In February this year, I did a day course, an introduction into Shamanic Dreaming, at the request of a very intuitive healer and practicing Shamanic Dreamer. She told me to ‘fill your boots.’ I did that and more. Imagination was the key element to making this experience enriching, and as an imaginist, you would have believed …
I only have one true literary inspiration. That is Clive Barker. I hungrily devoured his imaginative fiction with a ravenous appetite, and my understanding of how prose and poetry could be amalgamated began to take shape. I was stunned at his use of language, often writing down words that I had never seen written, nor heard spoken …
When I began writing in 2008, the message was clear; let the information, the stories, the characters be the public faces of Oho Ake Books, you (that’s me) stay behind the curtain and dish up the material, spin the narrative and just enjoy the unfolding wonder. Yeah, that worked well… In the years preceding the …
In my childhood, I had many experiences that could be perceived as supernatural or paranormal. What was defined as ‘real’ was a matter of conjecture, and for me, the last word on what was simply an active imagination or an aspect of heightened sensory awareness came from the mouths of my caregivers. I grew up with visitations from parasitic …
The fever that gripped me for two weeks after my possession cooled after the textbooks were filled. Yet my poetic heart blossomed, and I spent my nights composing poems for muses that came into the bars I worked in around the world. Romances and lovers came along with my gifts, and I gratefully accepted every …
My body paced throughout the house that late afternoon. No one was home as it stormed through the bedrooms, revolt spilling from my pores and infecting the environment like a pungent stench. Scott eventually came back home and when he did I walked towards him and in a moment of overpowering I bleated out on …
Had I known at the time that my girlfriend was clairvoyant, claircognizant, clairaudient, and a powerful intuitive because of these abilities I may have listened to her. Our relationship had recalibrated by the time I had gone on a double date with Scott, Pip, and Orna to see a movie at the Metropolis Theatre in …
It was in the early 1990s that the faucet of my literary spring was turned back on after an incident in an apartment in Dunedin. The four-bedroom apartment was in the centre of the city, at the south-eastern side of the Octagon (central city square). It was the top level of the three-story building, a …
I was thirteen years old when I wrote my first short story. It was an assignment given to my English class. My tale of an Inuit girl who saw a bird (for the first time) then had followed it onto the arctic ice, got lost and died spoke hugely of my life experience up to …