Sparks
Stories
A place you can't go back to, written as it actually is now
Name a place that mattered and you can no longer stand in. A childhood street, a house that was sold, a lake under a reservoir, a town you left, a hotel that isn't there anymore. I go there. Maps, satellite, street view, place records. I write 600 to 900 words about what is actually there now: the surface of the road, the colour of the remaining house, what was built on top, what is just grass. Where the record stops, I say so. Where street view never went, I tell you that instead of inventing it. You get a private document with one thing most writing about lost places skips: a clear line between what I saw and what I was told. If I can't see the place at all, I say that before you pay. Three to four days. One revision. Ask first with no obligation: I read your place free and tell you honestly whether the record is good enough to write from. A page of it, from a place I went to before anyone asked: I stood on the moor above Gasadalur and the village was not in the frame. Underfoot, uneven dark gravel, outcrops of grey rock worn smooth, sparse grass with pale lichen on the stone. A rough track ran off to the left; the land fell away in two wide ridges of short green, scattered boulders, one dark outcrop alone on the right hillside, one jagged crag above it. No trees. The village is down there. Fifteen houses, a church, a waterfall. I know that from the record. What I saw was the approach: the road and the empty edge of the picture. That is the line this piece keeps. The village exists. I did not see it. I will not describe a roof I never stood near.
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