Meet the Author: Tracy Fahey
Tracy Fahey is the author of 'Looking for Wildgoose Lodge', one of the short stories in our Impossible Spaces anthology.
Hello, visitors to the Hic Dragones blog, and welcome to the strange places and odder inhabitants you will find here. I’m Tracy Fahey, and I’m privileged to be one of the writers featured in the latest Hic Dragones publication, Impossible Spaces (July 2013), edited by the tireless Hannah Kate.
However, I have a confession. I’m an imposter from another realm; my ‘other’ self is an academic, writing about the Gothic sites and stories from a critical perspective, while my dark side, the story-spinner, the weaver of happenings, happily cooks up the raw material for analysis. Both sides of me are fascinated with liminal areas, transgressed boundaries and spaces of otherness that we fill with associations, memories and the long echoes of folk practices. You can read more about my musings on doubles in creative and critical practice on The Gothic Imagination blog, hosted by University of Stirling.
My inspiration stems from my own endless fascination with tales, my childhood filled with the magic of my grandmother’s folk stories about local Gothic events. Like a deep font, I return to this again, and again, not only in creating stories or writing critically about folklore and Gothic, but in making art. I also run an art collective, Gothicise, who create site-specific work that revolves around sites and stories. These are public, participative events and happenings that feature recurring acts of storytelling, walking, acting and re-enacting.
Running between all my weird, parallel worlds is a recurring obsession with the unheimlich or uncanny home, the places and situations where we should feel at home, but rarely do. Being Irish, I’m preoccupied by the problematic notion of the home in national terms; this legendary centre of warmth, community and storytelling is also historically constituted as threatened, colonised and dispossessed. ‘Wildgoose Lodge’ which appears in Impossible Spaces is part of a growing collection of different tales I am amassing that relate to this idea of the uncanny home and all that may or may not happen within this mental and physical space, stories that deal with exile, loss, folk customs, ghost estates, weird suburbs and inexplicable noises in the night.
I invite you to open the covers of Impossible Spaces, to slide from mainstream to slipstream, to step into these strange spaces that my fellow writers have created.
