The history of racial violence in the USA is usually framed in terms of the suffering of young black men, from George Stinney (executed, aged 14 in 1944 for a double murder he did not commit) to Emmett Till (lynched and mutilated, also aged 14 in 1955 for flirting with a white woman) to John […]
Author: Author
MISSING: Jane Doe, 1997
In this first extract from Exeme, Claudia is on her way back to School for her senior year. After an unfortunate accident, she arrives at The Poplars’ gates in the back of a patrol car. Jack The Cop calls in on his radio, tells the dispatcher he’s going to drop me off at The Poplars. […]
INSPIRATION: Louisa May Alcott
Like many other little girls the world over, I devoured Louisa May Alcott’s famous quartet of novels several times: Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo’s Boys. I giggled, wept, and was always slightly disappointed that Jo married Professor Bhaer – although I was glad she was so happy running her own school. Then I grew up, and forgot about […]
INSPIRATION: Peaches & Daddy Browning
The Sexual Revolution was a long time coming. Decades before the Pill, bra-burning, Roe vs. Wade or the Equal Rights Act, there was the struggle to establish that female sexuality existed, that women had enough agency over their bodies to enjoy – and even initiate – sex acts. Women in the USA and the UK […]
Letters Home #2
Babe, You would not believe what I have had to do to get this to you. First, write it, like, actually scratch on paper with my hands and a sticky black ballpoint because there’s no way you can use the computers here to type anything you don’t want the teachers to see. Hens. We call […]
MISSING: The Four Gees, 1912
In 1912, around sixty girls slept on the second and third floors of the main house, in small dormitories of four to six beds apiece. Gloria Atkinson shared a bedroom with three other ninth-graders — Gertrude Mortimer, Gladys Portnoy and Jemima Delreaux. They were a tight-knit group known, for obvious reasons, as the ‘Gee-Gees’. Around […]
HISTORY: Letter from a Civil War Surgeon
Dr. Isambard Jackson presided over The Poplars during the Civil War, when it was commandeered as a Field Hospital by the Confederacy. His letters to his sister, Maria, contain two brief references to Clarissa Lowell, a volunteer nurse who vanished in the spring of 1864, during one of the most brutal months of the entire […]
HISTORY: Gilbey & Sons Photographers, Part 1
Aloysius Gilbey, gentleman scientist, was a contemporary of Edgar Forbs, although he was educated overseas, in Germany. The two men shared an interest in chemistry, although Aloysius was concerned that his friend focused on the esoteric rather than the scientific. Throughout the 1840s they visited one another regularly, sharing their thoughts on the latest papers […]
HISTORY: Raffney’s Oak
When Thomas Forbs arrived in the valley that was to become The Poplars, in the late 16th century, the only area that wasn’t thick forest was the clearing surrounding the Well. It took Forbs and his people many years to clear the area of trees and start planting their own crops, thus evolving from hunter-gathers […]