Mudlarking

Abstract

Mudlarking is a novel-in-progress about realities and fantasies of queerness in the 1960s. Its two young protagonists, who have immigrated to London from unstable homes in Ireland and Virginia, seek to craft a new home for themselves out of things discarded by larger society, in a place at the fringe of reality and myth. They are “mudlarks” in both a literal and metaphorical sense, picking through refuse along the River Thames for long-lost things that can be made to glitter. Danger comes in the form of the insistent press of respectable conformity, and comfort in fluid transformation, remaking, and crafting a sanctuary out of a once-haunted space. The novel draws from conventions of Irish and Welsh folklore, as well as invented mythology, to emphasize the possibility of impossible transformations.Mudlarking is accompanied by three earlier stories that have informed its construction and themes in various ways. In A Lonely Death, the narrator has a conversation with the long-dead corpse of a stranger, while The Cunning Doll situates a familiar fairy tale in the swamps of Louisiana, and posits that the heroine and the witch are more similar than either would like to believe. Pink Moment is an ode to the color pink in all its forms, but also to the ways that we use color and place to tell fantasies of our own lives. All of these narratives are concerned with the intersection between historical and fantastical landscapes, as well as the unlikely connections that inform our concept of belonging.