Alice's Derives in Devonshire

Phil Smith author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Triarchy Press

Published:1st Dec '14

Should be back in stock very soon

Alice's Derives in Devonshire cover

Phil Smith, author of Mythogeography, On Walking and the Counter-Tourism books, member of Exeter-based Wrights & Sites, well-known as Crabman, drifter and walker/performer and prolific playwright has written a modern fairy tale. It embodies his fascination with the inner and outer possibilities that offer themselves up to us when we walk, think and experience our surroundings on many levels at the same time - public and the private, fact and dream, admissible and inadmissible, forgotten and remembered, past and future. This is mythogeography. Anyone can do it. You can do it. Alice does it. Alice's D rives in Devonshirefollows a nine-year-old girl (Alice) as she walks her way into the layered and muddy underbelly of Devonshire, urban and rural. Her Dad, though a fireman, occupies a world-of-dream somewhere between here and madness and inspires her exquisitely chronicled wanderings. Her mum, though a 'cynical cyclist' who looks after people who are ill in their minds, occupies a world-of-fact where the cooking gets done and the ladder to the loft is always pulled up for safety. As her Dad disappears into a sort of derangement, Alice sets out to look for him, first with Mandy and her brother and a list of ideas, then later, she has to set out on foot on her own, into the hill, into the underchalk, to find Wally Eager and Mister Binns and the Merry Men. Just as magical realism capsized 20th-century fiction, mythogeography turns inside out the ways in which we perceive our-possible-selves-in-the-world. This is the first mythogeographical novel.. It's intended for urban explorers, imaginative walkers, ambulant youngsters, drifters, mythogeographers, psychogeographers, situationists, and all the restless.

From The Foreword by Bradley L. Garrett (place hacker and author of Explore Everything: "In Alice's Derives, Phil Smith captures the wonder of childhood imaginations and reminds us of the importance of continuing to embrace desire, letting it play out through our imaginations. Phil reminds us of the continuing importance of transforming spaces into places. Alice and her friends encounter a world that seems at the same time completely familiar and bizarrely bleary-eyed; they are adept explorers of the everyday, finding the impossible all around them. In transporting us to this world from the perspective of a curious nine-year-old girl, Phil also reminds us that those experiences carry with them a hidden danger, the reason why we fear that rudderless lot: the wonders of the everyday waiting to be found are so tantalizing, so satisfying, that we may never emerge from them. This of course is what many of us are embarrassed to admit in adulthood - the compulsion to run away, to escape, never wholly vanished, we just suppressed it out of supposed necessity."

ISBN: 9781909470392

Dimensions: 203mm x 127mm x 10mm

Weight: unknown

216 pages

2nd edition