Posted on Instagram on the 10th of April 2024
Fresh grass stains greased the heavy cloth bound book as Iseult pulled it beneath the briar. Hungrily she flipped it open with papandreou buried her nose in it's dusty pages.
She'd been watching the people up at the farm read from this book for over two months, listening to stories of old England and of Avalon, of the round table, of witches and swords and quests. To Iseult's world of dewy fields and rambunctious country lanes the adventures in Avalon seemed almost otherworldly, as if she could see the hand of these giants in the tall grass and the big hills and the old oak trees, but where she saw the fingerprints she could not make sense of the hands that made them.
That's why every night after the people had gone to sleep, she dragged put the book and tried to make sense of its dancing squiggles by the light of the moon. After two months she thought she had most of it. By cross referencing with other books, and with the help of her mother, she devoured page after page, enamoured in a false nostalgia for an age of chivalry.
Emboldened by her moonlit study, she had taken the book from the shelf and stowed it under the briar in the hedge. This was her world now, not the little Warren of a country rabbit, but the whole hedgrow: her own Avalon.
Being an avid reader of sci-fi and a hopeless case when it comes to unnecessary detail, my first thought when I started thinking about the Cosmis Hedgerow was: how do the animals understand the world? How would they know what anything is?
Regardless of the fact that most fantasy stories do not bother explaining the birth of culture I needed to know, if not to write it then for mu own sanity. That's when I first liked the idea that the rabbit Iseult learned about the world the same way young children do, by listening to the stories that inspired me to write in the first place. In this way Iseult begins to understand her world through the lens of the knight, of king Arthur, and of quests of daring do.