Imagination Canvas
23 May 2022

I love a landscape that helps the ole right-side of the brain along… It doesn’t take much to walk around the city and find a visual canvas on which the addition of just a few images transform the vista into a whole story. Add two knights in armour on the rocks and voila, you may as well be playing DND or living in some High Fantasy adventure. Of course, a spacefaring drone in the foreground is as easy to add. Or a Police-Do Not Cross tape spun around the stiff some hardened detective found on the rocks. Or perhaps a supernatural pair of glowing red eyes watch you from inside the leftmost window… Or a group of carefree boys tombstoning (DON’T DO IT KIDS) and swimming, lovers in a kayak. The world is like a Rorschach test – but one that aids prognosis rather than diagnosis. After all, telling stories is how we cope… and there are coping mechanisms dotted all over town.

Peter van der Walt is a fiction author, although you may find some non-fiction and the odd essay out there. Fans can find his newsletter, posts, updates and developments at petervanderwalt.com. Currently, he is hard at work on his next story. When not writing, he has far too many interests to reasonably keep up with. He lives with his partner in Devon, England.