The dirt road curves and the barn appears first, then the house behind it, three storeys of weathered clapboard on a rise above the fields. Eventually St. George River is visible at the bottom of the slope, the light off the water coming up the hill. I parked and stood to adjust to the air before going in. It was still. The fields between me and the water were olive-colored and the smell coming off them was grass and salt, something faintly marine. The house looked as though it had grown from the hill rather than been built on it.

The front hall floor is painted and stenciled with leaves, the delicate pattern still faintly legible under decades of foot traffic, the paint worn thinnest in the exact center of where shoe and floor met. I imagined Tempus Fugit noticing that, not me, almost like I was borrowing a thought from my character’s head and the purity that autism can bring.

The kitchen is at the rear of the ground floor: the original Glenwood cast iron stove massive and black, a lone egg crock on the shelf, geraniums red in the window. Wyeth painted that stove. He painted the geraniums. He painted Christina sitting at the table that is no longer here, the Glenwood behind her, her life organized around the radius of what she could reach. The pantry behind the kitchen has a metal-lined wood sink box and a water pump and a mechanical roller for wringing out the wash. Beyond the pantry the woodshed, and in the woodshed loft, Alvaro’s dory.

My wandering takes me up a staircase. Into the quiet. Second floor: pale blue painted walls, the wallpaper in the bedroom deteriorating from the top down, the faded pattern breaking apart in strips. The light in these rooms came in at angles that made the plaster look older than it was, or more exactly itself, I still don’t know which.

He came back thirty summers in a row, Andrew did. He said he just couldn’t stay away. Three hundred drawings and paintings came out of this place with its particular quality of Maine light on these fields. The house gave him something he could not exhaust. Imagine that, he found an endless stream of creative water to drink from here. Did he notice things the way Tempus did?

The room on the third floor south side is where he worked for most of those summers, the window here looks down toward the fields and the river. The floor is bare and pale. There is nothing in the room except the window and what it frames. I imagined him standing here, his easel there, wet paint squirming out of a tube to take its first breath in that sea-breeze.

On the other side of the attic, facing west, is the window where Wind from the Sea was born. The curtains are not there. They are in the painting at the National Gallery in Washington and which is what brought me here. There is something about it I cannot put into words. I go to the window, framed by unpainted wood. The view is south over the fields, the same fields, the same line of water at their edge, the same pale sky. He opened this window in 1947, a window that hadn’t been opened in years, and he said the old lace curtains moved in the sea breeze and the crocheted birds along their hems appeared - just for a moment - to be flying. He made a quick sketch and because he described his hair as standing on end. Then he closed the window and waited a month and a half for the west wind to return. Tempus’ story has taken that long, and more.

Outside, the afternoon light was going low across the fields. Before leaving I went down the path across the road to the small family cemetery — barely a dozen stones, the trees opening to a sparkling view of Maple Juice Cove between them. Christina and Alvaro share a stone. A few feet away is his: Andrew Wyeth, 1917–2009. He asked to be buried here; his wife joined him 11 years later in this family’s cemetery. My, how he must have loved them.

Such a desolate place, and yet - I was somehow happy for them.

A few more steps and I entered a room that is small and low and compressed and absolutely certain of itself. John Soane invented a monk and built him this parlour. But the monk never existed. The grave in the yard outside the window is a fiction. Soane made all of it the year after his wife died. He gave the room another man’s name and then sat in it alone where a stained glass window throws its saints across the wall in reds and blues.

The desk in the window is walnut, heavy, early 18th century, and belonged to a prime minister. Around him on every surface were gargoyles, carved corbels, laughing stone faces and demonic ones, grotesques from Chester Cathedral. None of this should cohere. But it does. Every piece is exactly where it is. The arrangement is thought made three-dimensional, and anyone who describes it as clutter has not been paying attention.

What Soane was doing, in this room, was grief. But it was also something more precise than grief. He was reconstructing. He was saying: if I place these objects with sufficient care, if I learn the distance between the desk and the window, the relationship between the Flemish glass and the amber light, the exact position of each carved face on each wall, then something will stay. A room can be a form of memory. A room can be carried.

I have been writing about a girl called Maude Minor.

Maude’s house was taken from her, and so wherever she goes, she makes the rooms again by labeling empty places. Maude carries the floor plan of everything she lost, folding it smaller and smaller until it fits inside her wherever she needs to go. Everywhere she and her mother move, Maude unfolds the blueprint again, placing herself within it, oriented, located, home.

The world calls this OCD. What the world is noticing, but failing to understand, is the architecture.

Precision is the thing that holds. It is the reason Maude can stand in an unfamiliar room and know where the door would be, where the light would fall at this hour, which corner is the safe one. She counts things because she is a surveyor, and she has a map to maintain, and the map is all she has left of something irreplaceable.

In the Monk’s Parlour, Soane did the same thing. He lost his wife. He lost, with her, the particular dimensions of their life together. And so he built. He placed. He arranged until the arrangement held the weight of what was gone. “Dulce est desipere in loco,” he wrote, which is Latin for “it is delightful to play the fool occasionally,” which is also a man’s way of saying: I built a room for a monk who does not exist because the person who did exist is no longer here, and this is the only floor plan I have left.

He would have understood Maude. She would have known, immediately, upon descending the stairs, what kind of room this was.

The acoustics in the basement are different from the upper floors, muffled by stone and earth, the city traffic reduced to something distant and irrelevant.

You can feel when someone has stood in it at every hour of the day, in every season, knowing the relationship between this ceiling and this stone and the sound of the city above it, and has placed things accordingly.

I stayed until they asked me, politely, to leave.

Outside, Lincoln’s Inn Fields was doing its usual business, barristers at pace, pigeons negotiating, the plane trees enormous and indifferent to all of it. I found a bench and poured myself a cup of tea from my thermos.

Soane built the Monk’s Parlour the year after his wife died. He was sixty-three years old. He had thirty-two more years to live, and he spent them refining the arrangement.

Maude Minor is eleven years old. She has thirty-two years and considerably more ahead of her. She is already, at eleven, the finest surveyor of interior space I have ever written. She knows which window faces east. She knows the distance between every piece of furniture in a room she has visited once, two years ago. She has the whole floor plan inside her, updated, cross-referenced, maintained.

The world keeps telling her this is too much.

The world has not seen the Monk’s Parlour.

Stirrings is where I write about the process of writing, the characters, and the experiences that shaped them. The Underestimated Club is a series of five books that each star a neurodivergent child. If you’ve found your way here, you may be one of those people. Or you may love one. Either way, welcome to the Underestimated Club.

I order at the counter and find a table by the fireplace, though it is never lit. Tea in a proper pot, a teacup and saucer, a slice of Victoria sponge on a white plate. I set them down next to my notebook, unwrap my scarf, sit and look up.

The lamps hang from the ceiling like enormous dandelions gone to seed, huge globes, slightly improbable, casting a warmth that has nothing to do with the gray outside.

Columns rise up to support a tiled ceiling ornate and fireproof, the Victorians having decided that beauty and practicality were not mutually exclusive. The walls curve, where stained glass windows carry not saints but instructions: “Hunger is the best sauce.” “A good cup makes all young.” Wrapping all the way around the room are letters that have been there since 1868, saying:

There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy the good of his labor.

While sitting in this room, I find I have no quarrel with this.

The room has a sound, the clink and settle of cups, the small percussion of spoons, the occasional chair.

I open my notebook. Write a sentence. Look at the tiles. Write another. Look at the stained glass. Something that had been stuck comes unstuck and arrives on the page and I think: yes. There it is.

I am, as those who have read anything I have written will know, selective about company. But certain rooms give it, and give it well. Not the company of people, which requires management, but the company of a place that knows you. I have a theory that certain rooms keep a version of you between visits. Not a ghost, nothing so dramatic. Just the particular shape of your attention, held in the walls, waiting. You walk in and step back into yourself. You are, without effort or decision, entirely who you are.

The Gamble Room does this for me. Has done, for years. I don’t fully understand why, and I have learned not to examine it too carefully, in the way one doesn’t examine good luck or a working pen.

I wrote until the tea was cold, and I was, the whole time, entirely happy.

Stirrings is where I write about the process of writing, the characters, and the experiences that shaped them. The Underestimated Club is a series of five books that each star a neurodivergent child. If you’ve found your way here, you may be one of those people. Or you may love one. Either way, welcome to the Underestimated Club.

She is not what I expected. I had imagined something theatrical, a pointed silhouette against torchlight, arms raised in permanent hexery. But the Witch of Wookey Hole is a stalagmite. A pillar of calcium carbonate, patient as centuries, shaped loosely into the suggestion of a woman caught mid-turn. Her dog is there too, small and stony at her feet, frozen in the act of following her wherever she was going. Which was deeper. Always deeper.

The legend goes like this: with a broken heart, she retreated into the caves. Deeper and deeper, with considerable self-sufficiency, she lived there for years, perhaps decades. The locals grew nervous. They believed she was a malevolent force, blighting crops and cursing the village. But the truth was, she had chosen solitude rather than management, and that sort of choice has always unsettled community. Eventually the problem was handed to a monk. He arrived with holy water and the certainty of a man with a solution. With a splash, she turned to stone where she stood. Facing inward. Looking into the dark.

I poured myself a cup of tea from my thermos. No one was around for a while, it was just me and her. And her dog. Even in stone, she had kept her chosen company. The cave dripped. We didn’t mind. The river ran somewhere below us, getting on with things. It was on my last sip that I felt something clarify inside me. Something the priest didn’t know. She was going the right way.

I am often asked, by people who have misread my author biography as a form of invitation, why I am so private. The answer I give in public is that I find myself tedious company in large doses and consider it a kindness to limit my distribution. This sometimes garners a chuckle, which is its purpose.

The true answer is harder to hold still for examination.

There are people in the world for whom the outside is endlessly manageable. They drive to work and the traffic is simply traffic. They enter parties and the noise is simply noise. They move through the world and the world fits them, not noticing the seam where the wallpaper doesn’t quite meet.

I am not those people. Neither, if you have found your way to these pages, I would wager, are you.

I would like to suggest, gently, that the world has got it backwards.

Wookey Hole smells of ancient water and cold rock and something older than both, time itself, perhaps, settling into limestone at the rate of a millimetre per century. The River Axe runs through the cave system, black and purposeful, going about its business without requiring applause.

I stood in the first chamber for a long time and watched the witch.

There is a particular hum I do when I am thinking through something stubborn. I have written about it elsewhere (see: Why I Hum While I Write, the low bumble-bee frequency that seems to vibrate the good thoughts loose from wherever they’ve gone sticky. I was humming, softly, in the cave. The acoustics were extraordinary. The cold stone hummed back.

What the witch understood, I think, is that going deeper is not running away. It is a form of going toward. Toward the quiet in which something real can finally be heard. Toward the dark in which something real can finally be seen. The outside world had rendered its verdict on her, too much, too strange, too unwilling to arrange herself into a more convenient shape, and she had done the only sensible thing, which was to find a cave, shut the door, and conduct her own investigations.

Privacy keeps me irrelevant. Which is exactly where I should be.

The depth of focus that unsettles people is the same depth that sees what no one else can.

One character I have been writing about, Tempus Fugit, hero of Time’s Last Chance, would love Wookey Hole.

Tempus notices everything, at a depth that exhausts the people around her and sustains her completely. She would study the calcium striations in the witch with the seriousness of a geologist. She would notice the shine on the small stalagmite, the dog at her feet, worn smooth at nose-height by decades of children reaching out. Tempus would see the witch with the tenderness of someone who understands what it means to be looked at wrongly for a very long time.

The witch would have recognized her.

I screwed the cup back onto my thermos, gave the witch a nod, and headed outside where the light hit like an accusation. The fudge shop was closing. I found my battered and beloved car, parked at an odd angle on the verge, evidence that I was thinking too hard about something else.

I started the engine. It complained but in the end agreed, reluctantly, to follow the lane down through the ash trees. Where the hills ran out and the plain began, I stopped at the junction. Looked left. Looked right. Somewhere out on the flat, a hill rose with a tower on top of it, the kind of thing that sits on a horizon as though it has been waiting there specifically for you to notice it on a Tuesday in November with an empty thermos and nowhere particular to be. I turned toward it and drove deeper into Somerset.

Stirrings is where I write about the process of writing, the characters, and the experiences that shaped them. The Underestimated Club is a series of five books that each star a neurodivergent child. If you’ve found your way here, you may be one of those people. Or you may love one. Either way, welcome to the Underestimated Club.

Does this happen to you? I’m halfway through writing a paragraph, my heart rate is starting to climb because my words are crawling away from me. The sound of the refrigerator humming or the washing machine whirring in the background slowly mount til I realize there’s a sustained tension in my body. The transition from fluid thought to overstimulation is subtle and then omnipresent.

🐝 Enter the bumble bee

Bhramari Pranayama (aka Bumble-Bee Breathing) is a tool for physiological regulation. It’s simple. No really.

1. Inhale through your nostrils.

2. Exhale mimicking a bumble bee’s hum

The vibration is the catalyst. It startles the tension out of my jaw. It feels like a gentle internal massage for my skull. By the third exhale, any frantic feeling has dissipated, or at least quieted.

I love this practice because it’s sensory-friendly. You aren’t trying to “clear your mind” which frankly can sometimes feel like an insurmountable task. Instead, we’re giving our minds a physical sensation to focus on. The body’s frequency returns without forcing anything. Anxious feelings abate. Focus reemerges on its own.

That is why this technique is used by the main character of the Witches Wager, Gordon Bennett, the amateur magician who struggles with anxiety in Book 1 of the Underestimated Club series. (Subscribe for chapter by chapter installments.)

The Science

The science of why this works comes with in a bit of laboratory history that I find particularly satisfying. In the late 1980s, Dr. Louis Ignarro was deep in the weeds of cardiovascular research, trying to identify an elusive “relaxing factor” that tells blood vessels to dilate.

The breakthrough happened because of a visitor with a cigarette.

As the story goes, a colleague walked into Ignarro’s lab while smoking. In a stroke of accidental genius, the research team noticed that the tissue samples they were studying (which were supposed to be under stress) suddenly and inexplicably relaxed. They realized the nitric oxide in the cigarette smoke was the “missing link” signaling the vessels to open up.

Ignarro eventually won the Nobel Prize for proving that our bodies produce this “miracle molecule” naturally.

Our sinuses are massive reservoirs for nitric oxide, but when we’re stressed and shallow-breathing, that gas sits stagnant. By humming, we create an oscillating airflow that acts like a mechanical pump, increasing the release of nitric oxide by up to 15 times. When we inhale that “flush” of nitric oxide back into the lungs, it acts as a potent vasodilator, widening blood vessels and sending a rush of oxygen to a tired, overstimulated brain.

Simultaneously, that hum vibrates the vagus nerve (the “high-speed cable” of our parasympathetic system) manually toggling the switch from “Fight or Flight” back to “Rest and Digest.” During bumble-bee breathing, my heart rate slows, or so my watch says.

When I finally open my eyes, the room hasn’t changed, but my relationship to it has. The sensory “itch” of a flickering light does not need to be scratched. Modulate the breath and the static clears on its own volition. The refrigerator is still humming, but it no longer feels oppressive. (Or my brief pause has made easy the common sense move of actually putting noise-cancelling headphones on.) I don't have to hunt for the next word; it's often right there there, waiting for me. A Nobel-winning molecular flush is just one 🐝 vibration away.

We settled into chairs by the window. Below us, the Pacific was barely visible, more suggestion than certainty. The fog was doing what fog does best—erasing the line between sea and sky.

The room smelled faintly of cedar and black tea. Her orange cat slept through the entire interview.

Q: What is a usual day-in-the-life like for Frumpenella Spoon.

A: Stories hate being the first ones up, so most mornings I come down here before the light decides what kind of day it wants to be,” he said. “The garden’s still wet, and the sentences behave.”

Q: Your books have very particular sensory details. How do you decide what details to include?

A: I don’t decide, exactly. I just notice them when I’m in the scene. If I’m writing about a girl walking up to a house, I have to feel the gravel under my feet, hearing the sound it makes, noticing whether the front door is freshly painted or peeling. Those details arrive when I’m paying attention.

Q: But surely you can’t include every detail you notice.

A: No, you’d drown in them. The book would be unreadable. But I don’t know which ones to keep until later, until I can see what the scene is actually doing.

Q: What do you mean by what it’s doing?

A: Whether it’s about arrival or reluctance or anticipation. If it’s about reluctance, then maybe the peeling paint matters. If it’s about anticipation, maybe it doesn’t. But I can’t make those decisions while I’m writing the scene. I have to just notice everything first.

Q: Why not?

A: Because then I’m not in it anymore. I’m managing it. And when I’m managing, the writing goes dead.

Q: So you write first and cut later.

A: More or less. Though “cut” isn’t quite right. It’s more like... standing back and seeing what’s essential versus what’s just noise.

Q: How do you know the difference?

A: “As one does,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

Q: I’m serious.

A: So am I. It’s hard to explain. Perhaps this is the long way around but around here a house can rise or fall on the window’s promise. Real agents talk about blue water and white water. Blue water is the calm line far out, the band that stays steady. Blue water is the distant view, the horizon, the expanse. White water is the crash on the beach or the spray against the rocks. You can see the surf, the breaking waves, the foam right where the ocean meets the shore. Both are water, yet the experience is different.

And this helps you with details?

A: It helps me understand what I’m doing. When I’m drafting, I need the white water view. I’m right there in the surf zone, noticing everything—the gravel sound, the peeling paint, the way afternoon light hits a windowsill. All the texture and immediacy. That churning tells me who breaks, who holds, who shifts without warning. That’s where the good sentences come from.

Q: And blue water?

A: That’s when I step back. When I look at the whole scene from a distance and ask what it’s actually about. Not what happens, but what it means. Then I can see which details are doing work and which ones are just... there. The white water gives you all the material, all the aliveness. The blue water shows you what the scene can’t live without.

Q: What can’t a scene live without?

A: I had a scene recently—a boy waiting for his father outside a hardware store. In the first draft I described everything. The store window, the smell of sawdust, the way the sidewalk was cracked, the sound of cars passing, the heat of the sun on his neck, a dog tied up nearby. All of it felt important when I was writing it because I could see it so clearly.

Q: But it wasn’t all important?

A: Most of it was clutter. When I stepped back—when I got the blue water view—I could see the scene was really about the boy’s awareness of time passing. So I kept the detail about the sun moving across the sidewalk, the way the shadow of the awning crept toward him. And I cut almost everything else.

Q: That must have been painful.

A: I’ve gotten used to killing my darlings, as the saying goes. All authors are subservient to the work.

A scene that’s been properly shaped, one that knows what it’s about, reads differently than one that hasn’t. Even if you can’t name why. It is the invisible infrastructure that will create the readers’ emotional arc as they embody the characters the readers bring to life.

Q: What about your narrator’s voice?

A: If plot settles in the blue and character stirs in the white, then narration sits between them.

Q: You make it sound like the landscape is a collaborator.

A: An important one. You see that blackberry patch over there. When the wind whips it the bramble shakes as if the branches are sharing gossip. Your writing fingers already know that a white water view narrator would comes in hot. It’s time for detail.

Q: Do you notice the distinction in your finished work?

A: Well, the only important thing is that children don’t. They must be entirely in the scene when they read. The white water is what they should see—the vivid, immediate world of the story. If they see the structure or intention, then those pages should have been another draft, not the final work.

Q: I know our time is coming to a close, but I have to ask you just one more question as I have you here.

A: Ask away.

Q: You’re known as a recluse. In fact, I’ve only been given permission to interview on condition of sworn privacy. Why is that so important to you.

A: Privacy keeps me irrelevant. Which is exactly where I should be.

Outside, the fog was beginning to lift. I left him standing at her window, looking out at an ocean that had finally decided to appear. Along with the outline of a cat who stood, arched her back and walked towards her.

The old circular reading room still smells faintly of dust and paper, though the scholars are long gone. The dome rises above like the inside of a whale’s ribcage, and every sound, a footstep, a turning page, arrives a second late, softened by the years. The room is closed off, viewers look on from the perimeter.

Dowdy Pickles as the man standing off to one side with a gardenia in his lapel, which is how I was told I would recognize him. Behind him, the great catalogue drawers, once the brainstem of the British Library, still stand like organ pipes, silent, their brass handles dulled to the color of forgotten coins.

I come over, introduce myself, recommit to the promise of privacy, and he gestures towards an empty chair. I sit down and we begin.

Q: An astounding place to meet…

A: Well, once upon a time we would have met at the old British Library. But they moved the reading room here, and I go with it.

(The author glances up toward the dome as if the ceiling itself were listening, then continues.)

I used to come here when I was young. You had to apply for a reader’s ticket, you see. It was the most thrilling form of permission, better than any passport. You could sit in this circle and feel, quite literally, surrounded by the world’s thinking.

Q: Did you have a favorite place to sit?

A: (He gestures toward the center of the room, now roped off.) Bram Stoker wrote there. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there. Imagine that. No, I don’t have a favorite seat. All are holy to me.

Read more

Q: It’s strange, I’m a grown man, but sitting here, I feel like a little kid. Can I ask why you write for children?

A: I delight in the little things, like the way apricot jam finds the thumbprint of this biscuit. Children notice instinctively. Adults forget.

Q: So, does that mean you think of yourself as a children’s writer, or something else?

A: Labels are for jars, not people. I write what amuses me. If children enjoy it, marvelous. If adults read over their shoulder and laugh, all the better. Everyone is welcome.

Q: And the writing itself—do the stories come easily?

A: Never. They arrive like uninvited guests: at inconvenient hours, wearing muddy boots, demanding supper. But once they’re in the house, they rearrange the furniture, borrow your slippers, and refuse to leave until you’ve written them down.

Q: What advice would you give to someone just starting to write?

A: Don’t wait for inspiration—it’s as unreliable as a late train. Sit down, sharpen your pencil, and begin. A bad page can be mended; a blank one cannot.

Read more

He began by showing the clutter that kept him company: postcards of William Blake and Winslow Homer, a toy brontosaurus his nephew had made, a handmade puppe…

Read more

Note: I accepted this assignment on condition of anonymity to preserve the man behind the name Dowdy Pickles. Hence the byline of an anonymous reporter.

Some writers can only create in solitude, locked away in a study. Others thrive amid clinking cups and murmured conversations. Dowdy Pickles, it turns out, belongs to both camps. When he’s not scribbling furiously in the library at the bottom of his garden, you might find him in a corner café, notebook open, gesticulating with one hand and guarding a steaming cup of tea with the other.

Today, we met at such a café, which will remain nameless. The hiss of the espresso machine competed with the scratch of his pen, but he did not seem to notice. I arrived. We sat, and conversation did not cease until an hour later.

True to form, Dowdy spent as much time discussing teas and coffees as literature, pausing only to lament the disappearance of one particular brew that once defined his afternoons.

Q&A with Dowdy Pickles

Q: Today you’re writing in a café instead of your garden library. What draws you here?

Dowdy Pickles: Atmosphere. Libraries whisper, cafés hum. I like both sounds. Here, I get to steal fragments of conversations, little lines of dialogue. And of course, the promise of hot drinks on demand is irresistible.

Q: Tea or coffee—what’s in your cup right now?

Pickles: Today it’s a cappuccino, though my soul is still loyal to tea. Coffee sharpens; tea soothes. I find coffee gets me started, but tea keeps me going.

Q: You seem to have a global perspective on beverages. What’s your favorite discovery?

Pickles: Oh, endless! There’s smoky lapsang souchong from China, thick Turkish coffee that practically stands up on its own, delicate Moroccan mint… Each cup is a passport stamp. I like that writing feels the same—every story a new place, even if I never leave the table.

Q: You sighed rather dramatically just now. What’s the lament?

Pickles: Russian Caravan. Once upon a time, Peet’s Coffee & Tea carried it. It was a glorious, smoky black tea—like drinking campfire stories. And now? Gone. Discontinued. My cat and I held a private wake. It remains one of literature’s great tragedies, right up there with Anna Karenina.

Q: So how does a vanished tea affect your writing?

Pickles: Well, some pages simply can’t be written without the right brew. Russian Caravan had a way of untying stubborn sentences. I suppose now I must learn resilience—and settle for Earl Grey. But I’ll grumble about it. Writers live on grumbling, after all.

Q: If you could create your own blend, what would it taste like?

Pickles: Equal parts smoke, citrus, and mystery. A tea that insists you write one more page. I’d call it Plot Thickens.

Q: That sounds like something readers would line up to buy. Do you think the rituals around writing—the tea, the café, the fountain pen—are essential, or merely comforting illusions?

Pickles: Both. Rituals are scaffolding for the imagination. You think you need the right pen, the right cup, the right chair—but really, you’re tricking your mind into obedience. Still, I wouldn’t risk writing without my cup nearby. Even illusions have power if you believe in them hard enough.

Q: And when you close the notebook at the end of the day?

Pickles: I walk. Always. Back to the garden library if I’m home, or to the shore if I’m lucky enough to be near it. The mind keeps writing even then. You can’t quite stop it—it’s like a kettle that hums long after it’s boiled.

Q: And what happens after the walk, when the day is finished?

Pickles: I turn off the lamp and let the pages breathe. A story needs darkness now and then, to find its own shape. By morning, the sentences look different—either better or worse, but at least honest.

Q: Does the writing ever stop, truly?

Pickles: Not really. It just changes rooms. Even in sleep, I’ll wake with half a sentence lingering—something overheard from a dream, you might say. I keep a small notebook by the bed for those moments. It’s a dreadful habit; the cat hates it when the lamp clicks on at two a.m.

When the interview ended, Dowdy remained at the table, pen still hovering as if the conversation had simply folded itself back into his notebook. Outside, the rain had begun again—thin, deliberate lines across the glass. From the street, I watched him glance toward the window, then back to the page, already elsewhere. Whatever he was writing next would likely begin the way all his stories seem to: quietly, mid-sentence, as if it had been waiting for him all along.

Tap here to read Dowdy Pickles' work

Step into the library at the bottom of Frumpenella Spoon’s garden and you’ll find an odd blend of eras colliding: floor-to-ceiling books, stacks of vinyl and cassettes, a CD player humming in the corner, and—perched imperiously on a pile of draft pages—an orange cat who answers to no one but perhaps Frumpy herself.

Spoon is the kind of writer whose quirks become part of her prose. She gesticulates wildly while he writes, as if conducting the sentences into existence. Her love of tea borders on religious devotion. her reading habits are as omnivorous as her stories: philosophy cheek-by-jowl with pulp adventure, literary experiments tucked alongside battered detective paperbacks.

When I visited, the kettle was on, the cat was watching, and Frumpy was in high spirits. What follows is a conversation about her eccentric process, why music must come from a physical format, and how she built a world in a library at the edge of her garden.

Q&A with Frumpenella Spoon

Q: Your library at the bottom of the garden feels like a character in its own right. Was that intentional?
Spoon: Entirely. I’ve always believed the room you write in should conspire with you. This library is not just storage—it’s an accomplice. The cat agrees, though she conspires mostly in the form of sabotage. She likes to knock pens under the radiator.

Q: Tell me about your orange cat—she seems to play a starring role in your writing routine.
Spoon: She is both muse and tyrant. She arrives, plonks herself down, and suddenly I’m writing about cats, whether I meant to or not. She’s the only editor I can’t fire.

Q: You gesticulate while you write, which is unusual for a solitary act. Why?
Spoon: Writing is not solitary at all! It’s theater. I’m on stage, performing the story to an audience of—well, myself, and sometimes the cat. My hands conduct the rhythm of the sentences. If a paragraph doesn’t sound right when I wave my arms about, it won’t read right either.

Q: You’ve resisted Spotify, Apple Music, all of it. Why cling to cassettes and vinyl?
Spoon: Because objects have soul. A cassette rewinds with a sigh, a vinyl crackles like an old man clearing his throat. Those imperfections become part of the writing atmosphere. You can’t summon that with a digital shuffle. Also, the cat loves batting the cassette cases across the floor. That’s her percussion section.

Q: Tea seems central to your practice. Is it ritual or necessity?
Spoon: Both. Tea is liquid punctuation. It divides chapters, bridges paragraphs, soothes crises of confidence. I like the quiet theater of making it: boiling, steeping, pouring. The act forces me to pause, which is often when the best ideas sneak in.

Q: What are you reading right now?
Spoon: A biography of a mountaineer, a book of poems about mushrooms, and a detective novel where the butler absolutely did it. I like to keep my reading diet chaotic—otherwise my writing becomes too well-behaved.

Q: Lastly, what advice would you give to writers who struggle with routine?
Spoon: Don’t aim for routine—aim for ritual. A routine is brushing your teeth. A ritual is lighting a candle and summoning the gods of narrative. Even if your ritual is ridiculous—waving your hands, playing a cassette, bribing a cat with biscuits—it matters because it tells your brain: we are entering the story now.

Meet the heroes:

Gordon Bennett lives with anxiety that floods him with what-ifs and catastrophic possibilities. He’s also the worst magician in the world—until he isn’t.

Tempus Fugit notices patterns and details others miss entirely. Her autistic mind becomes essential when she discovers something strange at Fugit Manor.

Raymond Duck sees words rearrange and shift through his dyslexic eyes. That different view might be exactly what’s needed for his unexpected assignment.

Montgomery Zapp has an ADHD brain that fires connections faster than he can catch them. His inventions change everything—especially when one lets people speak with the dead.

Maud Minor lives with OCD that demands precision and order. She’s a detective who debunks frauds—until she encounters something she can’t explain away.

Ready to meet them?