I’m Stephen Fender. I live in the North Pennines in an old stone cottage that used to be a reading-room for lead miners. The hills around the cottage are populated by sheep, grouse and heather. Much of what I write is autobiographical. As all as I add is a pinch of magic.

For some time now, I’ve been drawn to epistolary novels. Collections of letters, diary entries, and stray documents that seem to resist being called novels at all. There’s something trustworthy in their deception. A letter admits its angle. A diary wears its bias openly. Truth doesn’t announce itself from a podium. It hides in the margins of what we actually write, quiet and unhurried, like a fieldmouse in long grass.

What we write are fermented moments of experience – left to age in the cellar of memory until they’re ready to be uncorked, examined, and occasionally misunderstood.

The absurd interests me too. Not absurdity for its own sake, but the absurd as a way of seeing. Reality is strange enough without embellishment. A dentist playing Beethoven. A stuffed Victorian. A clock with arthritis. These small misalignments reveal more than realism ever could.

The Resurrectory is a record of these preoccupations. It takes the form of a diary. Whether it can become a novel remains to be seen. Each entry is a moment preserved, distorted, and kept. Truthful, perhaps, in its fiction.

A Note on Authorship

All writing published here is original work by me and forms part of an ongoing creative project. While the photographs that accompany entries are generated using image tools, the words, characters, and world of The Resurrectory are entirely my own.