Uncommon Tapestries: Introduction
Uncommon Tapestries: Introduction
Scenes of desire, fear, history, current event, myth, legend, fable, poetry, charm, and story intermingle freely here threaded by fate and the strings of will.
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A Note to Subscribers
About Uncommon Tapestries
Uncommon Tapestries is an imaginative engagement with the textures of life and possibility meant to enhance perception of beauty but not at all intended as a reality escape. The idea for this project came to me before the 2024 US election result, but the 2024 US election result and subsequent global and local current events as they emerge will contribute to the unfolding work in intrinsic ways.
Uncommon Tapestries is a work of fiction. It opens the moment eyes land at the top of this page where it immediately begins to interact with realities beyond its borders.
About a month ago, the Narrator1 received an invitation that they could not refuse as follows:
The Invitation
You have been invited by the Caretaker to participate in an on-going study of Uncommon Tapestries on display in The Castle of Angers located in the heart of Old Town at The Confluence of Three Rivers2. It is our hope that you might bring your experience and insight to the curious characters of the tapestries now within our collection and also to the strange objects therein and the scenes that they depict. Your perceptions, should you accept our invitation, will inform and shape the scene descriptions presented in our Visitor Guide as well as the gift book which will go on sale later this year in the castle gift shop for interested parties. Your work on both these items will be compensated as recently made possible by a generous grant from The National Endowment for the Humanities3.
[The Fine Print] These tapestries are rumoured to be woven with modern prayers and ancient curses. They feature gods and goddesses, familiar and mythical places, celebrated and fabricated people, the living and the dead. Each one is said to be a love spell, but we are unsure what exactly this may mean. All viewers enter the gallery at their own risk and ticket purchases indicate patron agreement to take full responsibility for their own perceptions and subsequent actions.
The Schedule
As the Narrator, you will have unlimited access to the tapestries during open hours, closed hours, and off-season. On-site living accommodations can be arranged should you wish to live within the castle for further ease of access during the study. Your updates to the companion guides for visitors4 are to take place two to four times per month, preferably on Fridays but there is some built in flexibility here should you require it.
Community Engagement
The exhibit is open to the public throughout the developmental stages of the companion guides, and you, as the Narrator, are encouraged to interact with visitors that their input might guide your direction and enhance your contributions.
More About Uncommon Tapestries
A Note to Subscribers
Every time Uncommon Tapestries is updated, subscribers will receive a copy in their inboxes. Each episode will be between 700 and 2,000 words. The first season, that is to say, the first tapestry, will be made up of 15 scenes, also called episodes. Upon conclusion, these 15 episodes—plus bonus material and any censored scenes—will make up the body of the first book in the Uncommon Tapestries series thereby becoming the chapters within it.
If you have subscribed to my nonfiction Substack publication, Spirit Roads, you will automatically be subscribed to the fiction sub-section, Uncommon Tapestries. Should you wish to only subscribe to one of these publications and not the other, you can do that from the “manage my subscriptions” tab.
Acknowledgements
They say the way becomes clear as we walk it, and that is certainly true for me as the bones of this project fall into place. The work is experimental and speculative in nature, but it is not without predecessors, and I want to acknowledge the literary influences that have contributed to the core of creativity out of which I will write the Uncommon Tapestries series. First, for its early explorations in gender-shifting, I recognize Orlando: A Biography5 by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), English novelist consistently writing ahead of her time and known for her daring use of the modernist stream of consciousness narrative method. Both Invisible Cities6 and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler7 by word-wizard Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Italian writer and journalist, are sources of endless inspiration. Always Coming Home8 by Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), US American speculative sci-fi and fantasy novelist, provides instructive world-building insight through anthropological attention to detail in poem, song, fictive myth, and the creation of realistic biographical information on imaginary characters. House of Leaves9 by Mark Z. Danielewski (2000), US American postmodern satire and horror novelist, can be understood as the source for the now replicating zest for footnotes found within my fiction and poetry. And the Apocalypse Tapestry10 as well as the Unicorn Tapestries11 both provide invaluable and inciting visual stimulus for the scope and scale of this work. Finally, my deep respect to the centuries long—at times honored and celebrated, at times mocked and reviled—tradition of Tarot12 in all its many iterations together with its many off-shoots from simple card games to an array of divinatory tools. I extend my most heartfelt thanks to these artists and visionaries and to the many writers who have hearkened the muse’s terrifying, but most thrilling, call to creative experimentation.
The Narrator, Alexa St. James, is the first character encountered by readers in Uncommon Tapestries.
The castle at the confluence of three rivers is modelled on the Château d'Angers in the Loire Valley in France which houses the Apocalypse Tapestry, a set of six medieval tapestries consisting of 90 scenes. Angers, however, is pronounced with a US American or British English accent, significantly altering the meaning conveyed through the word.
The National Endowment for the Humanities is a real funding agency but the grant award mentioned here is entirely fabricated.
Uncommon Tapestries subscribers will receive two to four episodes per month.
Virginia Woolf. Orlando: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1928.
Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities. [Not an affiliate link.] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1978.
Italo Calvino. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. [Not an affiliate link.] Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1981.
Ursula K. Le Guin. Always Coming Home. [Not an affiliate link.] UP California, 2001.
Mark Z. Danielewski. House of Leaves. [Not an affiliate link.] Pantheon, 2000.
The Apocalypse Tapestry is a set of six medieval tapestries that feature allegorical scenes from the Book of Revelation.
The Unicorn Tapestries are a series of seven millefleurs (literally thousand flowers) medieval tapestries that feature a series of allegorical scenes that make up the tale of The Hunt of the Unicorn.