Introducing Altjeringa

There was a time when all I wrote was poetry. But I have always loved stories, and revered tellers of stories, so perhaps it was inevitable that I would reach out to become a teller of stories in my own right. This has led to some strange places, but most recently, it has led to a dream of combining words and images in a digital experiment.

Altjeringa is a borrowing from my future home, the Indigenous Australian equivalent of "Once upon a time", the magical time-beyond-time, and it is where I propose to take a small cadre of friends and readers, once per month, with a combined offering of a brand new fractal and a short story of 1500 words or more. Neither fractal nor story will be available anywhere else for five years beyond the end of Altjeringa's moments, however long we run, and if we run more than six months, I won't make them available anywhere else, ever. Like most things, it involves a choice: PDF-only, or a mailing that will feature the fractal print on archival-quality photo paper and the story on fine parchment, both inked with my signature chop and signed on the back of the fractal.

Current tale: The Work of the Weaver, In Colors, part Greek myth, part Goldilocks. Come see where open doors can lead.

The door is open.

That is not the usual way of things, you must understand. There must be walls, there have to be shut doors, or peeking in becomes commonplace, and the old woman sitting at her loom -- well, she becomes just another old woman. Someone you might see on any of a thousand corners, huddled and ignored.

Sometimes I enjoy that. Sometimes I pick one of those old, shuffling bodies, and slip into her like slipping into a stream; cold, and a little gritty, and a shock that makes me catch my breath. Sometimes if I open my mouth, I can taste her, and if she happens to struggle, this fish pushed temporarily into a corner of her own waters, hiding in the shallows under some rock of memory and self, then I know it will be ages before I feel like myself again...