Prose, Photos and Poems

By George G A Wensley

Prose, Photos and Poems

This is a compendium of short stories, poems and memoirs, of a writer learning his craft.

It is peppered with photographs as he is interested in the visual world.

Poetry is important to his work as it makes you think and wring out everything you possibly can from a word, and to be able to manipulate the elements of the story.

Madam Clich is about the writers love of the sound of the word Clich and his regret at its meaning and function.

Places and travel are important to the writer. Places become characters in his writing. Dreamlands is about a visit he made to Margate and the Turner Gallery, it is modelled on The Waste Land by TS Elliot and was one of the pieces that got the writer a Certificate in Creative writing.

Venice in the Rain is about a trip the writer made to Venice while researching for his Rialto Trilogy. He wrote stuff down as he walked through the landscape and it is just as much about memory as it is about the place.

The photography was done on his camera that was inherited from his father who was a member of the Royal Photographic Society and has been to symposiums at Fox Talbots House and has replicated the smoking mirrors experiment. The writer believes that photography is about the pictures you dont make.

The writer likes to call this sort of work Moodalogues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Nov 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477246689

George G A Wensley

George has for a long time done amateur photography concentrating on landscape photography, any people that appear in his photographs are there by chance. He enjoys poetry and short stories. Having achieved a certificate in creative writing he has learnt that some of the great novelists also wrote short stories and poetry as well. He admires people like HG Wells, Henning Mankell, Roald Dahl, Tolkien, Raymond Chandler, Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Reichs and Anne Lamott. Some of their shorter works give an insight to the larger ones. George likes to go visit the places that appear in his novels and write about them in detail, then like Ernest Hemingway's tips of the Ice burgs include a small detail in the full scale novel. The Isle of Thanet appears in his second novel, while doing research for the second book 'Devil's Gate and his work for the certificate, he went to the Turner Gallery at Margate and wrote a piece called the Dreamlands (he had read The waste lands by T, S Eliot) to get the description out of him. There is also a piece called 'Venice in the Rain,' which he wrote because he was struggling with the end of the book and what was happening in the third. He wishes that he could say that he lives with cats but because he likes to travel it would be difficult to keep them, but he does like his small flat with a court yard garden in a market town in Kent.

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© 2012 by George G A Wensley. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/20/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4665-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-4668-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Red Ken’s Pipe

Plagiarism

Slick

Splash

What’s in a look?

Valentine’s Day

The Dreamlands

Broadstairs

Ramsgate

The Lexicographers

Madam Cliché

Venice in the rain

Venice

Fruit de Mare at Mira Mere

Waiting for the train

Dreamlands Post Script

A tale of two book signings

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Red Ken’s Pipe

It was his habit when walking into town, looking for his favourite coffee shop, to walk to a weir, in the hinterland of the local park. One moment he was avoiding cars, the next he was on a tarmacked path with trees and grass. In front of him was an old woman with wrinkled plastic bags that were laden with precious bric-a-brac, with two dogs lying down. She fed pigeons while muttering either to her dogs, the pigeons or some unknown entity.

The man had lived in the country where the sight of a pigeon would have brought out shot guns and cob pie that would have been on the menu that day.

Then after a few paces he was at the weir. The water fell over the lip, mesmerizing; it was not constant like a watch, with the seasons it changed from muddy murk to crystal clear and from rushed spate to lazy warmth. The weir was made of red brick, which was worn by the water and water borne debris, tennis balls from the tennis courts, footballs, tin cans, bottles and wood. It was the wood that fascinated him, the most; the back draft of the weir tumbled all of these items, like a maelstrom turned in ninety degrees became rounded and smooth, where they constantly hit the abrasive bricks. He had worked in a factory where there was a machine that did exactly this for metal pieces. He remembered something that was of utmost beauty to him. A log with ivy smothering the bark, it too tumbled in the water, but the branches of ivy remained in skeletal white over the red log, in a natural sculpture.

Today the water was, a clear green, striating the red bricks as it fell. In the turmoil at the bottom of the weir, was a football, two tennis balls, a corked bottle of wine and the usual tumbled pieces of wood. His next habit was to chuck an imaginary Pooh stick into the water and walk to the other side of the bridge.

Here the water eddied in a normal way for river water. Across the river were pipes some small in diameter, some big in diameter. The largest one was the one