

October 2012

    Palestinian Airlines Produced and Directed by Eddie Wrey Co-produced and translated by Max Wrey Co-edited by Rye...

feature

Issue No. 14

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 14

Having several issues ago announced that we would no longer be writing our own editorials, the editors’ (ultimately inevitable)...

Interview

June 2015

Interview with Moyra Davey

Hannah Gregory

Interview

June 2015

One way to think about Moyra Davey’s way of working across photography, film and text is in terms of...

 

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