The narratives I want to read are marginal, not mainstream: the voices we don’t get to hear, the unrecorded and undiscovered stories of how people navigate/d life. I am a margin-dweller too, and I’m currently exploring the edgelands between worlds; those that connect and divide both our experiences and our geographical areas.
Exploring placeness, dereliction, psychogeography, the othered and brutalised body, power systems, counter-mapping, belonging and community, and rural and urban walking (amongst other things) – and looking at my own marginal memories through the lens of stories and wisdoms I find in the archives of great thinkers and collectors such as Maria Popova and Richard Rohr, plus national and local archives too – I am starting a Substack collection in an experimental attempt to make sense of The Edgelands. Extracts will be posted here on my site, but the full experience is over there, so subscribe to receive my writing directly into your inbox for ten weeks.
I will release one post per week on a Thursday morning, beginning February 24th. Themes will include:
- Alleyways: transitory bodies
- Psychogeography, thin places & otherworlds
- Asylums: a letter to my uncle
- M-otherhoods
- Pattern addiction & physical addiction – psychosis
- Shifting sands: between grief & laughter
- Broken people go to church on days that aren’t Sunday
- Borough boundaries, hostels & train tracks
- Sleep/wake dreamlands
- The blurred boundaries of mind & body – chronic pain & medical gaslighting
After that, I am not sure. I just hope that you come on a journey with me for ten weeks to begin with, at least. Maybe you’ll stay for whatever comes next, too.
“In the end, the measure of our strength is in how we face the fact that we are simply human — mortal, vulnerable creatures of uncommon creativity and courage, body-minds born to die and to make meaning of our fragile existence not by clinging to the self but by practicing our various arts of unselfing: love, creative work, transcendent communion with the rest of nature.”
Maria Popova
sam dodd 
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