THE WHITE HERON BENEATH THE REACTOR

A fully illustrated 64-page hardback book about Dungeness, white egrets, climate change, Europe and apocalypse. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES.

White herons. Nuclear power. The desert of the south-east.

Gary Budden, a lifelong bird-lover, returned to Dungeness in Kent – famous for its shingle desert, its nuclear power station, and Derek Jarman’s cottage – in the autumn of 2018 on a bird-watching trip. In the car park of the RSPB reserve, he watched greenfinches on a bird-feeder for the first time in several years – birds once commonplace, now under threat of extinction.

Entering the reserve, he saw the bird he had come to see: the great white egret, a towering white heron among the reeds, visible to the naked eye even from afar. Common on mainland Europe, but, a rarity and a source of excitement in the United Kingdom. Until now.  

As part of Kickstarter's Make 100 initiative, and working with renowned landscape artist Maxim Griffin, The White Heron Beneath the Reactor is an illustrated landscape punk essay exploring the bleak, otherworldly and captivating landscapes of Dungeness, the effects of climate change and a warming world, our relationship with continental Europe, and the looming fear of apocalypse.

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The author and artist have collaborated on a number of previous projects (such as Heaven is a Marsh in Winter), as well as continuing their ongoing solo investigations into the strangeness of the British landscape. They like working together and seeing how words and images can work together; how collaboration produces something unique that neither individual would have produced. 

Inspired by their favourite limited releases from obscure punk, psychedelic and folk labels, and the lavishly produced, extremely limited weird fiction books they covet, Gary and Maxim decided to create something similar. The Make 100 initiative seemed perfect for what they wanted to create. The White Heron Beneath the Reactor is a poetic interrogation of place and landscape in the current political climate; it is also a beautifully produced collector's item for the bibliophile in all of us. 

The book is LIMITED TO 100 hardback copies, with full colour illustrations.

With your help, we make this book a reality.  

Pledge here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1194866830/make-100-the-white-heron-beneath-the-reactor

HOW TO USE PLACE AND SETTING IN YOUR FICTION

February 12th 2019, I am running a workshop at the Idea Store in Whitechapel – HOW TO USE PLACE AND SETTING IN YOUR FICTION. All the information can be found here: https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk/events/how-to-use-place-and-setting-in-your-fiction-with-gary-budden/

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ABOUT THE EVENT

In this two-hour workshop the author of Hollow Shores, Gary Budden, will talk you through how to maximise the locations you use to set your fictions in, discussing what role the landscapes – rural, suburban and urban – play in the stories we tell and how they affect the narrative.

Looking at key examples in fiction followed by writing exercises, this session will give you the tools to you make the most of your setting, be it an evocative background or the central driver of your narrative.

ENFIELD TOWN IN THE MIST AS THE ASPHODEL MEADOWS

A meadow of endless asphodel flowers, a plant ghostly and pale itself. And if that sounds harsh I don’t mean it to be because it’s more about atmosphere and the mood and the vibe that this weather creates than anything else, and anyway, I would be destined for the Asphodel Meadows myself. A strange nowhere land (never say liminal) between one thing and the other is a kind of heaven itself.

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