fiction

Episode 3 The Reluctant Pilgrim

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Top Withens, reputed site of Wuthering Heights (Brontë, 1847), photograph by Samuel Vale, Executive Producer and Director of Photography

The ice on the path snapped, crackled and splintered underneath the soles of their walking boots. The ground was frozen solid. She felt as though she were walking with two blocks of ice strapped to her feet. She could feel the ground in her knees. The sound of her boots walking on frozen ground was like the crunching of bones. The chill of the wind sweeping across the moors caused her teeth to chatter in her head like a pair of castanets. Emily writes, she writes: “I lingered under that benign sky watched the moths fluttering among the heather and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass”. I remembered there is a spot mid barren hills where winter howls still, bringing a chill to the marrow.

By this time her toes were numb and every step was agony, her boots were rather too small, she made a reluctant pilgrim. She had lost track of time by stopping to take photographs on the way but photographs of what exactly? A seemingly vast, empty and undifferentiated landscape that she experienced as a rupture or a disjunction. The landscape was not easy to assimilate. it remained resolute and other. She was in the middle of it but couldn’t get into it, so she remained steadfastly on it for the duration of the walk. Time and space expanded in multiple directions on the Moors like the ripples on a pond. Three hours of walking felt like three years of living. The closer they got to Top Withens the further away it seemed to. Be. For an age it remained a tiny speck on the horizon.

He disappeared over a mound and briefly she found herself alone with naught but a wuthering wind whistling around her eardrums and flapping against her face. How exactly was she to report any of this back to George? She was famished.

On the 18th of May 1893, Top Withens was struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Holes were made in the wall, the roof was partially torn off, flags were cracked, and around 30 windows were almost completely removed. A portion of slate was thrown far from the house by the wind, and in the kitchen the blade of a knife had been fused by the heat.

Overview of Practice

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This research is grounded in an interdisciplinary, practice-led approach that stages chorography as both methodology and mode of inquiry, privileging process, embodiment, and creative experimentation. In practice, this approach is realised through a body of work spanning moving-image, photography, installation, site-specific intervention, and performance writing, all situated at the intersection of embodied fieldwork, archival play, and speculative narrative. Through these forms, I interrogate how archival fragments, textual, visual, and artefactual, can be (re)collected, reinterpreted, and reanimated via sensory gestures, narrative slippage, and acts of embodied citation. Central to this practice is the activation of dramatis personae who act as narrative interlocutors, structuring devices and speculative figures that enable a slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. These rhetorical figures operate as explorers, (mis)guides, and mnemonic surrogates, enabling a mode of fieldwork that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. Through them, the archive becomes a vehicle of resonance, resistance, and reimagination, staging historiographic instability and opening up space in the archive for embodied speculation, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded. In doing so, my work reframes the archive not as a static repository but as a haunted, migratory space that moves across media, bodies, and temporalities where landscapes, bodies and narratives converge.

A significant aspect of this approach is the construction of a vernacular archive sourced from eBay, whose algorithmically curated collections of letters, postcards, and photographs stand in deliberate contrast to institutional archives. This contingent, everyday archive both initiates and shapes the fieldwork, foregrounding the fragmentary, ephemeral, and unpredictable nature of memory, collection, and research. Through a performative archival practice, walking, (re)collecting, re-enacting, writing, re-citing, reciting and remembering, the landscape is activated as a mnemonic terrain and the archive as a live site of negotiation, resonance, and resistance, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored. This project is situated in Brontë Country, West Yorkshire, a landscape dense with literary, historical, and affective resonances. Here, I privilege fragment, rupture, and affective encounter over any claims the archive might have to institutional fixity or control by adopting a methodology of situated refusal, a way of inhabiting the archive without claiming it. This approach foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures preserved while advancing chorography as a feminist, performative, and practice-led methodology for reimagining place, history, cultural memory and the performative construction of identity.

Fiction as Method

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See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings of power into sharper relief by any media necessary; reveal access points to other worlds within our own. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible.

Text and image reproduced from https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/fiction-as-method/ (accessed 23/10/25)

Re-citing the Archive: Fieldwork, Fiction and the Politics of Memory

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Fieldwork as Fiction: Phyllis Dare, explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer

This paper proposes a speculative feminist historiography that re-cites the archive through embodied fieldwork, fictional personae, and the politics of memory. Drawing on site-specific research, situated within Brontë Country, West Yorkshire I explore how sensory gestures—walking, touching, re-enacting—activate archival fragments and reframe landscape as a mnemonic field. The archive here is not a static repository but a haunted space—one that migrates across media, bodies, and temporalities. By foregrounding the performative dimensions of archival practice — writing, walking, re-collecting, recollecting, reciting, re-citing and remembering, the archive, in this context, is a multisensory terrain and a site of negotiation, where memory is contested, reanimated, and re-authored.

Central to this inquiry is the figure of Phyliss Dare, a fictional persona who enables a methodological slippage between researcher and archive, past and present, fact and fiction. Dare operates as both structuring device and speculative method, enabling a mode of citation that foregrounds absence, polyphony, and narrative slippage. Her presence as explorer, travel guide, writer, and photographer allows for a reframing of fieldwork as fictional encounter, one that destabilises linear historiography and opens space for embodied speculation. Through Dare the archive becomes a stage for performance, where gestures of citation are enacted rather than merely recorded.

Rather than reconstructing a lost narrative or a singular past, the work proposes a historiography in which archival gestures become vehicles of resonance, resistance and reanimation. By triangulating fieldwork, fiction, and citation, I argue for a historiographic practice that is both materially grounded and imaginatively expansive. This method foregrounds the politics of memory, whose stories are told, whose gestures are preserved, and insists on the archive as a live site of encounter. In doing so, it offers a framework for engaging with historical material not only recovered as evidence, but re-situated within a living, shifting terrain where bodies landscapes and narratives converge.