I woke up as the survivor of a major and unexpected brain tumour. After a decade of migraines and mysterious body pains this white, placental presence had been seated over my left frontal lobe. Everything I thought I knew about my life, how my brain and senses works, changed. A new biography seems to lie beyond this interruption of an event, an as yet unshaped terrain that draws inspiration from everything that happened before, but is not of it. Before this happened there were numerous things doctors accused me of, including painkiller seeking, and that there was nothing physically, only psychologically, wrong with me. This helped me to arrive fresh-faced and confused at emergency, as I agreed to what my neurosurgeons said needed to be done, and the 10-15 percent chance of a disastrous outcome. I agreed to the chance of being brain damaged, of the up to fifteen bags of donor blood I would possibly receive, mainly because I have a precious family at home to whom I owe so much and I live my life in service to. I let myself fall, and numerous skilled surgeons, nurses, and occult practitioners around the world joined hands to uphold me. Though the memories are confused I sensed so many people with me during those days. Both in the arcane sense, and in the familiar sense, I have discovered how much I mean to a great variety of people.
Lee Morgan
"I am a teller of stories, a weaver of dreams. I can dance, sing and in the right weather, I can stand on my head. I know seven words of latin, I have a little magic and a trick or two. I know the proper way to meet a dragon. I can fight dirty but not fair. I once swallowed 30 oysters in a minute. I am not domestic. I am a luxury and in that sense, necessary."
-The Storyteller
The strange thing about being asked to put together a writer's bio is that we writers don't have a normal history, we have a biography of longing.
We aren't born with a nationality based on geography, we are defined by the flavour of their hiraeth (Welsh for an ineffable sadness for a country, imagined or real, that they feel exiled from). We don't have parents, instead other writers and thinkers are our parents. We come alive one day, from between the pages of someone else's book, a turn of phrase begins our gestation. Our life becomes a conversation through the two-way mirror of text, between the cemetery-rich fabrics of the living and the dead. Eventually the newborn learns to speak back ( after about two years of silence and listening, just as with children) during this time the reader-embryo is born as a writer. Do the parent texts speak back afterwards? The ghost voices from the mother book, or the father poem? Oh yes all the time, in waves of significance traced subtly through the style and vocal rhythms of their child. In this way, among many others, the dead live on. ‘A biography of Longing
‘The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes undone by a smell. a word, a place, the photo of a mountain of shoes. By love that closes its mouth before calling a name.’
-Anne Michaels
If you ask me for a biography I will give you one of my longing. That’s all my magic really is, art that spills over and out into everyday life. Thus I have played the devil at the crossroads, and I assume, by my current survival, that I have won. Perhaps this is just its own form of madness, the true underlying, green fertility of creation that the modern world has been so embarrassed by? We, as an era cannot see ahead, we can neither drink, nor think, ahead, to what is waiting, but maybe sometimes we can write or read ahead.
A spirit torque, a shadow past
The True Hungers
A witch is born out of the true hungers of her time… The things that are most wrong here summoned me.’
-Ray Bradbury
These experiences hovering around the mouth of death and mental struggle, over twenty-five years of teaching witchcraft, and being taught it, has given me a pocket full of odd rocks, some stories to tell, and some key observations. Come and sit beside my hearth and let me pass down some stories. Along the way I hope to help you find your true hunger, and maybe a trick or two about how to track it, hunt it down, wrestle it, and whether you win the wrestle or appear to lose, you are sure to learn a lot.
Please Join Me At My Fireside
[All writing on this website copy wright to Lee Morgan unless stated otherwise 2023