Later this year, a Ravenser Odd exhibition will be shared at Cleethorpes and Grimsby, not far from where the ill-fated island was situated. Last year, I was delighted to chat with Emily, whose PhD has been instrumental in the research and promotion of Yorkshire's Atlantis, and we talked about how the island had inspired this story, adding to the cultural evolution of the legend of of Ravenser Odd. It's a long read, but I hope you enjoy it... Ravenser Odd I had lived all of my fifteen years in Ravenser Odd. In my earliest memories it had been a busy town, the docks lined with ships of all sizes, carrying garments and foods from the mystical continent beyond the mouth of the Humber. Then, aboard one of those ships, arrived the plague. Forced to anchor at the toll on the peninsula, the ship had paid a deadly tax upon Ravenser Odd, carrying away half its population on the riptide of the Black Death. When the low-lying land had flooded, forcing out many of the surviving inhabi...
For today's #HistFicThursdays blog, I'm delighted to be sharing this flash fiction piece from Judith. Set in the realm of magical realism, this is a story of Ancient Greece... The Mermaid of the Aegean Thessalonike’s sigh as she awakens becomes the wind upon the waves, spiralling over the deep. The foam is her hair: the curls she inherited from her father… she still feels the water which washed them, trickling from the flask. She had laughed at how it tickled her scalp and ran into her ears as her brother poured it onto her head, his own curls bent over hers in devoted concentration. It was that memory which had propelled her from the earth and into the sea when word came of his death, casting herself into the ocean to escape a world without him. Yet she had awoken from sleep not death, her body and soul still united in the deep… and the enduring significance of that flask excruciatingly clear. Her wrath at him for destroying her death split the sea into grey ribbons, and her s...