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A review by myweereads
The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories by Eugen Bacon
4.0
"You know how things happen and it feels like a dream you’re witnessing? But, somehow, you’re also in the dream that is most thoroughly a nightmare?"
The Road To Woop Woop and Other Stories by Eugen Bacon is a collection of speculative stories which range from the strange to the absolute peculiar covering untraditional ground to bring a voice to these unique tales.
In an interview with author Eugen Bacon we gather some insight into what drove her to write this unique collection.
When I came up with the idea of a collection, I wanted The Road To Woop Woop and Other Stories to be a body of longing, a sea of memories. I sought an overarching theme of something dying—be it a past, a future, a connection.
Some stories like “Dying”, “A Case of Seeing”, “Scars of Grief” and “A Nursery Rhyme” are splattered with literal deaths:
It hurt each time he died. The first time it happened, Bluey was on his way to Kinetic, the insurance firm he worked for. That morning he woke up to the alarm at 6 a.m. Showered, cerealed, took the lift to the ground floor. He was crossing the road to catch a No. 78 tram into the city when he went splat, flattened by a truck. A mural on the pavement: flesh, blood, brain and bile. (“Dying”)
Some like “The Road to Woop Woop”, “Beatitudes”, “Mahuika” and “The Enduring” have the metaphoric death, perhaps of a relationship, and an ensuring transformation.
Tumbling down the stretch, a confident glide, the 4WD is a beaut, over nineteen years old.
The argument is brand-new. Maps are convolutions, complicated like relationships. (“The Road to Woop Woop”)
Some like “He Refused to Name It”, “Being Marcus” and “Playback, Jury of the Heart” have both physical and metaphoric deaths that are also awakenings.
Today, he does not bear the persona of Marcus, the fine gym instructor. He feels like Brutus. And most Brutuses he’s come across in this world are canine. “Here, Brutus! Fetch!”
So today Marcus feels like a dog. Same one that bit the hand off its adoring master. Same one that joined the inner circle centuries ago in a conspiracy that shore an empire of its hero. Caesar was a god. He could have saved himself. Almost did too. With a single sword, he could have taken them all, sliced their treacherous hearts one by one. But the moment he saw Brutus approaching with a dagger, “You too, child?” he said, and covered his face. Heartbroken and resigned.
But Marcus is changed. He is not Brutus anymore. (“Being Marcus”)
Others like “A Pining”, “Swimming with Daddy”, “The Animal I Am”, “Swimming with Daddy” and “The One Who Sees” are filled with yearning and memory, perhaps inside an unsayable dirge.
The rest like “A Good Ball” and “A Maji Maji Chronicle” have a hint of one or the other: a longing, a memory, a transformation, even death and transcendence in fragmentation and wholeness.
But even the darkness is a playfulness that extends Roland Barthes’ pleasure of the text, where things are made and unmade; Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction that interrogates the meaning of text; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome that has no beginning or end—it has no centre, but spreads, as epitomized in A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
In writing, mine is a principle of multiplicity. A rhizome that has no rules or laws—it is between things, interbeing, intermezzo. It continuously adapts to embrace other multiplicities.
I am always curious, experimenting. My writing can be a distortion that is a wholeness, a divergence that finds its own synchrony in a textual quest for answers.
And readers get it—reviews tell me this. For which I’m grateful.
The Road To Woop Woop and Other Stories by Eugen Bacon is a collection of speculative stories which range from the strange to the absolute peculiar covering untraditional ground to bring a voice to these unique tales.
In an interview with author Eugen Bacon we gather some insight into what drove her to write this unique collection.
When I came up with the idea of a collection, I wanted The Road To Woop Woop and Other Stories to be a body of longing, a sea of memories. I sought an overarching theme of something dying—be it a past, a future, a connection.
Some stories like “Dying”, “A Case of Seeing”, “Scars of Grief” and “A Nursery Rhyme” are splattered with literal deaths:
It hurt each time he died. The first time it happened, Bluey was on his way to Kinetic, the insurance firm he worked for. That morning he woke up to the alarm at 6 a.m. Showered, cerealed, took the lift to the ground floor. He was crossing the road to catch a No. 78 tram into the city when he went splat, flattened by a truck. A mural on the pavement: flesh, blood, brain and bile. (“Dying”)
Some like “The Road to Woop Woop”, “Beatitudes”, “Mahuika” and “The Enduring” have the metaphoric death, perhaps of a relationship, and an ensuring transformation.
Tumbling down the stretch, a confident glide, the 4WD is a beaut, over nineteen years old.
The argument is brand-new. Maps are convolutions, complicated like relationships. (“The Road to Woop Woop”)
Some like “He Refused to Name It”, “Being Marcus” and “Playback, Jury of the Heart” have both physical and metaphoric deaths that are also awakenings.
Today, he does not bear the persona of Marcus, the fine gym instructor. He feels like Brutus. And most Brutuses he’s come across in this world are canine. “Here, Brutus! Fetch!”
So today Marcus feels like a dog. Same one that bit the hand off its adoring master. Same one that joined the inner circle centuries ago in a conspiracy that shore an empire of its hero. Caesar was a god. He could have saved himself. Almost did too. With a single sword, he could have taken them all, sliced their treacherous hearts one by one. But the moment he saw Brutus approaching with a dagger, “You too, child?” he said, and covered his face. Heartbroken and resigned.
But Marcus is changed. He is not Brutus anymore. (“Being Marcus”)
Others like “A Pining”, “Swimming with Daddy”, “The Animal I Am”, “Swimming with Daddy” and “The One Who Sees” are filled with yearning and memory, perhaps inside an unsayable dirge.
The rest like “A Good Ball” and “A Maji Maji Chronicle” have a hint of one or the other: a longing, a memory, a transformation, even death and transcendence in fragmentation and wholeness.
But even the darkness is a playfulness that extends Roland Barthes’ pleasure of the text, where things are made and unmade; Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction that interrogates the meaning of text; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome that has no beginning or end—it has no centre, but spreads, as epitomized in A Thousand Plateaus (1987).
In writing, mine is a principle of multiplicity. A rhizome that has no rules or laws—it is between things, interbeing, intermezzo. It continuously adapts to embrace other multiplicities.
I am always curious, experimenting. My writing can be a distortion that is a wholeness, a divergence that finds its own synchrony in a textual quest for answers.
And readers get it—reviews tell me this. For which I’m grateful.