The Collector: Memoir

My maternal grandfather flew from Britain to New Zealand when I was eleven, and never got off the plane, thanks to a heart attack.  My grandmother was waiting to greet him in Arrivals, little knowing she would never speak with him again.

Beyond the Unimaginable: the Seadragon and the Seahorse

Surely there is no other creature as outlandish and wildly imagined as the sea dragon or the sea horse.  I simply had to find a way to put one or both into a story, and eventually they made their way into 'The Sea Urchin', an unsettling tale about a waif child born of the sea who lures a boy into her watery world, never to be seen again.  The sea dragon and the sea horse barely feature, but I liked to imagine them anyway; they fit well into this tale of weird and wonderful creations that surely must have been imagined by a Universe on acid.  Think about it for a minute.  Sea anemones, jellyfish, angler fish, sea horses....they are all so alien, so otherworldly; barely conceivable.