I am so weary of the fight. Not just to write but to be understood. Recently a reviewer described me as a ‘Thunders Obsessive’ which lead me to wonder that if I had been a man, would they have said ‘driven’ or ‘ambitious’. To know a subject well doesn’t make a person an ‘obsessive’ it makes them studious or knowledgeable. The fight for dignity is harder for women, particularly ‘outsider’ women. I’m pretty sure that the reviewer doesn’t have a clue about the other books and articles I’ve written and neither does Wayne Hussey who condemned me as someone who ‘only writes about skinny junkies that she fancies’ or words to that effect in his lengthy autobiography, ‘Salad Daze’. No one ever disrespected William Burroughs but the same could have been said about him. When I started writing, I was interested in subculture, the Beats, what we might now call off-grid characters. People throw words around without understanding the implications of their glib, macho, perception. Mainstream life never interested me and neither do books about relationships. My childhood was so fractured, I didn’t understand healthy relationships, what it might be to grow up in a loving environment so my choices of early subjects where Noir, hard-bitten and decidedly nocturnal, life’s fire-flies are far more interesting than those who dwell in comfort and wealth.
In the last two years, I’ve had several articles published by Fortean Times, the last magazine I actually enjoy. Although I have some dear friends who are musicians, it has been liberating to step away from the realm of ‘rock n’ roll.’ The people whose music I loved are no longer with us whilst the music press is no longer as relevant as it used to be. It is also about growing up, moving on and returning to the oeuvre of fantasy and faerie that I loved as a child, before Marc Bolan arrived like a comet of Bo Diddley riffs and sequinned bliss. Roger Corman’s lurid cinematic adaptations of Poe, especially the ones featuring Vincent Price, also enthralled me as a lonely child. Later there was the ancient enchantment in the books of Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood as well as a fondness for Walter De La Mare’s often uncanny poetry. I’ve just discovered the verses of Thomas Hardy and appreciate his spectral evocation of the past. I have always tread the thorny – path between melancholia and depression which is well suited to tales of strangeness and the esoteric. Only the lonely can haunt their own lives.
Nina Antonia 