Writer's Travel Scholarship

Among other things, Equivocality is the home of the Writer's Travel Scholarship, a yearly short-form writing contest. The winner gets a round-trip ticket to anywhere in the world. Submissions for the 2009 contest will be accepted starting in January. Meanwhile...

Start Here

Short Fiction: The Book Of Michelle.

Journalism about Africa: One Hungry Village.

Explosions as Art:Countdown of the Insane and Talented.

Latest Ramblings

Writing about Curiosity

Friday, January 2nd, 2009

Every writer wonders what they’re writing about. The only way I’ve ever found to know is to look back a little at what’s come out of my keyboard and see if there’s a theme. So I did this, and I think I’ve been writing about wonder. This is a haiku from Dec 12th

I just edited the
wikipedia page for
curiosity

I did too. Curiosity fascinates me. The wikipedia entry noted that it is “the fuel that drives science”, but I felt that was unfair. As if science is the only thing we want to know! I had to add that curiosity is the thing that makes us want to know anything at all; perhaps it’s an external form of creativity. In the past few months I’ve been writing about it a lot.

modern romance

Saturday, November 1st, 2008

i gave you the wifi
password. no toothbrush yet
but it starts like this

A Coin That Is A Die

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

I want a coin that is a die
there are no two-
sided dies
which is terrible for
when I have to answer for
a yes or no question

Sahara Himalaya

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

I’ve finally imported all of my (10,000 odd) travel photos into Lightroom and I’m starting to organize, tag, color correct, and most importantly of all, select which ones I want to assemble for a show. At a remove of months or years, I’m definitely seeing new aspects to my work. Even more fun, I’m begging to see previously unexpected correspondences between them, such as this one:


Sahara Himalaya

click for big version

I’ve always understood that photographs can be related visually, such as by form, texture, or color. I’ve also know that photographs could be related by theme, or tell a story. What hadn’t occurred to me until recently is that images could also be connected by the emotion they inspired in me. I love how understanding communication is a never-ending process…

Quiet Night On Mars

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

If I got the offer I would go instantly. I’d pack up everything and nothing and leave next week, or probably tomorrow. Even if I could never come back. Maybe especially if I couldn’t. I want to see the Solar System that badly.

Yeah, the technology, the adventure, the leap into the unknown is exciting. But I’ve always imagined turning off my radio at the end of the day, unplugging from Earth and having the cold planet all to myself for a little while in the dusk light. Boots crunching on the dry-ice frost, I’d sit down a rock and look at the sky.


Dust in the night-time martian sky.

And probably see something like this NASA video of drifting dust in the night-time Martian sky.

These images make me suddenly lonely, happy, and hopelessly yearning all at once.

Actually Joining The Circus: A Rhapsody on Sucking

Monday, July 28th, 2008

What I do in my Wednesday and Friday morning aerial class is mostly sucking. These are the sort of classes you take if you want to be an aerialist, a trapeze artist or something. Accordingly, my Russian instructor has made me hurt. She’s thoroughly professional, but isn’t known for being warmhearted or encouraging.

This would be easier if I wasn’t usually good at things. In fact, it was many years before I got bad at anything. When I went to university, I even made the lucky decision to study something I already knew something about. There were always these kids in the back of the class going, “wait… what??” but I was never one of them. In fact I didn’t even understand such people. I mean, how could you sit through class after class and never, you know, bother to work out what the fuck we were all talking about?

I know better now. In circus school I sit at the back of the class.

New Blog: JonathanStray.com

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

When I began Equivocality in 2005, I didn’t know what I was doing, just that I wanted to publicly share some of my writing. A lot of things have happened since then; I went traveling (again), I started the Writer’s Travel Scholarship, I began to write fiction. Equivocality has become a sort of scrapbook of my attempts to communicate. I really enjoy the fact that I can put anything here, that I am free to experiment with different forms — prose, poetry, photography.

But it’s surely not to everyone’s taste. It’s too much about me. (Also, no one can spell it!)

That’s why I have begun another writing project. More of a standard blog, with more frequent updates. Something you can add to your reader, something that most curious people will hopefully find interesting. It’s taken me a few weeks to find my footing, to figure out what it’s actually about, but I think I’m seeing a pattern in the things I want to write about.

Oh Calculus!

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

eyes summing over
when will you take my measure?
please integrate me

Heartbeat

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump-thump.
… !
Bang.
Ka-thump.
Ka-thump.
It’s an instant of, not fear exactly, but something that dissipates like a wave through your body. Your heart is still beating. It was just an ectopic beat, probably a PVC. Happens all the time, even in perfectly healthy hearts. Relax.
This is walking down the street, mind you, so you […]

Interesting Thought of the Day: The Galactic Internet is Out There

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

No, but what if? What if we’ve been going about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence all wrong? Why do we expect anyone anywhere to be sending messages to a random little yellow dwarf star? I think no one’s sending us messages for the same reason that we’re not sending any messages to them: it’s ridiculous to expect that someone could be listening, in just the right place at just the right time on just the right frequency.

Instead, I started thinking about the problem of interstellar communication the other way around. I just assumed that a network of technological civilizations already exists, and asked what the protocol would be for connecting to it.